The Common Purpose of All Religion

[Religion] is essentially a scheme to bend the extraordinary to man's uses--a plan of attack upon the powers which seem to control and condition it.

All religions, whatever their superficial differences, have that purpose at bottom, and so all of them are fundamentally alike. What the Bakua medicine-man seeks to accomplish by rattling stones in a cocoanut-shell, or the Tibetan lama by whirling his prayer-wheel, or the Yakut shaman by going into a sweat-bath, or the Crow Indian devotee by chopping off a finger is precisely what the Pope seeks to accomplish by saying Mass in St. Peter's. All desire, first, to attract the notice of the gods, and, second, to induce them to be amiable. The differences in method of approach, however radical they may appear superficially, are of little consequence in essence. 

--H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, 1930 

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