V.1               From Origins to Organized Religion
 
To understand a religion is to learn its origins and development over time. But more importantly, to evaluate is to know what is practiced rather than what is preached.
                                                                      This writer
 
Rather than its being the case that understanding religion requires belief, understanding religion, in a genuine way, is incompatible with believing it. Moreover, this secular understanding can be a sensitive empathetic understanding attuned (as Durkheim thought it must be) to the realities of religious experience and sentiment.                                                              Kai Nielson (b.1926)  
 
The mind will always create morality, religion, and mythology, and empower them with emotional force. The mental processes of religious belief represent programmed predispositions incorporated into the neural apparatus of the brain by thousands of years of genetic evolution. As such they are powerful, ineradicable and at the center of human social existence.
                                                    Edward O. Wilson (b.1929)
 
Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
                                              William O. Douglas (1898-1980)
 
A person's psychological makeup affects his or her religious experience, and that experience is best evaluated in terms of its moral quality.
                                                   William James (1842-1910)
 
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
                                                                  Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
 
Religious texts, though held sacred by believers, do not readily yield ethics or morality because they endorse both right and wrong conduct. Hence, inferences from these texts are no better than the ethical skills one brings to the task of interpretation.
                                                                       This writer
 
 
Introduction
A. About Religion in General
B. How Did Religious Beliefs Originate?
C. How Did Organized Religions Evolve?
 
Introduction
Since faith helps many to cope with life and often encourages humane ideals, it is my objective, here and elsewhere, not to criticize supernatural beliefs of any religion or spiritual tradition for the sake of making adverse comments. However, when belief systems serve to subjugate, intimidate, deceive, exploit, and dehumanize, then it would be intellectually dishonest and morally indefensible not to point this out.
 
A.  About Religion in General
Religion is a world power, but it is not a universally good thing. It offers life-coping explanations and hope for a better next life. However, organized religion has a long history of cruel, self-serving actions such as coercing and killing "unbelievers," legitimizing the exploiting powerful, oppressing women, and indoctrinating children, imprisoning free thought, and terrorizing the mind. In contrast, genuine religion (see Forberg's definition and Kant's maxim in Intellectual Giants Critique Religion) has always been practiced by enlightened individuals of all backgrounds. It is the natural desire of a humane mind that the true, the good, and the beautiful shall be victorious and triumph over the false, the wicked, and the ugly. It follows that we must examine organized religion for the benefit of everybody as well as for religion itself.
How should religion be scrutinized?
It should be based on the best of human rationality and knowledge. That is, it should be science based and proceed in the tradition of the philosophy of religion. This tradition examines religious truth claims from the perspective of philosophy. It does not take for granted the truth of any religious beliefs. Instead, it attempts to give naturalistic or scientific explanations for what may be natural human experiences and constructs of the mind.
It should not be faith based because most, if not all, religions have creation and developmental accounts that they claim were revealed by some higher authority such as God, gods, or goddesses. These accounts contain foundational assumptions, beliefs, and doctrines that are accepted as true but not verifiable. For instance, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions assume the existence of their version of God. Buddhism and Hinduism accept as true the Law of Karma.
It should start at the beginning with religious-like behavior. For an accurate single chronology of cannot be established because they evolved differently in various regions of the world. However, we have a good idea how religion developed from contemporary studies of so-called "primitive" cultures and historical evidence such as language and writings. Moreover, the earliest evidence archeology provides seems to furnish evidence of what communal groups must have been like as long as 60,000 years ago.
 
What is religion?
  • Although religion is a universal phenomena, it takes on a multitude of outward appearances. Adherents may worship a single god, many gods, goddesses or the idea of god(s) may be completely absent. Moreover, god may be thought of as a person or not as a person. Believers may practice praying, meditation, or rituals in a solitary or community setting.
  • Religion, as a minimum ingredient, must claim things, beings, forces, or events that cannot be subject to verification by the senses or the extended senses, instruments. This is so because if they would be testable, then they would fall in the domain of the sciences and could be shown to be true or false.
  • Another feature that is probably common to all religions is a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane (see below). The sacred is anything that is regarded as part of the supernatural or spiritual rather than the ordinary world. It arouses awe, reverence, and deep respect. Also, anything could be considered sacred: a variety of gods, texts, revelations, symbols such as a cross, a person, geographical features such as rocks, mountains, valleys, rivers, or even objects in the sky such as the sun or the moon.
  • Moreover, the sacred is usually approached through rituals. Rituals are formal, stylized proceedings such as prayer, incantation, or ceremonial purifications.
  • The sacred is often contrasted with the profane (the mundane, secular, this worldly). The profane is anything that is regarded as part of the ordinary rather than the supernatural or spiritual world.
What is the minimum requirement for an enduring religion?
It is the declaration that spiritual (immaterial, disembodied) beings, forces or worlds exist. Moreover, the devout often claim to have inner experiences with what they believe is a spiritual reality. These supernatural, outside the natural world, claims often include miracles, divine revelations, and divinely inspired texts. These claims are substantially disconnected from the empirical world, that is, they are non-scientific. Hence, these claims cannot be proven false. This appears to be one major factor why some religions endure.
 
