I honestly cannot remember half of what I learnt in school, mostly because it was ‘chew and pour’ all the way. And as they say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, I never saw any reason to revise my learning methods because I kept passing my exams.

Yet one thing I never forgot, even though it was something we learnt in our first year of school, was a sociology lecture on social institutions. One reason is because as a journalist I’m intimately interested in sociology, but the larger reason was that it struck a chord with me that from that day changed how I viewed all social institutions, religion in particular.

The gist of that lesson was that social institutions are structures put in place by man to make living easier. The official definition is something much classier than this, of course, but this is what I remember and what I’ve kept in my head all these years.

What does that mean? It means that throughout history humankind has always come up with innovative ways to skirt any particular vexing problem. And in that capacity you have to admit the genius of us humans, because we have a capability for adaptability that has ensured our survival as a species for millennia.

In the early days of man, the hunter-gatherer stage, it was mostly survival of the fittest. Yet the species would never have survived that status quo for a sustained stage, cue the formation of the social institution of family.

The family look out for each other, ensuring a higher chance of survival as a unit than the individual possesses. This led to communities springing up, which in turn necessitated the formation of government.

There have always been unexplainable phenomena in the history of man, and as the curious creature man is there has to be an explanation for everything. Initially superstition catered for that, with the belief in witches and wizards and other forms of superstition that attempted to explain away the unexplainable.

Eventually religion sprung up as the social institution in charge of explaining the unexplainable. Organised religion came up with the perfect answer, attributing everything remotely unexplainable to the presence of an all encompassing, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient deity.

You have to admit it’s the perfect solution, no matter whatever woes you go through it is okay, because it is all part of the grand plan of the aforementioned omnipotent deity. There is little you can do to question these plans for you, no matter how little you like them. Perhaps you can bring more sacrifices, both to the deity and his representatives here on Earth, but once again there is no guarantee of success, just that your faith tells you you must try.

Back in school I wondered why religion was listed as one of the social institutions, considering that the others were all the product of the genius of man as a species. Then it hit me, that perhaps the answer was just as simple as this; that perhaps religion is also the product of man.

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