Religion Shaping the World

In order for a society to be successful, the people involved need to be able to work with each other. Differences in personalities in people and upbringings can make connections difficult to form. For this reason, humans needed a base to help them develop relations with each other. Mann seems to provide in his chapter that religious centers became very influential in the development of an effective community as institutes provided an area to develop relations and instill basic rules on how these relations should function.

It is true that even now religious centers provide the basic morals and principles of how humans need to interact with each other. However, Mann never seems to mention why the people in those societies follow the ground rules established by ideological powers except to say "the social organization of ultimate knowledge and meaning is necessary to social life." This seems to mean that the people were satisfied that the religious institutions answered the questions people had about life and provided "norms, shared understandings of how people should act morally in their relations with each other, are necessary for sustained social cooperation." For the people of that time, this could have been all they needed, a way to make social relations in order to achieve goals, a human characteristic according to Mann.

On the other hand, in modern times, religion is a huge influence on how people behave because of the repercussions they may receive in afterlife or through karma. For example in Christianity, the religion basically states that if a human is good and behaves according to the norms of what is right according to Christianity’s principles, that individual will go to heaven, and if not, hell. The transformation of what religious institutes provide shows how societies are always changing based on the environment.