For many people, religion is nothing but a way to project their unhappy parent-child model on something outside themselves to make it less painful.
In this model, God is a strict parent whose love is conditional and has to be deserved. Former unloved children invent the original sin, the profound sinfulness of humanity, the need for a savior, etc to explain why they were never loved unconditionally as children.
Of course, there is a lot of rage attached to the knowledge that, for your parent, you were always damaged goods, always not good enough. This rage is displaced in this kind of religious people onto the sinners, the unfaithful, the atheists, etc. We all know that few things can equal in their destructive power the rage of the religious hordes that are destroying everything in view because the pain of being unloved, unwanted children burns them up.
For this sort of religious people, religion is all about fulfilling series of mechanical and meaningless obligations (fasting, praying in a certain way and during certain time of the day in a specific position, controlling one’s diet, not having sex on certain days, etc). These rituals allow them to feel like good, obedient children who are trying to deserve the strict parent ‘ s approval. “God” controls their lives in the same areas – food, sex, clothing – that their unloving parents did.
Clarissa's Blog 
Maybe this is why I’ve never been capable of engaging in religious feeling…
I don’t want to give too rosy a picture of my upbringing (there was more than an average amount of chaos and disruption and some real dysfunction going on) but I never had the slightest doubt that my parents and several other relatives I was in frequent contact with loved me and my brother unconditionally.
I think I even made it to adulthood before I fully realized that lots of people never had that (in a real way, not just teenage dramatizing).
My parents neither encouraged or discouraged my feeble experiments in religion (on and off for a few years) but by 15 or so I was a pretty staunch…. agnostic. I always distanced myself from militant atheists who seem every bit as weird and alienating as the over religious and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not also working out childhood trauma.
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What about children who were loved, but stayed religious after being raised in religious families? They also fulfill “series of mechanical and meaningless obligations.”
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In this model, God is a strict parent whose love is conditional and has to be deserved. Former unloved children invent the original sin, the profound sinfulness of humanity, the need for a savior, etc to explain why they were never loved unconditionally as children.
Of course, there is a lot of rage attached to the knowledge that, for your parent, you were always damaged goods, always not good enough
This explanation seems to work best for Abrahamic religions, especially the fundamentalists.
I don’t think it works so well for other religions though. It doesn’t make sense for Hindus, not even those Hindus who are Bhaktas (more emphasis on a personal god) or fundamentalist, and it doesn’t make sense for Buddhists or Jains, or Sikhs.
And there are a lot of rituals and practices.
Also, there is no such thing as unconditional love.
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I happen to know for an absolute fact that unconditional love does exist. 🙂
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