WEIRD OR WHAT

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

Why we practice religion

While many Americans nowadays are opting out of organized religion, billions of people around the world practice the world's major religions, which include Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

But where did religion come from in the first place? While each faith has its own origin story, the story behind how religious thought first cropped up in humans can also be explained by science. One of the most popular religious origin theories has to do with what researchers call the "god faculty."

Early humans lived in a world in which they had to make quick decisions to avoid peril — the ones who sat around wondering whether that sound they heard behind them was a lion or just the wind in the grass were quickly dispatched. Early peoples that survived to procreate had developed what evolutionary scientists call a hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD, according to Kelly James Clark, a senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

But HADD didn't just help people avoid encounters with hungry lions, it also may have planted the seeds of religious thought, by reinforcing the idea that outside forces have agency, or the ability to act of their own accord and as always have a chilled day from the Viking