Abstract

Religious Origins 6

Better not believe in a deity at all than to cringe before gods who are worse than the worst of men. Unbelief does not so much dishonour the deity whose existence it denies.

Plutarch

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Friday, 29 August 2008

Greek Philosopy

The earliest Greek philosopher to have any of his work recorded was Xenophanes who left Colophon in 532 BC, first settling in a Greek colony in Sicily, whence he moved to Uele (Elea, Velia) in Italy. The later Greek philosophers believed he had founded the Eleatic school. He famously said horses, if they could make images, would make images of their god like a horse. He himself believed in a monotheistic none anthropomorphic god. Who had Xenophanes been talking to to develop his notion of a formless monotheistic god in a society brought up on Homer and Hesiod? Surely, it could only have been the Persians, and it seems he was exiled from Colophon after the Persians had moved in (c 546 BC).

Persians began spreading the idea of ethical monotheism as a way of keeping its disparate peoples under control. Dr Bouquet compared Xenophanes with second Isaiah, an unquestionably Persian work. He disapproved of making images of God, just as Persians and, later, the Jews did. Perhaps he was exactly like the prophets, Persian propagandists, and was too pro-Persian to remain in his home town, or was sent out to propagandize them in the Greek colonies. Who knows? But his ideas could easily have been influenced by Persian religion.

Plato referred to both “gods” and “God” in his works, seeming to be hedging his bets against popular disfavour, but in Nomos, a work of his last years, he hesitated no longer and urged that anyone who refused to believe in one god was dangerous to the state and should be punished or even killed. Thus he gave respectability to religious persecution by monotheists, and they have accepted his approval ever since. It is another reason why the church decided to preserve his works, though it closed down his schools!

The Stoics under Zeno (360-264 BC), a Phœnician (a Canaanite born when Persia still ruled Canaan) and then Chrysippus propounded a monotheistic naturalism in which God is the power of the universe. This Stoic God is not anthropomorphic or personal. It is an abstract power, with no favourites. At first, following the Persians (asha, arta) it was conceived of as fire and truth, then became reason to the Greeks. Because the power was impartial among everyone, everyone were brothers and sisters, and it was a moral duty to help others as your kinfolk.

Adelphiasophism calls it kinunity. People must aim to live symbiotically with Nature, not at war with her. Adelphiasophists personify Nature as a Goddess not because they think Nature has a sex, but because the natural process is giving birth not manufacturing. It is not creation but procreation. It is not willed but unwilled, and is no more designed than your own children were designed. If we ever decided to design our children, then we would suffer a catastrophic fall in genetic variation, and that is what happens just before any species becomes extinct.

A lot of Christian thinking came from the Stoics in the first five centuries of Christianity. Cicero wrote a treatise on Stoicism called De Officiis (One’s Duty), and the Christian bishop, S Ambrose, copied a lot of it with a Christian slant in a book called… De Officiis! Many modern liberal Christians and Unitarians are Stoics more than Christians, and would be more honest if they frankly admitted it rather than hanging on to falsely held beliefs. Some might say that Adelphiasophism is not a religion, but that is to hang on to the notion that a religion must be supernatural in some way. Religion began as a socio-cultural outlook for simple tribal people, and then evolved its supernatural appurtenances. Now it is time to shed them, and accept that any world view is a religion, because a religion, natural or supernatural is essentially a world view. Be proud to be an Adelphiasophist. If you must be a Christian be proud to be a secular Christian. The secular Christian walks the walk while the faith based Christian just keeps talking empty talk.

Most of the Stoic founding fathers were from the part of the world that had been Persian, or was strongly influenced by Persia—Babylon, Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and the Phœnician colonies in North Africa like Carthage. “All men are born free” is a slogan first said by the Stoics. Stoics recognize that we are all subject to the forces of Nature and of the cultural force of society within it. Society we can change, but changing Nature is something, in our own best interest, we ought to be cautious about. Stoics valued the cautious approach.

In personal qualities, Stoics valued self discipline, integrity, intelligence, consideration, creativity, virtue, and above all kinunity. Christians accused Stoics of lacking pity and compassion. It is obviously false. What is the value of sisterhood and brotherhood when there is no compassion? It is that Stoics disdain simpering sentimentality, a habit that is getting increasingly fashionable. What is done is done, and wallowing in pity achieves nothing to resolve difficulties or heartache. If someone has spilt their milk, pity and bunches of flowers are no substitute. You do not offer sentimentality, but practical help—some of your own milk, or help in finding some.

In his epistle in the New Testament, James was saying the same. Christianity had to be practical, because faith devoid of practical assistance to others was useless. Even Paul who invented the whole notion of salvation by faith, told Christians that love was more important—but they forget that—and love means lovingkindness. A stiff upper lip was once considered typically English. It is being Stoical. The day of a disaster is the first day of the rest of your life, so get on with it, don’t whimper and maunder about how terrible things have been. Others depend on you, you have a duty to do! Indulging in pity is indulging in self pity. It is no good to others and serves only to feed your own self image of a concerned human being. So, Stoics are not pitiless, but they are more practical than simperers and whimperers.

Chinese Religions

Confucius was born about 550 BC, so he too was active when the Persian empire had been well established. Lao Tzu is a founder of the other main Chinese religious philosophy, Taoism, and was supposed to have been born around 600 BC, so is unlikely to have been inspired by the Persians, but, in fact, he is considered to have been mythical, and so his supposed date of birth is meaningless. Indeed, he is said to have been the teacher of Confucius and of Buddha, and that makes him begin to look like Zoroaster himself, or a personification of Persia.

Both Confucianism and Taoism are concerned with Tao which seems to be the equivalent of the Persian arta, the power of Nature. Tao (pronounced “dow”) is a word curiously like “deo” and “theo”, meaning God, and also like “tau” or “taw”, now “t” but more obviously the sign of the cross in old alphabets, an ancient sun symbol. Taoism accepts what is. Trying to change things usually makes them worse. What one can change is yourself, and through that society will get better.

Confucius had a much more hands on attitude. People had to maintain good relationships between each other by adopting values that made for a better society. Mo Ti (470-390 BC) thought Confucius had neglected God in his system. Mo Ti sounds curiously like Moses, and that certainly came from the Mazda of Ahura Mazda. The Ahura part of the name was lost in the word torah, Hebrew for “law” because the Persian for law is dat, and with Ahura Mazda, it sounded like datura masas to Jews who knew no Persian, which they took to be ha torah masas, the law of Moses. Maybe the Chinese heard Ahura Mazda as something to do with Mo Ti, and it became the name of his advocate.

This Chinese thinker was contemporaneous with Ezra, who was the historical Moses, bringer of the law, and the setting up of the Temple state of Jerusalem in the west by Darius. Anyway, Mo Ti believed in a good god like Ahuramazda who loved people universally and without distinction—impartially. War was against his nature. All strife is caused by selfishness and lack of love. Bouquet describes Mo Ti as being like a Hebrew prophet in his monotheism and ethical ideals. Perhaps it reflects their common inspiration in the Persian chancellery.

