Abandonment and the Origin of Religion

It is said that some adopted children may suffer from an overwhelming sense of shame as they become convinced that their birth parents sent them away because they are inherently bad and unlovable. They will be able to overcome this if their adopting parents reassure them that this is not the case, by standing by them and being there for them in their new, truly forever family.

This reasoning, naturally, will mostly if not wholly be unconscious, but I find it sadly fascinating for a number of reasons. Just like our inability to cope with randomness, it shows that we all have a prescriptive sense of justice, and that this very sense of justice is able to thwart our understanding of the world. An abandoned child might say that "if something bad happened to me, I deserved it," but how could that be true?

In a more abstract sense, I think this also shows that our innate intuitions are misleading when we strive to understand real cause and effect not only in the physical world, but also in civilisation.

Moreover, isn't this sense of shame similar to the Judeo-Christian notion of the original sin? Life is terrible, death and childbirth are painful, so we must have done something horrendous to deserve this. Or, if not us, then some of our ancestors. Most likely the very first ones. It's interesting to think that aspects of some religions mushroomed out of our innate intuitions and yearnings for fanciful logical connections that do little but hinder us in understanding our world - and each other.