Terror Management Theory suggests that religion (and culture) developed as a tool to comfort the human mind when confronted with its own mortality; the idea is that being a species that can foresee our deaths and be preoccupied with the prospect, religion was developed to help keep us from coming unglued about knowing we're all going to die.
It is of course a theory, but studies indicate that feelings of mortality and one's strength of beliefs are linked; if subjects have their mortality made salient in an experiment and are afterwards prompted openly or covertly about their thoughts on other cultures, people tend to feel stronger in their own beliefs and feel more threatened and closed-off by those of anyone else.
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