Influence

The history of the religion of each individual nation or tribe largely reflects the degree of its cultural development during a certain period of its historical existence. This is quite natural, since religious beliefs and forms of worship put a certain imprint on the life of the people, their General worldview, moral concepts, etc., and on the other hand, civilization largely determines the nature of religious concepts and worship. Therefore, every nation has a complete parallelism in the course of cultural growth and religious development.

The influence of religion on all aspects of human life is so wide and deep that it is hardly possible to properly understand the life of a certain people, their moral and legal concepts, the order of their entire everyday life, and so on, if the most important basis of their entire life – religion-is not understood. During the past millennia of its historical life, humanity, with only a few exceptions, was guided, and still is guided in its life mainly by the foundations of religions. The eternal questions about God, the world, and man, over which people will never cease to think, for the vast, terribly overwhelming majority have always found their solution in religion alone, so that it imparted to the lives of even uncultured people a certain meaningfulness and intelligence. We can say that religion for the majority of people replaced and replaces science, philosophy, morality, and art. Not being able to explain to themselves the phenomena of nature by the action of natural forces and laws, most are satisfied with reducing these phenomena to the will and action of a deity or mysterious spirits; for him there is nothing incomprehensible in the change of times, or in thunder and lightning, or in a devastating earthquake, because through the assumption of the action of the Almighty divine will, all these phenomena receive for him a sufficient causal explanation and become from his point of view more or less understandable.

As for the moral life, in this respect humanity has always been guided mainly by the requirements and precepts of religion; from it it has always derived the concept of good and evil, of its family and social duties, and so on, so that the violation of the moral law has always been considered not only as a Vice and a crime, but also as a sin, i.e. as a violation of the divine will. In modern times, there have often been attempts to free morality from religious influence and build it on other, purely scientific or philosophical principles, but even hitherto even the intelligent strata of society continue to be guided in life mainly by the moral foundations that are given in Christianity.