Following Mo Ti, Hsun Tzu in the 300s BC reversed the emphasis but not the message. Like Christians, he saw wickedness as dominating, but he sought the answer in care and proper education. Rather like the Essenes, who believed a man could be born wicked but could overcome it by will, Hsun Tzu thought everyone could be taught practical goodness to overcome their natural wickedness.

At a much later date, Chu Tzu appeared (1130-1200 AD) to disagree with those Chinese Buddhists who thought personality should be suppressed, and instead taught that everyone had to develop their minds so as to bring them closer to harmony with the Atman, because personal development not suppression was what helped anyone to approach the Great Self. Intensifying one’s knowledge took one closer to God by doing more for other people and society. Chu Tzu spoke of Li, which for Confucius was habitual behaviour that bonded society together—rather as “religion” is—as if it were a sort of cosmic law or truth akin to Persian arta, but which manifests itself in human relations as love and mutual care, righteousness, respect and wisdom.

Confucianism teaches that human beings are nothing if they are not righteous in their dealings with each other and the world. The life rule for people should be “reciprocity”, the same as Christian love. Christ and Confucius had the same principle, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you”, as Christ put it, and “Do not unto others what you would not have them do to you”, in Confucius’s formulation. Christians think the positive formulation of Christ is superior, but they have never found it in them to love their enemies, so it is hardly surprising if their enemies do not love them. The Confucian formulation at least plainly forbids people from being horrible to each other, even if they cannot bring themselves to love. It is therefore the more practical, and Confucius was always concerned with practice, not just theory. Teaching benefits everyone by removing all distinctions between classes. The gentleman should not cultivate likes and hatreds, but only what is right, and that is what promotes reciprocity. However unpleasant and even uncivilized some people might seem, lovingkindness should not be withheld. It is what Christians call love.

Zen or Ch’an Buddhism is a syncretism of Taoism with Buddhism, but far from disappearing into the mystic, it remains a down to earth guide to life, for perfection is not had by meditation but by correct living. Its important principle is wu wei, or none resistance, “resist ye not evil”, as Christ said. It is not that you should be left defenseless, though, because wu wei allows you to use an evil force against itself. Judo is wu wei put into practice as a martial art, and illustrates well what it implies. The bad or evil aspects of life are not going away, so the thing to do is make the best of a bad thing, directing it back upon itself or, at least, away from harm. When the evil is in yourself, it is finding ways of sublimating wicked inclinations into something useful. Resistance causes more harm, so, as you cannot eliminate the negative, accentuate the positive!

Christianity

The ultimate practical good of Christianity is the same as that of other religions, uniting people for their mutual benefit. Christians forget that their God is every human being in the world. If you hate someone, then you hate God! You can only love God by loving all other human beings. Love is not slobbering over people with overt demonstrations of emotion, it is kindness to them. It is the reciprocity of Confucius because it is taught to everyone, and so everyone must practice it. If someone does not and you are harmed by it, then you do not compound the evil with a vendetta, you trust to the law, because as Chu Tzu said, society can act to punish individual wrongs as long as the punisment is just. Nor could evil leaders start wars if no one was willing to fight them, and no Christian should because retaliation was not what Christ taught his followers. There is no escaping this, unless the Christian is going to tell the man who was God incarnate he was wrong. In which case, they forfeit their right to be called a Christian.

A free church Christian wrote “our religion is indefeasibly social”. God depends upon society because in a real sense God is society. If there is a spiritual God, as many religious people still believe, then the believers cannot escape the fact that this God wants people to be kind to other human beings. That is the practical material message of God and whatever other spiritual beliefs you might have, this simple practical advice cannot be ignored. If this spiritual God has rewards and punishments, then it is plain that they come from doing good in the world, and that means helping others, not harming them—all others. God is not partial! Believers must treat others as if they were God himself. The free church man continued that Christianity as a universal fellowship is not an extra, a luxury for those who are gregarious.

Christianity is meant to be a new sort of society, a fellowship, koinonia or communion in which everyone undertakes to love all other people. It was not meant to be an exclusive club in which the Christians loved each other after a fashion, but hated everyone else, and it was not meant to be tens of thousands of separate churches each of which looks askance at the others. Bouquet excuses it because self centeredness is universal, even in subhuman creation where it is the will to survive at all costs. Quite so, but human beings are human because they are social, and all religions are trying their utmost to get across to individual members of the race that selfishness is antisocial and ultimately destructive of society. It is sin! That is what severs us from society, symbolized by God. Despite all the prophets and gurus, few people have yet got the message.

In 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, Paul begins a section explaining what modern Pauline Christians refuse to accept, that love is greater than faith, but, in this initial part, he uses several images that can be traced to an incident in Athens in 20 BC. Paul mentions speaking foreign languages, the tongues of men and angels, angels probably being simply “messengers” in this context, he also mentions a “noisy gong” and “clanging cymbal”, prophetic powers and knowledge of mysteries, and having the faith to move mountains, all of which are nothing without love. Then he speaks of giving away all he had and his body to be burnt.

The point is that all such extreme sacrifices are worthless without love being their purpose, but it seems to imply a foreign delegation bringing a taste of mystery and magical knowledge and ending in self immolation. A king of India, Porus, sent a delegation to the Greeks which included a sadhu. He immolated himself. It must have left an impression in Athens. A delegation can be considered messengers, and must have been accompanied by linguists. A sadhu is a poor naked mendicant holy man in India. Like Arab fakirs, they can control their bodies and so perform feats of endurance, wonders and magic. No doubt, he or an assistant announced themselves by banging gongs and clashing symbals. His faith is immense but seems pointless to a westerner. Someone must have confronted Paul with this man's exhibition of faith and its ultimate sacrifice, and his reply was that, however strong the faith was, it was empty without love.

What hast thou that thou didst not receive?

1 Corinthians 4:7

Here Paul expresses the plain fact that society maketh man. Society gives us everything, even our very humanity, and so God, as a metaphor for society, does the same. To overemphasize individualism is antihuman because ultimately the individual left alone is not human and is unlikely to survive for long. Excessive individualism without adequate recognition of the importance of society is atavistic. It propels us back to before we became human. That is why so called neoliberalism taken too far is inhuman and even atavistic. It is true and sensible that individual people want to be as free as possible within society, that is what liberalism is. Too many Americans, in particular, think that merely to recognize society is to be socialistic and they have decided in advance that is awful. Well socialism is no more than accepting that society is important to us, and we cannot live without it, so we might as well learn to live with it. It is after all, what God represents, and these pages try to show.