What basic human needs does religion generally satisfy?
Besides physical safety and material needs, humans also need psychological security. That is, they need answers to questions raised by their curious minds:
  • Who are we?
  • How should we live?
  • Where does it all come from?
  • What is the meaning of life?
  • Where does morality come from?
  • Who has moral authority?
  • How can we achieve justice (all get what they deserve)?
  • Why is there so much evil?
  • Why do the innocent have to suffer?
  • Does God or gods exist?
  • If higher powers exist, how may I earn their help or favors?
  • What may we expect after life as we know it is over?
  • How may I obtain a happy afterlife (in heaven)?
  • How may I procure a better life through reincarnation (here on earth)?
  • How may I reach a state of perfect blessedness (nirvana)?
  • Is there a true ultimate belief, and how may I find it?
Also, an apparently ingrained feeling of dependence and reliance upon some higher power is experienced by many. And though probably learned, it is probably the strongest motivating force to be religious, that is, being bound to the doctrines of one's religion. Moreover, their belief is fortified by the presence of this higher power or God experienced subjectively when the believer prays or meditates. 
The world religions have explanations that originated in ancient, pre-scientific times. Although not obvious, these answers also entailed the means for social control, that is, they had to be acceptable by rulers and the ruled. Acceptance by the ruled was often accomplished with brute force until the means became a tradition.
  • They blame the victims of historical circumstances, or exploitation by others, for their own misfortune. For example, the dogma of original sin in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition and the law of Karma in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition.
  • At the same time, these concepts also legitimize the undeserved winners of historical circumstances and exploitation. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic system, it is simply argued that everybody should stay in their by God ordained place and with theirs as it happens to be on top. And in the Hindu-Buddhist religions, those on top claim that they simply enjoy what they have earned in a prior life according to the law of Karma--you reap (in this life) what you sowed (in a prior life). You "reap what you sow" is also mentioned in the Bible.
Still another, though evil, benefit of religion is that it provides the means to override an individual's  scruples or conscience when it is deemed necessary to act atrociously for the good of the faith, country, or individual. The monotheistic religions (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) are particularly good at this.  For example, the Israelites had no scruples when in the name of God, they exterminated entire nations (see Judaism in The Most Influential World Religions). Also, the Christian nations had no qualms when they decimated the people of their colonies, enslaved the survivors, and destroyed their cultures while imposing their religion. Moreover, Islam was initially also spread by the sword to impose its faith and culture while destroying the faith and culture of others, for instance, Zoroastrianism. And Hinduism's caste system enslaved most of the indigenous population of India for millennia.
Why examine religions?
To reiterate, because religious moral guidance and views of what is "best" still dominate the minds of the multitude. For them, supernatural claims, hopes, and explanations are a source of considerable help and comfort. Many of these beliefs rest on subjective evaluations of both natural phenomena and personal experiences. Being subjective makes them difficult to be appraised or verified scientifically. To the many, religious belief, true or false and verifiable or not, appear to be an indispensable aid to a tranquil life and the key to avoid chaos of consciousness. However, the faithful have often been deceived and exploited with the help of self-serving religious guidance and views. Hence, one must examine religious claims and expose those that have pernicious consequences. 

Is There Such a Thing as Intelligent Belief and Unbelief?

Believers should accept that intelligent belief requires that they not be credulous. For instance, over half of humanity believes that a supernatural creator originated this world with humans in his or her image. It follows that rather than accepting metaphor and tradition, believers have a sacred duty to learn about and accept "general revelation," namely, this creator's most original work or text, the natural world.

     However, this learning will reflect his or her image only if they do it humanely, that is, utilizing the best qualities humans are capable of. These are objectivity and intellectual honesty in the search for truth, and compassion when interpreting findings toward rules of social conduct and relations.

Unbelievers, on the other hand, should tolerate and respect this variety of life-coping beliefs as long as they do not interfere with the well-being of the believer, other individuals, or the group. A distinction must be made between the individual believer and an all-to-often ill-motivated, self-serving hierarchy of a religion.

     The individual's naturally evolved "moral" sentiment and potential for acquiring culture's rules of conduct are the real foundation of the community,  Moreover, since unbelievers have to interact with believers, they should learn about religions' origins, development, and what faith, the often unquestioned belief that does not require scientific proof or evidence, means to the believer.

