I've been blogging on the evolution of religion before. Initially, I just thought operant behavior would seem like a good explanation for religion: the argument tied together the observation that (1) religious people are less depressed and (2) that learned helplessness is an animal model of depression and (3) that religion helps to create a feeling of control which is known to reduce depression. I later added some ideas prompted by some recent news about geomythology. Basically, the geomyths reinforced the notion that we always need to have an explanation and a reason for things that happen to us, especially for the bad things that happen to us. For all the things the people in the old days didn't have any explanation, they invented a deity. Sort of like creationists today, only more verbose.
Now about three weeks ago, there was a paper in the journal Science (which has been covered extensively in the media and also in the other GlamMagz). Because of the extensive coverage, I won't go into any details of the procedure here, save it to quote the Nature Reviews Neuroscience article: Now, taking all of the above together, one could say that the brain tries to avoid depression by seeing order and reasons, where there are none. I think the case gets more and more solid by the research report that religion is a coping strategy of the brain to prevent debilitating depression by keeping up the appearance of operant control where in fact there isn't any. Even animals show superstition conditioning and religion is nothing but the human organized extension of it.

Oh, and if your get-rich-quick scheme is to invent your own religion (which seems to be quite a successful idea so far): a good strategy is to look for people who feel out of control, or, even better, make people feel out of control. They will be more likely to believe your weird stuff then...

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Citation: J. A. Whitson, A. D. Galinsky (2008). Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception Science, 322 (5898), 115-117 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845