Society is the very center of religion, and it is the center of Christ’s teaching, despite the nonsense propagated by right wing Christian demagogues. It is easy to get obsessed with some dream that we should or can be completely free. No one is, and no one can make it so. Such freedom is utter isolation. Who wants it? Christ invited us to love our enemy so that we can live together amicably, for unless we can, we shall end up killing each other. We do not have to agree on everything. An argument is not a quarrel, but we cannot be obsessively self centered, and Christianity and Judaism, as well as other religious systems say we ought not to be. For Jesus, mutual love is necessary, and the history of the last twenty centuries shows that Christianity has never got Christ’s message. Doubtless some individual Christians have got it, but not enough to make society Christian, and many have actually died at the hands of their so called brothers. Love is needed for it, and few Christians have it.

God the Creator

The god of the Christians is the creator of the universe.

Ho hum! The priests of the various Egyptian gods each sought to show their own god as the creator of all things. All religious systems took it for granted that their own god was the primordial entity or primum agens who created the world, humanity and human inventions. Christian theologians tell us there is only one true religion, thereby declaring Christianity to be no different from every previous religion that had been devised by human cunning. All of them are “the one true religion”.

“Ah! But other religions are the work of demons,” says the Christian. Groan. In the first ecumenical movement during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the god, Ptah, was shown as starting all the other gods by deliberately setting up temples to them. How do Christians know that Ptah did not set up theirs and is not still setting up religions?

In the Babylonian systems, it was the human race that had been specifically created—to build temples to the gods and to feed them with offerings. This religion was defined as “service”—the service of the gods being the very purpose of human existence. Since the gods have never been shown to eat the offerings made to them, or spend the money collected for them in more sophisticated times, our only conclusion is that god’s attendants, the priests, in fact, consume the sacrifices and spend the money!

Xenophanes said horses would draw gods to look like horses, if they could draw. They cannot, but humans can and African gods are black and snub-nosed whereas European gods are red-cheeked and fair-haired. These simple observations should be enough to make anyone who can think at all realise that gods are made in the image of man and not man in the image of gods. Anaxagoras was banished for impiety. He had declared the sun and moon to be heavenly masses not deities. 2000 years before Galileo, the Religious Right were being outraged. The fact that they are still being outraged and are still fighting Truth in the USA just shows how primitive, indeed backward, religion is, and its defenders are. Just like the Athenian conservatives of two and a half millennia earlier, Christians appeal to the prejudices of the mob—prejudices that they have inculcated in them.

For centuries Greek intellectuals had to make token references to “the gods” for the sake of a peaceful life though their own discoveries showed that they did not believe in any gods. The Indo-Europeans had the notion of a cosmic “Order” that became the foundation of Zoroastrianism, so that contemporary Greek philosophers, hearing about the teachings of their rivals, the Persians, called this “Order” “God”. God was an alternative name for the universal “Order” that regulated the universe. They did not see this God as a disembodied super-consciousness with a personal interest in every ant in the field as modern Christians do.

Epicurus (340-270 BC) was considered by Lucretius to have been the saviour of mankind for showing that religion enslaved people. Lucretius in On the Nature of Things, wrote that, if there were any gods, they had no effect on the world we live in. He saw that humans had been baffled by certain phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons, the heavenly bodies and abstract concepts like beauty, and had invented gods to explain them:

O unhappy race of mankind, to ascribe such doings to the gods and add thereto bitter wrath! What groans did they then create for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for generations to come!

Rudolf Otto thought that religion came from mystical experiences, what he calls a sense of the “numinous”. The “numinous” is a feeling of oneness with the cosmos, a standing outside of self and within Nature that people interpret as having sight of god, or seeing with God’s eyes. In such ways does the natural become the supernatural.

God and Security

Plato described the self as a charioteer trying to control the conflicting horses of reason and passion. Freud enlarged the idea into a system of psychoanalysis. The horse of passion became the Id (Latin for “it”), the atavistic selfishness of the basic need for self preservation and sex. The horse of reason became the Superego (Latin for “above myself”), the requirements of society conditioned into us from birth onwards, what is acceptable or safe to do, and what is not. The charioteer is the Ego (Latin for “I”), the self, the outcome of the struggle between the selfish Id and the social Superego, between the atavistic brute and the civilized person.

The compromise of society is that of being free to do just as you like, and being restricted in some things you can do to have the benefits of social life, mainly security and an assurance of a share of the food available. We can no longer take possession of whatever we fancy because some things are held communally. We cannot just have sex with anybody we come across. Among the social restrictions for archaic humanity the taboo against incest was important.

Others were to do with the significance of the totem itself. The taboo on killing the totem suggests that someone might have wanted to do it—some people resented it and had to be stopped from harming the social structure. Nor are we any longer justified in killing anyone who angers us. As compensation for any frustrations, we have to get our rewards from the group by taking pride in it, serving it to help it be more effective, and taking our pleasure in communal activities. But social living could not eliminate every fear in life, it could not leave archaic humans totally secure. Society could not prevent death from old age and disease, flash floods, famine, accidents. Society remained subject to Nature!

Infants always have the immediate security of the mother, and the yearning of primitive humans, still in an infantile stage of thinking was to call on the mother when they were distressed, just as a sixteen year old boy in a spate of stabbings in Britain, instinctively called for his mother when was about to be stabbed in a gang fight. The film actor, James Cagney, playing a young thug, did the same when he was going to the electric chair. The leader of the tribe might have been the alpha male, but even he appealed to his mother when in danger. Early human adults must have craved a childhood security with their mother that they had lost, and so must have been been comforted in illness and death by thoughts of returning to the arms of their mother. The father was quite unknown to these archaic human beings who understood nothing about where babies came from or why, and lived in extended families not nuclear ones. Their mother was the natural personal saviour figure, not their father.

The father was to them the leader of the tribe, and eventually a notional founder of the tribe. Because the father represented the tribe, the tribal god was a father, but the personal saviour of each of the members of the tribe was the mother god. Such comforting ideas are a desire, a wish, a hope—they are not true, but compel belief by their strength. We know we, even as advanced human beings, are inclined to will it on to ourselves, but most of us know it is an illusion, indeed a delusion now that we know there is no basis for it. The wish is strong, though, and plenty of people, mainly the more unsophisticated ones, but including many people who should know better, justify it by appeals to personal psychological experiences conditioned by the hope for an absent feeling of security. Yet these strange experiences, always supposed by believers to have been encounters with God are no such thing. The experiences happen, that is usually certain, but the interpretation of them is the delusion. Ludwig Feuerbach showed that religion was just such a type of psychological autosuggestion.

The heavenly father—by then having replaced all the heavenly mothers in the strongly patriarchal societies that had emerged following the colonization of the land—psychologically fulfilled human wishes concerning their basic fears. In so doing it demeaned us as human beings, and kept us thinking childishly and selfishly. The personal god replaced the wish for a mother, and Christ is presented as a feminized man, a man with generally feminine motherly qualities. He replaces the wish for personal security, the maternal goddess, not the father figure who is still revengeful, and authoritarian—the tribal god.

