According to Oxford University’s Richard Swinburne; The purposes of the practice of a religion are to achieve the goals of salvation for oneself and others, and (if there is a God) to render due worship and obedience to God.
The root of the word religion comes from a Latin word meaning “to link back, bind together.” This aspect of religion has played a very important role in our evolution. Up to a point, it was the only tool available to us to make sense of our world. It gave us ethics, how we should treat each other, and the rules and regulations to effectively organize a society. It set a foundation for civilizations to have a commonality other than simple survival. Religion provided structure during the chaotic times in our story as we shifted from nomads to a more urban and agricultural society.
However, most religions have failed to evolve to represent the environment and changes in the knowledge we have gained over thousands of years. For instance, if I was to ask you to define God, what would be your answer? If we are all made in “God’s” image, why is there so much separation amongst us? Moreover, lately, there is the suspicion that our love and belief in God correlates more to the need for financial well-being and the need to push our beliefs onto others.
The dogmatic and poetic interpretation of religion, which for the most part, is stuck in a certain time and place in history, and the assumption that one is better than the other, truly take away from the essence of what the founders of those religions taught. For instance, by holding on to those outdated dogmas, we are failing to recognize that we share 99.9% of DNA with the person standing next to us, so anything we do to others, we are truly doing it to ourselves. In addition, the poetry of the texts, steeped in metaphors, mostly based on greek mythology, fail to teach us the importance of self-transformation, in spite of all the “prophets” setting the template by the way they lived their lives.