Published by I’d start of with the notion that religion is the main source from which people have through the ages sought to construct a sense of meaning in their existence. I believe that people try to look for the meaning of their existence because whatever they see tends to have a purpose for its existence. So the mind kind of rejects the notion that human could have a purposeless existence. However, the human mind can go only so far as to tell the person that yes his existence has a meaning but the mind can not tell the purpose. It is for this reason that the person looks for the answer to his unanswered question and here religion provides him guidance.
Some people tend to believe that religion is a human construct and it is the human mind that came up with the religions. However, I believe that majority (if not all) of the religions have their bases in some source that transcends the human world. As you also agree that the human mind can not create something or think of something that it has never experienced through any of his senses. Then how could it be possible for humans to construct certain religious concepts (for example those of angels and demons) as they would not have experienced them at all (unless such forces did exist). So religion has to have it base not in the human mind but rather a superhuman source.
As to why do certain humans (especially religious ones) believe in “God” when they have never actually seen him or touched him or experienced him using their five senses, I would say that still God isn’t a human construct because almost all the major religions believe that God used some sort of a messenger to convey His message to the humans. Now when a human experiences such a messenger (e..g. angel) which people around him can not experience, he tends to believe in this messenger and accept the existence of a supreme god partly because his mind was already searching for Him and the rest because of his experiencing a superhuman messenger.
Discussing the feeling that there is a gap between things as they are and things as they ought to be, I’d say that this is not just experienced by the religious people. It is not just religion that tells people or rather makes them realize that things ought to be different than they are. Rather it is also the human mind that keeps saying so. That is the why I think that people develop or try to develop laws with which to govern their lives. Now you can call it religious evil or moral evil or social evil or whatever but the thing is that many a times in our daily lives we come to face situations where we realize that things actually ought to be different.
As for the claim (of Geertz) that the distinctive feature about the religious perspective is that it is characterized by faith and it tries to establish its ideas as being true beyond doubt or beyond evidence. I think that yes this statement is true but it is only after the authority of the religion is proved to the individual that (and then only) the individual would experience faith. Taking the Islamic religion for example, there is not any sort of compulsion in accepting the Islamic sources in any kind of an authority. The Islamic sources themselves prove their authority and their being trustworthy so as to base the faith on. When you are sure that a person doesn’t tell lies and that he has proved that although what he says seems not so true but it does turn out to be true, then in cases when he says something that is above your intellectual level you can’t just refuse to accept what he says. If he himself is not truthful then that would be another case.
For men being congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality, I think that whether congenitally or not but humans do deserve that a meaningful order be imposed upon reality. When humans observe such ordered systems within themselves and within their surroundings, then how can the overall reality be in chaos (i.e. in disordered state).
And hmmm, yes the religion has been one of the most effective bulwarks against anomie throughout human history. I believe that if it weren’t for religion, humans would still be following the “might is right policy” because I believe that it is only due to fear that humans on a collective level be expected to have some social stability (i.e. having some morals and values). You take the religion away and there won’t be any humanity left in the humans. Even the atheists have adopted religious values but they don’t accept religion as the base of these values.