Such beliefs today are absurd, but persist. Why? It is because the feeling of insecurity is basic in us, and is enhanced in those societies where people feel insecure because society abrogates its duty of making people feel secure. The toleration of the citizenry carrying weapons is the single main reason why Americans feel insecure, and therefore turn to outdated religion. The politicians and media feed it with stories of terrorists overrunning us. It is getting the same in the UK with guns and knives being more and more of a problem. Even so, we ought to have grown out of religion, and be demanding that society do its job, meaning that leaders should provide what society wants—personal security and fairness.

Society is most clearly felt when it is in action, and today, society is united behind the government of the day most easily by cynically invoking an external threat—war or terrorism. In tribal society, similar threats were felt from neighbouring tribes and maurauders from further afield, as well as from Nature, so the communal rituals were both a release of tension and a comfort, and such feelings could be ecstatic. It is the reason why people like to dance communally still. The assembly of the clans and the ecstatic dancing rituals dominated primitive religions because society is its source. It is through obedience to the social requirements of tribal ceremonial that primitive morality is imbued, and from it advanced morality emerges. The rites themselves, besides dancing, are libations, meals, washings, markings, circumcisions, marriage, burials, all symbolic common—profane—actions which have been consecrated by their communal ceremonial usage. The ritual transfers holiness to the recipient who thereby passes from a profane state to a holy one. They are accepted into some higher level of society. Here is the source of something holy being passed on, a type of religious energy that Christians call the Holy Spirit.

Psychology and Religion

Many people cannot mature, and the encouragement of childishness at the hands of religious parents and professional Christians plugging the “reality” of childish hopes does not help them to. Freud explained neurotic behaviour as being just such a suspension of childish traits. Religion then is an encouraged obsessional neurosis. Explaining to a neurotic that their behaviour is irrational does not cure them. Their only hope of a cure is for them to realize what the cause is so that they can see the behaviour is unnecessary even if it once was. Evidence for the connexion between neurotic behaviour and religion is that they present similarly. Both demand repetitive, ritualized behaviour, and generate a feeling of guilt when the neurotic cannot repeat the obsessive habit often enough or properly. Yet all of the repeating of the habit does not change anything.

And religion is connected with the repression of sexual instincts, just as obsessional neurosis is. Christians demonstrate constantly that they are obsessed with the suppression of sex. If it must be done then it must be done properly, prudishly, the way they think it should be. Many serious Christians make a point of suppressing their own sexuality completely, imaging that it is God’s will. They are clearly worried by something about sex, and feel guilty about it. They should see a therapist and stop telling the rest of us that we should not do perfectly natural and harmless things. Sex is not the problem, but as Thomas Malthus said, it is the irresponsibility of those who have children without the willingness or the means to bring them up.

Theories of religion that depend on personal psychology cannot be general theories because personal psychology is largely subjective. It must be social psychology, though there is always a strong interaction and feedback between the social origins of religion and the effect of them on the individual psychology, and there was from the beginning. But it is wrong to dismiss any theory of religion merely because some individuals today do not fall within its scope. Modern atheism does not refute historical theories of religion, and nor do modern idiosyncratic beliefs. Malory Nye (Religions: The Basics) thinks he dismisses Freud’s ideas about religion when he writes:

The assumption that religion comes from making up a heavenly father figure called god to compensate for relations with one’s own father simply does not apply to those non-Christian traditions that don’t image god as a father figure, or don’t image god at all.

Nye is right that no assumption can be a valid origin of religion, but Freud is not making an assumption. He is demonstrating a psychological factor common to the major religions with which he was familiar—the patriarchal religions. Freud’s is not a general theory of religious origin, but it is not therefore to be discarded as useless. It is like someone discarding Newton’s laws because they do not apply to speeds close to light or to movements of very tiny particles. It is manifestly true in these important religions that God is a father figure. Freud is on to a strong aspect of religion, at least among more than half the population of the world. The patriarchal religions were not the first of them but have proved immensely attractive for all these people including ourselves, and there is something important to be learned about ourselves to understand why.

As the social origins of religion were lost as society evolved, the personal psychology of it assumed all the more importance through cultural feedback. Religion is culture and so feeds into each new generation until each society resonates with those aspects of it that suit them best.

The Social in Religion

A good deal has been made of the social aspect of religion—the treatment of the group itself as sacred—and those who maintain that the first duty was the tribe… see in initiation the most religious of all acts, the attainment by the growing boy or girl of self consciousness as a member of a sacred unit.

A C Bouquet

A C Bouquet was a prominent Cambridge scholar who wrote about religion in general but from a Christian viewpoint. He believes the object of religion always was “transcendent” even if not originally very “nobly conceived”. His dismissive attitude is that of the man who has to believe religion always was higher than something mundane like the group. It is wilful misunderstanding because no one supposes that early human beings consciously began to worship the group of them as a god. The point is that the object of veneration, whether totem or god, always stood for the group. Even primitive tribes see rituals like initiation as being an identification with some object, like a totem, which represents the tribe, and not directly with the tribe itself. It arose because the individual tribal members enjoyed the whole body of them collecting for some exciting frolick—the primordial village dance, fete or even football match. Originally, it was playful, like children playing together, then it became more habitual and some excuse was found for it, and so what was originally simply the tribe gathering became the veneration of whatever the excuse was.

One possible meaning of the word religion could reflect the very original meaning of binding together, though another proposed origin suggests it referred to what was already a ritual that had to be observed. The Latin religio or relligio, was thought by Servius to be from the Latin root lig, concerning binding. Cicero thought it was from the root leg, pertaining to counting or observing. Read in relation to the god being worshipped, they meant observing divine commandments or being bound to the god, but as the god is a proxy for the community, they were observing the rituals of the community or being bound together in communal activity. S Augustine used both senses in his vast collection of works. Either way, religious activity is communal, and the god is the focus of the community or society.

The Greek word translated as “religion” is parateresis, which has the sense of observance, suggesting that Cicero was right. This Greek word is used by Christ himself in the Greek gospels (Lk 17:20), “the kingdom of God cometh not with parateresis”, because it was already inside you. It is in a section of Luke that has no parallel in the other gospels and is probably a late gloss, but it was plainly meant to be understood by the readers of Luke in the sense that Jeremy meant the covenant was to be held in the heart. It was to be made instinctive.

Hindus call their own beliefs sanatana dharma, “everlasting dharma”, but dharma means much more than we mean by “religion”. It has much the same meaning as the Persian arta and Greek kosmos and logos, a cosmic principle, truth or purpose. Everyone and every thing has its dharma as what motivates them in the natural order of things. We have singled out “religion” as a particular activity largely separated from everyday life, and we are hypocritical about it when it is not, but Hindus regard religion as integrated with their lives, society and the natural order of things, Nature. Religion for many is not a different activity from daily life. Hindu religion is much more a model of original religion than the patriarchal ones which are more of an imposition on to, or an intrusion into, everyday life, society and Nature. Islam is patriarchal but is more influenced by eastern custom.

