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Religion is Play Gone Wrong
When playing goes too far, religions are born
Researcher, scholar and research professor of psychology at Boston College, Peter Gray, speaks of a raison d’être behind play, where he states that a general function of all forms of play is to provide a form of meaning to the lives of people, where that meaning helps in coping with the realities of the world.
At first glance, this seems to be rather counter-intuitive. After all, we exist in what has come to be a deeply utilitarian world, with most of our lives dominated by work; where most of the things we end up doing in life, we do for something else.
However, with further investigation, one realizes that Gray’s statement may hold true. For play is unique in the sense that its essence requires that it is an activity that in its purest form, is done for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. There is no external purpose or reward. We play just to play.
Aristotle once outlined this problem, where if one’s life is to be made up of things done for the sake of something else, that satisfaction is continually deferred, and if our lives were to mean anything at all, then there has to exist something that is valuable for what it is in itself and not merely what it can result in. In other words, for life to have meaning, there has to be…
