THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

THE HISTORY OF RELIGION
Betrayal of Belief

Religion is the edifice built upon people’s need to believe in a higher power and their need to explain the inexplicable and provide answers to the unknowable. It is the institutionalized system that incorporates people’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices generated for that deep purpose and exploited by charlatans for their aggrandizement. True believers of stature and honest belief preach to the masses from the front of the stage while the real action is taking place behind the drawn curtains of religious edifices; acquisition of wealth and power.

At the time about thirteen thousand years ago that some human-inhabited geographic areas began the move from hunter-gatherer societies to communities of herders and farmers, religion came into existence. Prior to the establishment of permanent habitation, there are no signs of religious structures or systems of worship. The single outstanding difference between migratory and sedentary societies is the accumulation of wealth through surplus production of agricultural products and the good, services, and habitation needs of people in those societies. Surplus led to barter and to the exchange of goods for services and the establishment of specialized craftsmanship, to the accumulation of wealth and its byproduct, power, and the byproduct of both, stratification of societies with richer and poorer, stronger and weaker.

It is reasonable to assume and there is some anthropological evidence that prior to the establishment of religion, people believed in “higher” and supernatural powers. The indiscriminate equation of the laws of nature and the universe with the existence of superhuman powers probably arose in human cognition with the growth in awareness of the immensity and vastness of natural forces and the recognition of human inability to control or affect those forces. Thus began man’s belief in gods that manipulated natural forces. However, primitive clans, families, individuals, and tribes, were busy trying to feed themselves rather than allocating time and material to the worship of superior powers. Perhaps early man prayed or danced for rain or successful hunting without religious leaders, houses of worship, and sacramental equipment. Stories were told and re-told through generations of events or people that in some way influenced the forces of nature. The skeleton of belief embedded in religion was erected as the stories spread from individuals through families, then tribes and clans, and into structured societies. Belief was the need and religion was the ready answer.

Early statues and objects thought to be conceptualizations of powerful gods have been unearthed with little more than their existence as evidence of modern man’s belief in higher powers. Burial grounds were non-existent in early migratory periods, so even prayer to an especially powerful human predecessor was improbable. But the idea of being able to influence or propitiate those powers through prayer, gifts, and sacrifice contributed to the birth of religions and their parasitic institutions. Religions and the formalities attached to their practice were created and exploited by those who saw power and a profit in them, as is generally the case with so many human inventions. The absence of the shards of religion throughout the million years of humankind’s existence prior to the revolution that took place when animal and land husbandry began to show a profit provides some evidence of when religion reared its head.

The strongest nail in the creation of religious edifices was the invention of writing; writing based on an alphabet that came into use approximately three and a half thousand years ago. The rules and regulations could be spread out among the populations and pointed to by religionists as having emanated from god. The bible as the word of God. How convenient.