Religion has a distinct meaning in the west because western rulers, if no one else, have known for 2500 years that the world happens whether people worship or not. Going to church was a useful way for the leaders of getting large groups of people together to have the law read to them, thereby making them law-abiding. In church, they were told what God expected of them, and that made it easier for kings to rule imperial states that were getting ever bigger and more disparate. The Persians were the first to do it systematically, then Greeks and Romans, and thus, via Christianity, it became, in the west, largely an institution of state separate from everyday activity. The fact that Christianity was most often imposed on to the western peoples in place of their native natural lifestyle religions aggravated the separation of religion, life and society.

Westerners have separated religion from culture—what people do that is particular to their society—but beforehand there was only culture, “religion” being the central component of it. The quotation marks emphasize that the characteristics which we consider as religious evolved with culture, and evolved differently in different cultures, but was not considered as separate. Nothing suggests that the belief in gods and spirits, though widespread, is a necessary or sufficient feature of religion, any more than a church is. Some enthusiasts say that football is a religion and is tribal, and it is true that religion began in just such communal, tribal activity.

If religion was not originally communal, it was presumably derived from solitary meditation or prayer. Yet, in primitive villages, individualism in religion is unknown, and probably impossible. Life ticks over according to the clock of communal activity—are we any different?—and no religious action is ever performed by an individual without the involvement of the social unit, the tribe. Moreover, the clan huts accommodated the family unit in one large room. There was little chance of being alone in it. In Bouquet’s own words, “Much of the life of early man was communal, and on the level of the barrack room. It lacked privacy.” Privacy would have required going alone to “desert places”, and generally that would have been quite frightening to primeval people whose purpose in living together was security. To wander alone was insecure, again as Bouquet points out himself in our closest relatives:

Chimpanzees exhibit great unhappiness if banished or separated from their fellows.

A C Bouquet

In the Christian philosophy of Hegel, finite mind is the individual personality, the self, and Absolute Mind is God and therefore society. Religious knowledge is truthfully the slow appreciation that humans are only human through society. Only when the supernatural is rejected can it become clear that heaven or the kingdom of God depends upon us! What we do in the world makes our individual heaven through our beneficial activity, and it also adds to the accumulation of good through culture and practice in society bringing future generations closer to heaven. We solve the problems, and we unravel the complications, not God. God is what is carried forward. All religions subsume the individual personality in that of God or a Greater Self, however it might be envisaged, but the Greater Self does not exist without the lesser selves, and so cannot replace them in some mystical or supernatural way.

Mahayana Buddhists imagine that the Absolute wanted to see itself, and to do so divided itself voluntarity into all the personal souls, so each separate soul is trying to see the Great Soul. Zoroastrians believed that everyone had a personal battle against the evil within them, and it was the sum total of all those battles that determined the outcome—victory for good or victory for evil. The point was never to make someone else good. Just to try is evil! Each was to ensure that they themselves were perfectly good, and until then, no one had any right to attack others for their failings. Only those without sin could throw a stone. Christ also said, “Remove the plank from your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from your neighbour’s”. By bettering yourself, by defeating wickedness and selfishness within yourself, you raise the mark, and things improve for everyone. That is the point, not setting out in a crusade against external evil. That is itself evil! Gnostics saw each one of us as a spark of the divine, trying to restore unity with it.

Humanity might be the eyes and mind, the sight and consciousness, of Nature, so the Buddhist analogy might be true in fact! The spirit of the man is the candle of the Lord (Proverbs 20:37), virtually expresses the truth that humanity could be Nature’s sight and consciousness, otherwise perhaps, expressed as man being in the image of God. Our destiny was to enable Nature to see and think, but it seems more likely that we are Nature’s insanity, and shall destroy ourselves through our utter failure to overcome selfishness. Christ forbade retaliation. “Resist not evil”, he said. Buddhists practice that commandment far better than Christians ever did. Christians never did! And it is no escape to set aside a caste of people called soldiers or warriors who are allowed to murder.

The identity of God and humanity in modern religions is most poignantly illustrated by the story of the British soldier beyoneting a Hindu sadhu in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. With his dying breath, the naked holy man said to the British redcoat standing over him, “And you too are He” It is the fundamental reality Christ tried to put over—“As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me”, but failed. God says all men are God! The Bhagavadgita has:

Whoever sees Me everywhere, and sees everything in Me, I am never lost to them, and they are never lost to Me.

The Blessed Lord, Bhagavadgita 6:30

God is society. He is in everyone and everyone is in Him. Without Him, we are not human and cannot exist. Society cannot be ignored out of some antisocial dogma without risking our very existence as a race on earth.

Cattell on “Secular Christianity”

R B Cattell (Psychology and the Religious Quest, 1938) outlined what virtually boils down to some essentials of Secular Christianity, viz:

1. Individual people depend upon others in their social group. Without such help, no isolated person could survive
2. Each of us is created by the society we are born into, our culture is its culture, its ideals are our ideals, its purpose is our purpose. Our personality is sculpted by the people around us and how they live, and even our physical form is, to a degree, eg our bearing, whether we are nourished or malnourished, etc
3. Part of the culture we inherit from our group are its morals
4. Much of our purpose in life derives from our desires to serve the group, and our loyalty to it. We cooperate with others in the group to fulfil these desires
5. People are often willing to sacrifice a lot, perhaps everything, for their society
6. By serving the group, which, in comparison to any member of it, is immortal, we get the sense of immortality ourselves. We hope to be remembered by our community for our contributions to it
7. Equally, we have a sense of immortality through our children, adding them to our community, and having a large part to play in passing on to them the group’s culture.

In all of this the local community has attributes that became attached to God. We once lived in and for our human group with no need for a supernatural God. We have to return to that condition, but one in which the world is our village, and its whole population our neighbors. Our purpose then is to bind together the global village with the aim of improving the condition of the inhabitants of the global human group. It means caring for everyone, sharing more so that no one is in need, and no one hogs the roast, protecting each other, ensuring that no one is harmed or exploited. Applying, in short, Honderich’s Principle of Humanity, which is the essence of Christ’s morality.

The idea of an omnipotent being looking after you is no doubt a comfort of sorts, but may be one that leads to underestimating real challenges. With the false feeling that “God is with us” people might be attempting things that a cool headed look will reject. The elevation of society to a fantastic supernatural level by comparison reduces to insignificance the genuine help it can offer.

Once upon a time, society could help someone confronted by a lion when they called out for help. It could help when they have searched for roots and berries all day and found nothing. It could help when they fell ill. No imaginary god can help in any of these circumstances, but, curiously, when people are helped by society and come through the hardship, it is God they thank! It is their real and original god—the human community.

In rejecting supernaturalism, people should not feel the loss of God. By realising and accepting that human society is God, they will then be less inclined to run society down, and more inclined to get in there and do their duty to help it, and therefore all of us, out. The loss of the figment will thereby result in a strengthening of real help from those around—even people we do not know.