B.                        How Did Religious Beliefs Originate?
The short answer is to cope with life, to satisfy inquiring minds, and to exercise social control by a few over the many:
  • They needed a simple explanation of life and the world  to avoid chaos of consciousness.
  • They needed relief from existential anxieties for as Schopenhauer (1788-1860) observed:
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
  • They needed a moral ideal and therefore created gods and supernatural forces in their own moral image. Hence, morality existed prior to religion and is also observable among non-human primates to a degree.
  • They needed assurance that justice will be served if not in this life, then in the next.
  • They needed hope for immortality to endure life that was pointlessly "solitaire, nasty, brutish, and short."
  • They, the few who ruled among them, needed extra help in form of a belief system to control the many.
  • They needed excuses to maintain a tranquil conscience when greed and competition for survival required cruel acts such as exploiting, enslaving, robbing, raping, and killing of innocent others. For instance, as recorded in their scriptures, the "God-approved" cruelties of the Hebrews against their neighbors are classical examples. However, like-justified cruelties have been committed by all the world religions with the possible exception of Buddhism.
  • Finally, they needed specialists, priests, who then claimed to control access to God, forgive sins and crimes on His behalf, and maintained that prayers and sacrifices are meritorious acts that incline God to grant favors. If the wishes remain unfulfilled, the faithful are told that their prayers and sacrifices were insufficient.
Modern humans (homo sapiens) appeared approximately 200,000 years ago. And until about 12,000 years ago they lived in small groups (perhaps 25-125) as hunters and gatherers. They had large brains that had evolved like everything else because it gave them a competitive advantage over other animals. But they also had to compete within their own group with social skills made possible by a large brain. The large brain may have evolved because it allowed better social survival skills--the socially fittest produced more offspring. At least this is to date the most plausible explanation. Apparently, language that allowed higher forms of thinking evolved simultaneously or sometime later.
     Now, with the extra thinking capacity of a large brain:
  1. Most certainly, humans could better communicate, plan for the future, and most importantly, they could pass on culture to succeeding generations.
  2. Also, humans had become aware of themselves, that is, the individual's self-recognition and conscious experience, as stored in memory, of a distinct, personal identity that is separate from all other people and things. In humans, thus, the universe had become conscious of itself together with an answer-demanding, immense curiosity.
  3. And besides the world of conscious sense experiences, there was for them another world, for they did not clearly distinguish between the waking and the dreaming state. In the dreaming state they could meet family members and friends which had died some time ago. Moreover, they could be in touch with spiritual beings and forces unseen or known in the waking world. To them it was clear, there was more to this world than what their waking senses could experience.
  4. And when they thought about the environment and the natural forces they experienced, they did not understand and started to ask questions. But there were no ready answers. However, answers they desperately needed to avoid chaos of consciousness.
  5. And when survival depended on competition for scarce resources, such as life-supporting land, required them to kill other humans, religion provided justifications so that it could be done while maintaining a tranquil conscience. For example, Gods chosen people being ordered to exterminate unbelievers.
  6. And unable to conceive of impersonal natural laws, they filled this knowledge gap with a multitude of mythologies, spirits and gods. There were creation myths and epics, forces and gods in charge of almost everything from rain, thunder and lightning to the fertility of their women and later of the crops in the field. They believed that everything is alive; that spirits are in all things, or that all things have souls. Moreover, they accepted that spirits or souls were the cause of all life including their own. These entities, particularly in humans, would continue to exist after the body perishes and could be experienced in meditations, dreams and trances.
  7. And these animistic and polytheistic forerunners of today's religions sometimes included ancestor and nature worship. Totemism was probably the least connected belief system to today's religions. Here an animal or other natural object was thought of as ancestrally related to a given group. This totem was often kept as a companion and helper with supernatural powers, and as such it is honored and occasionally revered.
  8. And archaeology disclosed the huge magnitude of the cultures and civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Syrian-Palestine as well as a large quantity of inscriptions. as one researcher observed: "the magnitude proves to be a conglomeration of temple cultures devised to pacify the anger of the Unknown. The Unknown, represented by idolatry and polytheism, confronts and threatens human self with arbitrary destinies and fates leading to cruel, merciless misfortunes and death. This complex of destiny and fate has obsessed not only the Near East but also the whole world past and present. It has indispensably given rise to temple culture that is characteristic of the whole globe."
  9. Concerning ancient gods: The "Venus of Willendorf" is a limestone figurine about 24,000 to 26,000 years old. The exaggerated sex organs and apparent pregnancy could indicate that it was the symbol of a fertility goddess. Many figures with like characteristics have been unearthed between Russia and France. b) A Sumerian clay tablet in the language of cuneiform script from ca. 2,400 BCE list Sumerian deities in order of seniority, Enlil, Ninlil, Enki, Nergal, Hendursanga, Inanna-Zabalam, Ninebgal, Inanna, Utu, Nanna. c) Early in the 21st century a temple with the names of about 20,000 gods was unearthed in what is now Iraq. The large number of gods came about when a conquered people were forced to accept the gods of the victors but were allowed to retain their gods.
To summarize. There appears to be no specific instinct for religious belief in general or for a particular belief such as in only one single god, monotheism. However, as Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) suggests, there is a universal need of the human mind to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. The primary instinct involved appears to be the need for tranquility of consciousness and conscience being achieved thru physical and emotional security as well as explanations for the bewildering events of life such as birth, sickness, suffering, death, and a variety of humanly and naturally caused calamities. But as far as religion is concerned, we are all born areligious, that is, unconcerned with or indifferent to religious matters. Religion is primarily acquired from the tradition of a culture according to and largely determined by a person's geographical location.
 
