THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

Part One - 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. They are the institutionalized systems that incorporate people’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are then exploited by charlatans for their aggrandizement. True pious believers of stature and honest belief preach to the masses from the pulpit at the front of the stage while the real action is taking place behind the drawn curtains of religious edifices, the 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 organized 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 goods, 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” or 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. In the Western World, writing based on an alphabet came into use approximately three and a half thousand years ago. The rules and regulations enumerated and ritualized in religious tomes could be spread among the populations and pointed to by religionists as having emanated from god simply because the laity did not know how to read. The Old Testament and Christian bibles, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and other religions’ foundational books are passed off as the word of God. How convenient that they are objects of belief, belief in their holiness and belief that they are god-written, "the word of god" whose authority may not be questioned. What a gold mine.

Part Two – Religion and Wealth

Though the books may not have changed, changing times have forced religionists into exegeses, into explanations and interpretations of original “holy” works and subsequent “holy” writings that would make some sort of sense to the contemporary audience. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were historical periods that expanded man’s knowledge of the world around him; it also expanded hugely the capacity to produce wealth.

The driving force behind the work of religionists was and is wealth accumulation. If Jesus drove the money lenders from the temple, what did that mean in His day? What does that mean today? And what has it meant, especially to money lenders and the perception of money lenders, through the two thousand years since Jesus acted as he is purported to have acted. And whose perception of money lenders counts, anyway? The crucial question that must always be answered is, “If wealth accumulation is at odds with religious teachings, how are religious teachings adjusted to conform to wealth acquisition?

The crucial answer is that religious teachings ALWAYS conform to wealth acquisition. The purpose and goal of religious teachings IS wealth accumulation. All other aspects of religion, whether stolen from ethical humanism or other ethical philosophies, or whether other aspects of religion are designed solely to mesmerize people into adhering to the particular religion by proselytizing propagandizing missionaries through song and dance or food or “spiritual” sustenance with promises that cannot knowingly be kept, are all designed to increase material support for the religious hierarchy and, thereby, the power elites.

Religions and governments function on behalf of and at the behest of power elites. Both entities provide education to the masses to achieve allegiance and pander to prejudice and intolerance of non-believers and “foreigners.” Strong believers and patriots support the two main systems whereby masses of people are controlled and motivated to act for the benefit of power elites; religion and government. In the church it is called volunteerism. In business that is called marketing.

And in every community there is an “acceptable” house of prayer. A sufficient number of believers and a paid Shaman start the process of marketing and as the congregation grows, the religious services expand to ever greater attractiveness. Proselytizing cum marketing is ordained from above, not heaven but rather hierarchy. And, since disparaged money lies at the root of this growth demand, the unique tools of marketing religion come into play. “Your soul will burn in Hell for eternity and only by conversion to our brand of soft soap will you be saved.”

Part Three - Religion and Murder

Anti-religious propaganda is patently against the interests of religion and power. Only violence or war against a religion in the acquisition and defense of power is acceptable. Power is money, land, assets in the way of cattle or slaves, adherents and believers who work to increase the flock. Such valuables are envied and fought over and fought for in the name of the true God. This is how our world was and is run. This is how our world will be run in the future.

Religious terrorists, or priests and preachers, indoctrinated to hate and attack “non-believers,” will acquire weapons of mass destruction and wreak havoc on the world’s populations in the names of their “Gods.” Those Gods are the protectors of the believing wealthy, Wahabists, Catholics, Protestants and other Christian sects, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, pantheists and nativists, Bhuddists, etcetera, etcetera, all in their chosen variety of their religions with all their symbols of numerology, clothing, forms of prayer, food requirements, holy days, and bibles from which their esoteric beliefs and functions differentiate them from others.

Only the Jews preach “Peace.” And that is reason enough to kill them. And, since the Jews do not proselytize nor, until 1948, did they have an army, it was easy enough to slaughter them like animals.

Now, in 2008, billions of Moslems would once again presume to exterminate them, and, they are actively working on the methods to achieve that goal. (Iran in particular with its stated and avowed goal of extermination, is actively working on the development of nuclear weapons to realize their holy mission on earth.) With the help of most of the nations on the face of the earth, gathered in the United Nations in their single-minded pursuit to first, delegitimize this most creative human strain, and then, banded together politically and militarily, plan to march as Crusaders of old to chase them from Jerusalem and the “Holy Land.” That is, the Land that the Jews made holy and where they have gathered after Hitler’s and Germany’s failure to achieve total elimination.

Thus, religion has shown its ugly dirty insidious face to the world. Prejudice against women, Gays, Gypsies, Atheists, and other various illogical, often crazy, single-minded and narrow-minded pursuits by the enormous variety of institutions established to bring God to earth for the “benefit” of humankind, must alert narrow-believers and non-believers to the dangers they face by being different from their pursuers, different from “other” religions and religionists.

And, all thinking, caring, aware, humane, knowledgeable people, must also be prepared to do battle against the religious killers of the world.