With a multiplicity of variations among the myriad forms that exist and have existed in the past, religion is a difficult subject on which people can reach mutual agreement, especially regarding his purpose in life. human beings. Taking a sociological view of this phenomenon, Berger defines religion as the human endeavor, stimulated by man's unique biological constitution, through which a sacred cosmos is created for the purpose of establishing a sense of order and of meaning in man's life and to protect him against the horrors of nothingness and chaos. Nonhuman animals enter worlds that are mapped out for them, with limited choices and safe guidelines by which they must live. Man, however, has an instinctive nature that is “subspecialized and undirected” (5), so he must create his own world. This construction of the world, which creates society, takes place in three stages. First, humans pour meaning into the environment around them and create culture, a process known as externalization (5-6). Society and all its parts that it creates, material and immaterial, become an “objectivized human activity” (11), to the extent that its status as existing independently of the humans who created it transforms it into an objective reality that men collectively consider it done. In the final stage of world-building, through the process of socialization, man not only learns the objectified meanings of his society, but “internalizes” them so that they shape his very consciousness (15). This socially constructed world is “above all an order of experiences… a nomos” (19). By externalizing meaning in an otherwise meaningless environment, transforming these meanings into objective realities and internalizing them in consciousness, ...... middle of paper ...... within the private sphere. The above argument is intended to emphasize that religion is a powerful human construct which, in its use of the sacred as validation of the man-made world, has the power to break away from its human origins and acquire a reality which is unique to him. Since man comes into the world with limited instincts and an immense variety of choices to make, religion helps him build and maintain a world that gives him a sense of grounding, allowing everything he does to feeling tidier and more meaningful than it would otherwise. Religion is so comprehensive that, even when secularized forces remove religious legitimizations from the social world at large, religion still retains orderly and meaningful positions in the private lives of people around the world, remaining a sacred canopy under which beings humans can feel safe and secure.