C.                       How Did Organized Religions Evolve? 
             "Believing is easier than thinking; hence, more believers than thinkers." 
Until about 12,000 years ago, before humans learned to domesticate plants and animals, they subsisted in small groups. Their curiosity was satisfied with mythologies and animistic as well as polytheistic beliefs as told by their usually part-time shaman, witchdoctor or medicine man. The agricultural revolution, then, facilitated larger communities, the division of labor, and eventually civilizations with full-time rulers. Moreover, the part-time spiritualists were now replaced with full-time priests. 
  • And the diversity of religious beliefs by various groups within larger communities and tribal associations often caused discord and infighting. Therefore, the rulers ordered their priests to come up with a belief system that would unite while firmly supporting the rulers on top, the priests second, and the rest at the bottom. The new creed would then be imposed on all subjects by friendly persuasion, but more often with the sword as in the case of the most successful world religions.
  • And the priests came up with well-organized, complex belief systems that would have answers to all the cosmological and existential questions as well as guides and justification for practices. Furthermore, it would show that everybody had a divinely ordained, or prior life earned, station in life. It just so happened that the divine or royal rulers', their families' and friends' as well as the priests' station was on top while the rest was at the bottom. To this day, it is used as a justification for people who would start at the bottom and usually stay there.
  • And, of course, the priests did not just "come up" with something. Instead, they claimed it was revealed to them by a god or gods who often dwelled in another world. Prior to the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago, this knowledge was orally transmitted from generation to generation. Subsequently, it was recorded in sacred scriptures by writers who it was claimed were inspired or guided by higher powers. A most influential culture with an orally transmitted tradition were the Indo-Europeans.
  • And today's world religions were written down between 1,300 and 2,200 years ago. This enshrined and sanctified the teachings almost permanently but led to a major loss of flexibility and lack of adaptation to new realities and insights. This necessitated the practice of eisegetical interpretation of scriptures. It expresses the interpreter's own ideas, bias, or the like, rather than the meaning of the text. The eisegete says "the scriptures say . . . . This means stating his idea. . . . Thus by reading his own ideas into the text, he gets them back, and passes them on, endowed with authority.
The Seminal Significance of the Proto-Indo-European Religion
The Indo-Europeans were a group of people who lived from about 4,500 BCE in an area around the Black Sea, that is, between south-east Europe and Asia. Their existence is inferred from the super-family of Proto-Indo-European languages. Major subgroups include the Germanic L. (English, German, etc.), Italic L. (Latin, thus, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.), Greek L., and the Indo-Iranian L. (Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, etc.) consisting of over 300 languages spoken by about 1,000 million people.
     As the map below indicates, these Indo-Europeans migrated from their original area from ca. 4,000 to 1,000 BCE according to the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis. The purple area corresponds to the assumed original home. The red area corresponds to the area which may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to ca. 2500 BCE; the orange area to 1000 BCE.    
Map of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BCE
(Diagram source: Wikipedia)
 
A study of the myths, deities and religious customs of the dispersed Indo-European people indicates origins from a common Proto-Indo-European religion and mythology. Of course, there may have been a parallel development, but the best evidence is the existence of cognate (derived from the same source) words and names in those Indo-European tongues.
     It appears that this ancestral religion was the source of pre-Christian religions in Europe, of the Dharmic* (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) religions in India, and of Zoroastrianism in Iran. Religion was sustained by a class of priests or shamans subordinate to a tribal king who may also have been the high priest. There were four classes, the royal, the clerical, the warriors, and the peasants. Historical Indo-European religions also had priestesses, either as temple prostitutes, dedicated virgins, or oracles.
*The theology and philosophy of Dharmic Religions center on the concept of Dharma, a Sanskrit term for "fixed decree, law, duty", especially in a spiritual sense of "natural law, reality".
 
Ancient anthropomorphic Ukrainian stone stela (Kernosovka stela), possibly depicting a late Proto-Indo-European god, most likely Dyeus. (Picture source: Wikipedia)