Class, Religion and Resentment

Explaining primitive religion without addressing primitive class divisions or economic needs is like explaining the human heart without ever referring to the blood or the lungs.

Daniel L Pals, Seven Theories of Religion

Ludwig A Feuerbach (1804-72), a German philosopher contemporary with Marx, severely criticized his teacher, a previous and highly renowned German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1830). Hegel was a Christian pastor and an idealist who invented a dialectical method of examining propositions. Marx famously turned Hegel’s method on its head, applying it to matter not ideals. Feuerbach said (The Essence of God) that Hegel and his faith used God, but God really stood for humanity. Everything good in human nature was attributed to God. Desirable abstractions such as liberty, love, wisdom, honesty, reason, and many more were supposedly given to humanity by God, but everything awful—the opposite abstractions—are sins, our own responsibility. People are therefore alienated from their true nature, to be social, to care and be compassionate to others, by casting them as having devilish natures.

Nietzsche (1844-1900) had read Hegel and Feuerbach, and was a relentless critic of contemporary Christianity, though not of Christ. Nietzsche’s idea of resentment stems from the gross and unfair suppression of the lower classes in society. Even primeval society might have been unfair in the sense that the leader of the band was privileged, and doubtless he favoured others, male amd female, but the rest were mainly not treated abjectly or marginalized for otherwise they would then have had no incentive to remain in the group, and social instincts would have been weakened by reality. “Class” difference therefore cannot have been great. In later, more modern societies, the situation was different. Ill treatment of large numbers of people at the bottom of the ladder caused resentment which could fester until it was released in riot or revolution.

Nietzsche argued that it led in western Christianity to glorifying qualities like mercy and fellowship as a “slave revolt in morals”, and generating “duty” as an ethic. Of course, everyone in society were fellows in it, so fellowship in tribal society could not have been a particularly slave morality, and later everyone in society has a duty towards it, including the privileged, though they all too often ignored their duty to the disadvantaged. This failure of upper class duty to the lower classes was the cause of resentment among the latter, and ultimately of social unrest, though it could be resolved if the duty of fellowship towards all were more visible.

The upper classes thought differently. They did not want to be left feeling guilty that they were fortunate. It was not enough for them to be well off, they wanted to know, or at least feel, that they deserved it, particularly in relation to the disadvantaged classes. “The poor are poor because they deserve it” was the message the upper crust wanted to hear. Religion could explain the economic relativities in society from with its notion of sin and its theories of theodicy.

God tells everyone they are criminals—sinners is His word—and will be severely punished if they do not do as they are told, but, if they are good, and behave themselves according to God’s prescriptions, then they will live forever. Principally, they must accept their lot in life without complaining. They must endure their oppression. But however good they try to be, it is not enough. The good they experience in life is always God’s doing, but all the evil is their own fault, or they bring it on to themselves by not pursuing evil in the world adequately. And evil in the world is people not doing whatever suits the prescriptions of God. Of course, the prescriptions of God are really the prescriptions of the rulers!

Thus, what originally stood for human social endeavour through the communal action of the tribe becomes a source of alienation of people from society—people are alienated from themselves. The energy, the labour of the bulk of the people, the classes below the ruling classes, is what produces everything in it. They build society and its material welfare but the ruling elite own it, and they and their God get the credit. Everyone’s natural inclination is towards society. We are social animals, yet all of our efforts benefit above all the elite who take everything except a token wage for those doing the work. There is little communal pride in what is made because it is never your own. Though you might have made a car or a house, you have to buy it from someone else because it is not yours until you do. We become customers for the commodities we have made ourselves. The commodities are more important than us!

Society as True Religion

What multiplies while remaining one, yet divides while remaining united?

God? We know nothing about Him that is not made up. No, it is society. The people that make up a society multiply and divide continually yet society lives on. Human life is dependent on human society, but that depends upon Nature, and Nature can be similarly described. These three entities have been the core of religions. Out of them came the notion of society as a meta human entity that lived forever—God. God is the human society personified. People have always thought within the bounds of their experience, initially a small human group close to Nature. Their early speculations eventually led to religion, a set of rituals meant to bond people into their tribal culture, thereby strengthening the unity of the tribe and its ability to see off external threats, then philosophical and finally scientific speculation emerged as society evolved through the ages.

Religious ways of thinking served early humans very well, but it was hidebound and incorrect. The less hidebound but still speculative mode of thinking called philosophy followed on. Each successive mode of speculation was more refined but each inherited baggage as well as benefits from the older mode. In this scientific age, we still have to contend with outmoded ways of thinking perpetually stimulated by outmoded words and concepts. Souls, spirits and gods are meaningless words in the modern world, and unconstrained speculation is nothing more than a mental exercise unless the products of speculation can be tested somehow against the reality of our world. Science is self critical like the best of philosophy and unlike religion, but seeks external tests of its speculations, called hypotheses. Science demands broad agreement about anything before it is accepted as true, and in this way ensures objectivity.

Unless Nature has objective laws, life cannot exist within it, for life has to avoid hazards and seek out nutrition, and if only subjective experience existed, then nothing could be learnt by experience, so dangers could not be avoided, and food could not be sensibly looked for. Order in Nature is not a benefit conferred by God on to poor feeble human beings, it is a necessity that even God cannot live without. Science is the end product of a systematic process of thinking that began with religion, but has replaced religion as the way for us to know about life, society and Nature. Religion tried to step aside, retaining spirituality and mysticism while yielding the material world and actual experience to science. Psychology and now neuroscience are even filling the gap that religion thought to secure for itself, one’s psychic self and one’s consciousness. Conventional religion should now step offstage, and religious people should seek what they require in what has replaced it.

Yet so many people are persuaded that unseen worlds exist that can, on special occasions or by special means, be seen. They are hiccups of the mind, still nourished by religions, and almost everyone still is fed with religion as a child, a trend that is, if anything, growing! The characteristic of religion is to make everything seem mysterious. It uses concepts for which there is no basis in reality, and explains it by them being “spiritual”. The function of religion then is to impress on us how these unreal or spiritual concepts, which evade ordinary knowledge, can be known by those who claim to have the power, and can be of any importance to us who do not.

Morality especially is considered to be the magisterium of religion, even though the moral record of religions, in the west at least, is abysmal. Morality is a social matter. It is a requirement of any successful society, especially large ones in which miscreants cannot be known by everyone else. It should be taught, therefore, as a social necessity, and miscreants should be sure they will be punished by society when they try to avoid their social duties.

The conflict between science and religion is ultimately about what is the best for society. Is society best organized on the basis of ancient and erroneous speculations or upon modern hypotheses, tested and shown to work—on dogma or on testing and verification. Religion is founded on false and failed theories of humanity and Nature, while science is necessarily incomplete, and always will be. Yet science is correct within the bounds any hypothesis specifies, but religion now is wrong at core. It has no answers, it simply claims to have them.

