Personality, Religion, and Cultural Values: Exploring the Relationship - Essay Sample

Introduction

Individual differences in religion consistently relate to personality in terms of cultural practices such as values and strict personality traits that is greatly influenced by genetics. A person's religious practices, beliefs and attitudes reflect the individual's personality. Religious beliefs have a positive relationship with good personality traits that aid people to identify crisis and resolve the challenges of their life. Religion provides people with decreased life span stress, relaxation, more adjustments with daily hassles and ultimately alters the positive personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. Openness reflects a willingness to consider new ideas as well as questioning one's values, opinions and beliefs. Religion has a positive relationship with agreeableness values such as selfless, sympathetic and forgiving characteristic as well as extraversion values such as friendly and joiner characteristics. People with conscientiousness are careful, reliable and hardworking. Primary religious beliefs have a welcoming relationship with excellent features that helps people resolve their identity and life crisis challenges. Moral discipline borrowed from religion has positive effects on feelings, experience and behaviour of human beings. What people think, how they feel as well as how they actively interact with each other and religious beliefs change people’s opinions that as a result, affects how people respond. Moreover, religion helps people by offering more practice and avoiding behaviours that deplete resources, thereby ensuring that people are used to specific routines that in turn, shape their personality and habits. Personality traits such as behaving, believing, belonging and behaving are developed by religion. People are able to accept the belief in a supernatural being or world. At the same time, bonding shows how important religion is to self and how they are connected to something bigger than themselves. Behaving, on the other hand, is reflected by how people change their lifestyles to appease their spiritual beliefs while belonging is the identity that an individual acquires by believing in a religion.Religion Moves People Towards Goals

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Spirituality beliefs can contribute to people finding the meaning of life, thus finding goals to these people. When people can answer to critical questions about self, others, world, God and interactions among them through religion, they attain a good and stable sense of hopefulness towards the world, purpose. They can distinguish the meaning of life, feel integrated with existence and accept realities. People understand why they live, how they should behave and what they want in their lives. Religion causes people to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty because for religion; an aspiration is an intention to strive towards long-range goals whatever the present difficulties and risks. Religions succeed in offering reasons to do the right thing because people feel motivated by God’s grace, and they feel God wants them to do the right thing. It is through religion that people want to pay attention to their behaviour through meditation and mindfulness and measure if it matches the standards of the faith. Thus, the stress on selfhood may motivate some people above self towards achieving the desired goals. Religion together with its principles is essential factors that affect humans mind and psyche as it tries to show ways of human development and wellbeing. Religious individuals mostly relate their various assignments to their spiritual career path, and this motivates them to always do the right thing. Religious people possess conscientiousness traits of hardworking, well organized and reliable. Therefore one can conclude that religious people own more of these positive traits, are more responsible and have greater achievement possibilities in their life than others. Individuals who practice religion usually have a more positive outlook on life that is increased by both personal and organizational belief. People feel greater satisfaction when they belong to a group, get a support system from the church and feel more motivated when they increase participation within the church’s community.