Human history is permeated with the acts of men and women acknowledging and seeking evidence of an unseen entity superior to ourselves and all the other forces of the world humans perceive. We have worshiped God and gods. From civilizations where crude historical records were etched on the walls of caves to this electronic nuclear age of scientific advancement in the making, recording, and discovering of history, human belief in and worship of an omnipotent omnipresent God has persisted.
Human belief in a god has been manifested in many strange and incredulous ways. Earth's history is replete with the roll call of cultures that have worshiped idol gods. Participation in idolatry requires a people to suspend logic and ignore an obvious fallacy; they worship and pray to the very thing they created with their own hands. They worshiped and were afraid of what they were capable of destroying.
Today, many of us are wont to deride and vulgarize such behavior; for surely it is pure vulgarity and stupidity to believe that a people could receive protection and favors from their own physical creation. Societies have passionately worshiped a golden calf, a silver statute, a bronze symbol, or a fiery furnace where human sacrifices were made. While each creation generally were intended to be a symbolic representation of the ethereal god they worshiped, more often than not, their man-made symbol became the god they worshiped.
Today, deity worship is very much a prolific part of every culture. While atheist and agnostics have always been among the living, their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the number of people who believe in the existence of a Cosmic Creator God. Human belief in a God who has power over the universe and who would come to our aid if we served It appropriately has been a driving and dividing force throughout human history. That belief has sustained and nurtured the cultures, lives, and spirit of the strong and the weak.
Whether their gods were physical creations, abstract, or a god of the mind, humans have always been motivated to seek strength and redemption in the worship of their God or their gods. When a primitive tribe worshiped a wooden idol, a geological formation, or any material object, they received the one thing they could not otherwise receive or do without.
An active, often passionate belief in a deity, even of a bogus god, paired with rituals of worship and adulation, provided many cultures with a sustaining energy that allowed them to go on with their lives often in difficult times.
Cultures that did not worship their own physical creations nevertheless worshiped a god or gods of their own choosing. They gave adulation to forces they deem to be supernatural. They acknowledged the forces of nature, natural phenomena, the sun, the moon, and other visible bodies in the nighttime sky as all-knowing and all-powerful gods. While their gods were not wooden idols or gods of that ilk, their reasons for worshiping them were functionally the same.
Gods were to be worshiped and honored. Every people had a duty to obey what they believed to the demands of their proclaimed god so that they would be protected, blessed, and spared the wrath they believed their god would rain upon them if they disobeyed. Nevertheless, the god they obeyed was the god of their cultural mind's creation.
Every God lives in the minds and lives of the people who seek protection and special favors from what they "know" to be a power far greater then any other power. Every acts of worship is perpetuated wholly on the assumption that men and women who pay homage to their God would receive favorable responses from it either in the present or in life after death.
Is belief in a God or gods, a necessary human trait? In the final analysis, belief in an omnipotent, omnipresent, protective God is the one thing most people, with varying degrees of comfort and need, must have, and cannot do without.