I have always enjoyed this quote from Voltaire: "Religion began when the first charlatan met the first fool."

It comes from a need to explain things we don’t understand

Religion evolved from early mans effort to understand his surroundings.

Fear of the unknown, and the need to explain it.

I think it comes from the butt. No brain would come up with this shit. ?

Religion comes from an attempt to provide an answer for something unexplained at that moment. And to ease fears from thunderstorms to death.

Here's my tuppence worth:-
Religion builds upon itself, just as a rumour machine does. Person A surmises something esoteric, such as "That storm could have been dead people fighting." Person B then claims that every storm is caused by their ancestor's spirits. Person C then dreams up some ethereal land, with great Leaders. Person D gives them an all powerful status. Over time a word for these all powerful beings is coined. This is typical human behaviour, and can arise in multiple tribes, with the original concept perhaps coming from the early intelligent Apes of Africa that had learned to communicate by complex speech.
However, The SPREAD of religion comes with the expansion of civilisations. Hence the dominant religions all originated in the places where great civilizations once flourished.

I think that religion comes from two places; a desire to understand, colliding with a need to control. It's easy enough for humans to try and explain the world around them in ways that they can identify, but it never takes long for that innocent explaination to be used to keep one person from doing something another doesn't want them to do. The system grows from there.

And I thought it was Wallmart.....

Silly me.

Mankind created god/gods and religion.

IMHO I think it comes from the hearts of evil controling men.

Fear and stupidity.

Religion comes from the inability to admit that you don't know something.

It was our primitive fear of the unknown in the early stages of our human development. Now it is the fear of the complexity of modern life, IMHO

Fear, power, control.

For almost all of us, except maybe sociopaths and a few others, we have a need to connect to something bigger or more important than the illusion of our individuality. We are hardwired to be social creatures. For example our need to speak, develop language and impose a structure (grammar) on that language is 'instinctual' and is necessary for social interactions. Combine this with trying to understand the world around us before the development of the scientific method and we get religion and other faulty belief systems.

Lol... geeze! I wonder what theyre going to find on mars?

I would say religion comes from ancient peoples that didn't understand how things work! Hopeful people will get smarter understand science.

I have heard that it was formed from fear of darkness. People would go out into the dark and animals would of course attack and carry them off to eat them. The tribal leaders started to have people do repeat things like make noise and commotion and to go into the night with several people developing rituals.

I think that it is human nature to try to find explanations for things we don’t understand. Without a scientific framework the supernatural becomes an explanation.

Freud attributed it, in part, to totemism.

Those tribal people came up with the idea of one god. Everywhere else had many.

While spirituality emerges spontaneously from the human body-mind synthesis, religion is almost always a social mechanism created by egotists who say they're enlightened, but really just want to exercise self-anointed authority over people - usually women.

Religion uses the fear of death to control people. The promise of a hereafter. And it builds from there.

If there is one single area religion has done the most damage, people's sexuality. I see that reflected in comments here, people who still suffer sexual taboos based on religious teashing... I feel sorry for them, and sometimes I just want to shout, "GET OVER IT."