There is a religious instinct that explains much beyond religion.

Man is born aware of the divinity of all life, and religion is his attempt to facilitate and synthesize his experience. What does it mean to be divine? Wiktionary offers four definitions: 1. of or pertaining to a god 2. eternal, holy, or otherwise supernatural. 3. of superhuman or surpassing excellence 4. beautiful, heavenly How can a godless religion pertain to a god? How can nature be supernatural? How can humans be superhuman? How can the earth be heavenly? By definition, nature cannot be more than nature--it is what it is, and nothing more. Likewise, humans cannot be anything but human. However, nature is much more than what is covered in the *word* nature, and humans are much more than what is covered in the *word* human. When I say everything in the universe is divine, I am not claiming that the universe is anything more than what it is. Rather, I am emphasizing the point that the universe is much more than what people *perceive* it to be. Man is born understanding that he is more than his body. He is born perceiving--although probably imperfectly--that there is more to nature than he can perceive with his five physical senses. To express this inexpressible supernatural element, he creates religion--or not. As my opponent points out, some cultures have constructed what he calls "godless religions", but where gods exist they are only imperfect expressions of the superhuman and supernatural--they are expressions of the divine, and not divinity itself. Definition 1 of "divine" is "of or pertaining to a god" because the most common method of expressing the divine today is via gods. Communing with the divine can occur just as readily in a "godless religion" as in one with gods. Regarding the question of ego, my opponent writes, "There is conflict in wanting to stay at the center of one's universe and also subordinate to the tribe." It is true that perception makes each of us the center of our respective universes, but a recognition of the divinity and unity of all things reveals the illusory nature of this. A child believes until a certain age that other people can see his thoughts. Is this lack of development, or an awareness of how things really are? We are not born with ego--it takes form and grows more rigid as our perception of the world deteriorates. Religions and other mystical belief systems are, at their root, attempts to remediate our perception. Although most religions have been corrupted beyond recognition today, the original impulse is to lessen--not strengthen, through tribal identity--the ego. Man is a part of the world, and so he seeks to know his full self (the whole world). No instinct is required here, any more than an instinct is required for a man to explore the land on which he is born. Furthermore, to say that religion comes out of the same X instinct responsible for supporting political parties and sports teams, for example, is to conflate an impulse to understand the unity of all things and lessen one's ego with an impulse to further divide the world and inflate the ego. Religion is qualitatively different in purpose from many of the quasi-religious activities my opponent listed in his first round argument, and they therefore cannot be said to derive from the same purported instinct. I thank my opponent for beginning and sustaining a debate that made me think in both untested and unfamiliar directions. For every one of the "new points to ponder" I gave him, he gave me at least three points. Now, I only hope the voters will be as generous.