Why do people believe them, when they are quite unproven? For the reason that all scams work—people want them to be true, and are happy to hear someone, albeit with absolutely no foundation, say it is true. Faith remains strong because it is what people want to hear, and they can only know the truth when they are dead. The perfect scam. Kennedy said:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

A religion for the scientific age can be put similarly:

Ask not what God can do for you but what you can do for God.

The added knowledge that the concept of God is simply a personification of society makes it into sense and not nonsense—and further, that society is the human being’s place in Nature. The upshot is to eschew the selfishness of the religious obsession with personal salvation, which is antisocial, in favour of compassion for others, and the practical helping hand. Looked at in practical terms, that is precisely what the Christian God told His followers to do, but all bar a tiny minority failed to notice it in the promise of supernatural rewards for doing nothing!

Religious faith has its origin in society, and was for the benefit of society. If society has no benefits from religion, then religion has lost its purpose, and a religion of purely personal salvation can have few benefits for society—and any that manifest are incidental. Science now, above all, demands that everyone take care—that everyone realizes what effect their actions will have on the world of the future—their children’s world!

Science once reported on how the world is, but now it is pointing the way forward in the world, practically, but also morally. Science will never be complete, but it tells us what has been established, and that cannot be gainsaid. Then it is for us to judge whether it is to the advantage of our human society or not. Are we instead to overrule science in favour of old fashioned speculations that have consistently failed us in wars, famines crime and bad management of the world’s resources? We must take our future direction from science, and not from vain hope. As Emile Durkheim said in respect of science:

We can affirm nothing that it denies, deny nothing that it affirms, and establish nothing that is not directly or indirectly founded upon principles taken from it.

Faith should no longer have the hegemony it had over our moral thought.

Divided Society and Religion

The institutions of the state, including the church, always reflect the position taken by the ruling class. In his work on witchcraft among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard tells us the upper class of rulers were immune from any accusations of witchcraft. Commoners could not accuse the princes of witchcraft and, in any case the princes were the final judges of the charges of witchcraft brought, so were unlikely to subject themselves to trial. The fear of being accused of witchcraft kept people behaving correctly, and the Azande thought they could not do without it. It served the same function for them as law and morality does in more familiar societies.

It does not need a huge conspiracy to effect such unfairness. All it needs is that ruling class people, people with something to lose in a more fair society, are preferentially placed in controlling positions in the social hierarchy. Naturally, the rulers are rich and educate their children to be rulers, so they are always the candidates chosen. The ideology of these rulers does not challenge the status quo because it is to their own advantage. Their values match those of the ruling class that they are members of.

Clever lower class people are taken in to the top schools on the basis of performance in examinations, and, when they are successful, they are taught the same ideology, giving them the chance of joining the elite. The ministers of the church preach a morality that suits the rulers, and keeps the lower classes abject and alienated. Despite the grace of God, many more working class people end up as criminals. The reason is their utter alienation from society. The ministers invite the poor to give to charity, usually meaning themselves, so some of them get extremely rich off the mites of widows, and meanwhile social institutions for the poor are neglected through underfunding.

People need a properly functioning society, and without it are impelled to revert to a savage state of pure selfishness. Their atavistic, solitary nature comes to the fore. But, it is, of course, no longer possible for people to leave society, so they remain in it, but confused and frustrated—alienated—unable to comprehend what is happening, and blaming their neighbours, near or far, because they cannot see who else to blame. Yet simply teaching humanity’s social nature and needs would help people to know what is wrong and indicate what needs changing. The problem is the ruling class which really wants nothing to be changed at all because they like the unjust society we currently have because it is heavily weighted in their favour. Religion, once meant to bond indiviual people to their society, is now binding them to someone else’s:

Man who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven… found nothing there but the reflexion of himself.

K Marx

Today, religion is learned helplessness. The lower class spends its time historically in perpetual distress, with no escape except drugs, booze or fantasy. Given the chance to escape the fantasy, they have grown so used to it, they now prefer it. They have learned to stay helpless. Religion is the opiate of the people:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.

K Marx

The world, nature, society are real, but a supernatural heaven is like an opium induced dream—pure escapism. Religion is an addiction. It is hardly surprising that so called Christian millionaires sponsor churches, charities and foundations, like the Templeton Foundation, to perpetuate religion. They are slave owners building churches for their slaves. Religion keeps people from attending to their real problems in society, their slavery to another class when society is meant to give them security and a better life than they would have fending for themselves. When society seems to offer few or no benefits then it is ready to collapse. The point then is no longer to analyze the world but to change it.

How many times do you read in religious works that the world is just as God wills it to be? Christ was himself a revolutionary and died for it, though that has been hidden in the gospels, and so too has his principle message. The priests and pastors tell us Christ was not questioning the society he lived in, and advocating a revolution to change it, but was simply teaching faith in God. Well, as God is society, he was not teaching faith in the God he was familiar with who favoured the rich and the collaborators with the occupying power, the Romans, but faith in a God of all! Christ tried to remind people that God was their fellow man, not a wish fulfilling phantom in the sky.

Friedrich Engels, and the Marxist, Karl Kautsky—reviled as a revisionist by the neocons when they were still Trotskyites—saw that Christ was a revolutionary. Christianity began as a revolutionary program for slaves and the conquered people of the Roman empire against Roman imperialism. That was why the Christians were supposedly persecuted in Christian mythology. Romans considered them the way modern Americans see Islamists—as terrorists or potentially terrorists. Christ was seen as the Osama Bin Laden of the first century!

Modern Hypotheses of Religion

Alertness to danger was important to a weak ape amidst much stronger animals with strong bites. Consequently, we evolved certain cognitive abilities that:

1. suggested to us the proximity of potentially dangerous predators though often it might be a trembling leaf
2. suggested all our experiences had causes that might be hazardous
3. showed that other creatures and people had their own thoughts, desires and intentions

These three ideas are called agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

Agent Detection—Evolution is not the sum of logical decisions by sensible animals. It is the permanent removal of the ones that make wrong choices. If an animal is nervous and starts at the fall of a leaf, but sometimes the falling leaf is a predator and as a consequence the nervous creatures evades the raptor’s claws, then that nervous reaction will spread in the population causing more and more of the animals to anticipate the predator and escape being eaten. Agent detection evolved in some such manner. We evolved to suspect intent. Animals that instinctively run when they sense danger are more likely to survive. When it was just a falling leaf, all that is lost is a little energy, but when it is a hyena, skittishness will preserve life.

We have evolved to presume movement is intentional. An agent is behind it. Psychologists in the 1940s found that subjects under test thought they could detect agency even when the motions they were seeing were random movements of abstract shapes. They saw pursuit, planning, escape. It is the reason primitive humans saw spirits—minds—behind everything in Nature. Our brains are primed to suspect that all motion is caused by an agent whose intentions towards us might not be good. It is safest for us to assume it is not. Now many of us have to assuage the supernatural!

