THE POWER OF RELIGION - PART ONE

THE BIRTH OF BELIEF AND RELIGION

No other force in the history of human development has so entered the minds of the peoples of the earth as belief in a higher power, in God. In the ongoing attempt to segregate “nature” and “nurture” to determine behavior, no single attribute comes closer to nature’s DNA than nurture’s inculcation of belief.

The ideological attempt to conquer this phenomenon by communist countries’ pursuit of Marxian dogma has failed to eliminate the almost universal acceptance of god as real and active. Russia and its separated states have seen the return of the churches and the churchmen into the minds, hearts, and pockets of the people. In the China of today, where religion has been renounced for decades and is opposed by the State, a resurgence of religious belief and affiliation is surreptitiously taking place. In Turkey, when the Ottoman Empire was overthrown after World War I, church and state were separated firmly by law. Yet in the beginning of the 21st century, religionists were elected to power despite constitutional prohibitions. And the Arab world is beset with ignorance of almost everything except guns and religion.

How has this powerful force been created and why has it continued through the ages to a time when communist countries created laws that prohibited observance of the belief in god and the United States, the first nation that separated church and state by law, now allows laws on the books of various states mandating the belief in god. (One cannot serve on a jury in some states if one is a declared atheist.) Atheism as “anathema” has spread over the entire globe. How this has happened and how it continues to happen is easier to explain, easier to find the mechanisms for the expansion of religion, than why it continues to penetrate the minds of the masses with their acquiescence in view of its strong negative results in money and blood.


HOW RELIGION AND THE BELIEF IN GOD HAS BEEN INCULCATED IN ALL PEOPLES THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY

Is belief in the un-provable, unknowable and un-seeable a “natural” phenomenon? Is belief a survival tactic in the Darwinian sense, passed down through the ages by the fittest of Homo sapiens? Does Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, also called “ritual,” a common denominator in all religions, primitive and modern, provide power to overcome the ills to which mankind has been and is subjected; ills like poverty, disease, and war? (Note that two of these three are man-made.)

Is the corrosiveness of fear of the unknown dissipated by religion and its minions providing believers un-provable and often absurd answers about the nature of the “Unknown.” Pre-civilization belief in higher powers grew from awe in unexplainable natural events, some of which were life giving and others of which were life-threatening or life-taking. Sun, rain, lightening and thunder, flood and earthquake were inexplicable events. Forests, lakes, rivers, oceans, mountains, and all of natures’ living creatures provided man’s food, clothing, and shelter and his growing brain with food for thought. Birth, but more so, death, operated to create personal unknowns and fears.

Pantheistic gods were created and passed down from generation to generation with embellishments based on existential experience with the forces and laws of nature. As mankind spread over the face of the earth, similar gods and natural religions in all societies grew out of similar experiences.

Such originally natural religions were co-opted and creatively expanded and manipulated by smart and charismatic shamans who created “priesthoods” and exploited mankind’s fears and the inexplicable nature of those natural phenomena to provide money and produce power for themselves. They created the trade of selling belief as relief and made-up “answers” to the mysterious unknowable events in the lives of the gullible. They built “religion” with all of its obeisance to edifices, costumes, numerology, ritual, absurd beliefs and mumbo-jumbo.

Religious leaders are “ordained.” They have been provided with “authority” to deal in the answers about the unknown and the un-provable. They can explain the inexplicable. And they do so with the authority that higher-ups in the religious hierarchy have given them. They are the passageways to the unknown and the inexplicable. They are also the passageways for believers’ money and loyalty. Through them, the congregations provide the monetary where-withal for the spread of religion and the soldiers’ bodies for loyalty to the nations in which they reside.

Rituals and ritualistic behavior are building blocks in the religious edifice that occupies the minds of believers. From the seven days of the Creation to the Ten Commandments to biblical numerology, the magic and power in numbers in religious observance is incredible. Every religion has numbers as potent totems of power. There are days when you must do and days when you are prohibited from doing. You must bow or not bow. The sun, the moon, and the stars may command you. So too with foods, the times of eating and the times of fasting, the acceptability of certain foods and the prohibitions on others, permeate all religions. Clothing that is worn at all times or on certain days. Caps and shawls, fringes and coat lengths, white caparison for the dead in China and the living in the western world. From childhood to deathbed, religion provides the vehicle for belief and relief.

The general answer to the “How?” religion became entrenched is that belief provides relief. But first, people must be taught to be in awe, to be afraid, to believe in belief as the answer to problems and pain, to the end of history or the end of the world. Belief must provide “salvation” and forgiveness for sins. And the more complicated the beliefs and the rituals, the more saleable they become to the common people.