Buying into the afterlife is rather like buying a lottery ticket. A person may understand that they are unlikely to win the lottery, but buying the ticket gives them hope. The similarities do not end there.

Arguably the boost in that a person receives from purchasing a lottery ticket is worth more than the price of the ticket. This is analogous to the benefits of religious belief and ritual exceeding the costs.

The Evolution of Religion

For religious propensities to emerge in the evolutionary past, our ancestors would have to have received benefits that exceeded the costs. Given that all historical societies had religious beliefs and rituals, it is likely that religion provided some advantage in the struggle to survive and reproduce.

The fact that the cerebral cortex has functional specialization for perceiving religious experiences also supports the argument that religious propensities were naturally selected. Of course, the poorly named “God spot” may not have evolved specifically for a religious sensibility (1). It is possible that weakening of the ego and played a role in group cohesion unrelated to religious rituals as such.

Religious rituals and prayer probably helped our ancestors to manage stress. Hence the phenomenon of being enhanced by situations, such as fighting in a war. Such emotional benefits are believed to contribute to better health and longer life.

This security-blanket perspective on religion makes sense of the pattern according to which economic development erodes religious belief and practice. Religious skepticism is strongest in developed countries that have good health and long life expectancy, such as Japan, or the social democracies of Europe.

Acknowledging that religion serves an emotional function helps account for its persistence, providing an analogy to drug .

Addiction and Persistence

Believing that one can go to paradise is rather like believing that one is going to win the lottery.

A small investment in a lottery ticket can yield a substantial return in hope and psychological well being. So, it is not surprising that playing the lottery is addictive. Its addictiveness is not because the player wins and is reinforced in that way, it is because the act of buying a ticket improves a person's mood.

Those who study gambling are quite concerned about how poor people play this gambling game. They spend far more of their earnings on the lottery than rich people who prefer to gamble on shorter odds in the stock market.

The main cause for concern is that poor people behave like compulsive gamblers in their lottery playing (2). As in other gambling addictions, they go all out when they experience bad fortune, have stressful experiences, or feel .

Addictive Properties of Religion

We would not normally think of religion as addictive but the underlying psychology is more similar than different, There are three essential points of similarity. First, like gambling, religious rituals can relieve stress and elevate a person's mood. Second, the more distressed a person is, or the more difficult their lives, the more important religion is to them. Third the improved mood from gambling springs both from the activity itself and from belief in a fortunate outcome.

A religious ritual like prayer is inherently calming but also improves a believer's expectations of the future. The panicked flier who encounters a patch of distressing turbulence and fears that the plane is about to crash is calmed by the act of praying and also believes that they are interceding with the to forestall disaster.

So What: Trends in Religion and Gambling

If gambling and religion share many psychological features, it is interesting that gambling is on the rise even as religion is declining.

Gambling is now a majority pursuit in the US with 64 percent of Americans admitting that they gamble at least occasionally according to a Gallup poll and about half the population playing state lotteries alone. Meanwhile, there have been huge increases in gambling revenues.

If gambling provides some of the emotion-focused coping of religious rituals, then it makes sense that gambling would rise even as religion declines.

Precisely the same pattern is manifested in sports spectatorship, that also intersects with religious experiences, as I pointed out in an earlier post.