Causal Reasoning—Then again, we have evolved the ability unconsciously to look for explanations of what happens to us. We seek a cause and effect relationship between things. If a twig nearby suddenly snaps, we immediately suspect it might have a cause, and the cause might be a lion. Later, when humans began to think and speculate about their situation in the world, their instinct was to seek causes for natural phenomena as supernatural agents. They became gods. Even in our rational age, a lucky escape might seem to be a miracle—a blessing of God.

Theory of mind—We have evolved to understand that there is a mind similar to our own behind everyone we meet, and maybe behind some animals and objects too, leading to the mythopoetic way of explaining things. Theory of mind lets us anticipate what others are thinking, and therefore are likely to do. People with disability like autism do not have an adequate theory of mind, and so cannot relate properly with others. However, it inclines us to imagine minds as separate from bodies, leading to mind body duality of thought. Once minds are thought of as a separate entity from their containing bodies, it is easy to believe souls are independent of bodies.

Infants develop with immense trust in adults, particularly their mothers. For them, knowledge is commonly held. Adults seem like gods. They know everything the children know, and see what they see. But at about 15 months children begin to realize it is not so. A simple test with puppets, has one puppet place a sweet in a box, then another, out of sight of the original, moves it to another box. When the first puppet reappears, the children have to say where they expect him to look for the sweet. The children know the sweet is in the second box, and young children expect the original puppet to know it, even though it did not see the sweet moved. Older children, however, have started to get a theory of the mind, and know that the original character did not see the sweet moved, and must still think it is in the first box. They are realizing that everyone does not know what they do, and that people can be mistaken.

Trust is important to social bonding in social animals, but it is an advantage to be able to judge from direct experience whether someone can be trusted. Yet this is, for a young child, like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. They learn that trust is not absolute. But parents encourage them to think the old absolute becomes God. Given the concept of God, children accept it as the embodiment of the trust they used to have in all adults, particularly the mother.

From these three evolved traits, children grow up inclined to attribute agency when it is not there, reason when none exists, and trust in an imaginary perpetual adult who is never wrong. Different cultures fill out the specifics of these beliefs explaining why different cultures had different religions, and no single one arose spontaneously in the human mind. In this idea, religion arises as a byproduct of evolution to cope with different situations.

Fear of death is an undercurrent of belief. The idea of spiritual existence after death is central to most religions.

A quite unrealistic idea about how religion evolved is propagated by so-called “adaptationists”. It is that religious belief had survival value. It is not the notion that something should have survival value that is unrealistsic but the notion that religion existed to have any survival value when humans were very primitive. The “theory” requires “religion” to have been with us from the earliest infancy of the human race. Thus Richard Sosis argues that religious and secular rituals can promote cooperation, but religious rituals generate greater belief and commitment because they do not require proof. Rituals are incomprehensible, and a commitment to them is emotional rather than logical, and so deeper and more long-lasting. Sosis thinks rituals signal to others one’s commitment to the religion’s core beliefs, thereby earning loyalty from others in the group.

He is assuming religion is perfectly formed from the outset. In fact “religion” is a notion of civilization. For most of the existence of the human race, no separate practice called “religion” existed. The elements that now go to comprise religion were simply part of everyday existence, so the “theory” amounts to the absurdity that existence has survival value. There were no peculiar men doing strange things to get respect. Everyone performed the rituals because they were part of the tribal culture. Anyone doing something strange will more likely have been expelled as dangerous deviants than respected. The Sosis idea has more to do with how people now regard religious extemists.

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, chose to study human evolution to explore group selection. Then he decided that religion could show it. There are costs to any individual of being religious—the time and resources spent on rituals, the effort devoted to following prescription, but the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others outweighed the costs.

Before these people ask how religion might have helped early humans survive and reproduce, they have to explain what some of these early people did that constituted religion. What was this thing that helped them survive? It cannot have just started for no reason. There is no answer. We just hear generalities like religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves, more sure of safety, and more replete with love and affection. The faithful were better at finding and storing food, and better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. Here is someone thinking of modern religion retrojected myriads of years into the past. This religion must have been supernatural because it just appeared small but perfectly formed at the birth of humanity.

What is true is that the same elements that we eventually split off into the distinct practice called religion made early groups more cohesive and united, but these elements at that stage were cultural. What was competing were different societies via culture, and incipient religion was part of it.

The gap that God now fills is that between the maladaptation of the ghosts and monsters we sometimes imagine threatening us, and modern rationality that shows they are merely our atavistic fears. Our instinctive response to the unknown is stronger than our reason, at least it is for many of us. The scientific study of the evolution of religion suggests that science can explain it, but the persistence of the institutions of religion stop us from properly countering our atavistic maladaptations by scientific discovery.

Higher and Lower Religion?

Decorating the Lingam

The drums are beating violently as he approaches, and wild music of strange sorts is issuing from the equally strange building before him. He is admitted—after he has taken off his shoes—and beholds a sight as extraordinary as is the noise that accompanies it. On the walls of the room are hideous images carved in stone and daubed in red paint, one representing a monkey, one a creature with a fat human belly and an elephant’s head, each with an offering of yellow marigolds before it, while in the most prominent place is a stone pillar, rounded off on the top, wet with the pouring of much Ganges water, bedaubed with spots of paint, and surrounded with green leaves, uncooked rice, a few coins and more yellow marigolds.

There are two priests in the corner, beating tom-toms, and by the pillar stands a third, daubing it with paint, pouring water over it, placing leaves upon it, and all the while mumbling words, many of them repetitions of mere names—to which no one seems to listen. The noise becomes louder, and the old priest seizes a lighted lamp and brandishes it about in front of the much bedaubed pillar, while the audience follow his motions with obvious excitement, and at the close of the hocus-pocus he distributes to them some of the rice which has been collected at the foot of the sacred object.

The performance has been utterly unintelligible to our visitor, but the most astonishing thing about it all is the attitude and aspect of the worshippers. For worshippers they indubitably are. Some of them have been standing, some kneeling, some are prostrate on their faces. Each one has made an offering before the bedrenched pillar or at the feet of the grotesque figures on the walls, and though some seem indifferent, many give unmistakable signs of reverence, and a few show in their faces, as they start homewards, that they have found in that preposterous transaction the same sort of inner treasure which our Protestant churchgoer may carry home with him on Sunday from his American meeting house.

Professor J B Pratt

A Village Mass

In a little village church in France in the month of June, I attended an early mass. So far as the outward ceremonies went, I saw the use of holy water, the stiff attitude of the sacerdotal ambassador of God, the ceremonial lights carried and waved about, the flowers in front of the statues garish with paint. I noted the muttered prayers, to which no one seemed to give much attention. I heard the nasal sing-song of a village choir led by a woman. There was a climax of prostration, and at the end a little boy walked round with a basket of pain beni, of which we all partook. As we came out, one saw the faces of the congregation, and some of them recalled to me the ancient passage in Exodus, that the face of Moses shone with a supernatural glow, as he came down from the mount of God.

Professor A C Bouquet

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