December marches on and everyone is focused on the best holiday of the year, you know presents in excess, drinking to excess, food to excess followed by more cold meat and pickle than you can shake a stick at. With the odd hang over and family fight thrown in for good measure obviously. The original reason for this frivolity, back in the day, was to celebrate the winter solstice, a pagan ritual; basically a bit of a party to say thank god we survived till now and any chance we could make it to spring please? Then along came Christianity and before you can say turkey and cranberry sandwiches they’d nicked it, moved it a week and got 3 clever blokes with posh presents involved. They started banging on about mangers, angels and shepherds with not a single flake of snow in sight.
All this because of the one true god rather than some plank of wood that looks like a crow, but why do we have gods, what purpose do they play? It really is much more straight forward than we make it today and I’d like to share it with you. I call it my practical guide to mythology, theology and gobbledygook.
In the beginning we were mere monkeys who picked our bums and the bugs off the backs of anyone that would have sex with us. Life was simple then; contentment was derived from blissful ignorance born of massages, cheap nookie and an abundance of fruit. Then one day evolution brought three ingredients together that would change things forever. Opposable thumbs, a big brain and a single word, WHY? (Not sure about the question mark, but you get the idea) From that day forward everything we did was driven by the need to know, the need to understand, explain and control. This is when the gods slipped quietly onto the scene and took control.
For your average caveman who could just about fashion crude flint tools knowledge was fleeting and without any kind of language or means of communication any inspirational leap in understanding or thought was lost when the hide clad genius was either eaten by a roving beast or when he drowned in the nearby lake. There were a lot of whys then and very few answers and to bridge that chasm of unknowing, people basically made it up, blaming everything on a strange magical higher power that controlled everything. The sun was a good start and it was worshipped and feared in equal measure.
For the next few millennia people all round the world started to learn some stuff, rudimentary cooking, looking after sheep and what berries not to eat, but they didn’t amount to that much. They continued to ask lots of whys. So we continued to make shit up and why not. Hey presto the gods took major control and religious dogma was just around the corner. We started to write bits and bobs down so we didn’t forget it, but if some bloke (women weren’t trusted) who looked vaguely clever, think Charlton Heston in a beard, said something that kind of sounded right people believed it to be so. If something else happened then it was blamed on the gods. Things often went badly and death and famine stalked the land like two large stalking things (yes, I know it's Blackadder but it’s a classic). So the gods were very busy. The unclean lived in fear and would do just about anything to stay in their local god’s good books and the more bizarre the better. Nothing like sacrificing a virgin or eating cow dung just in case.
Then in areas around the world pockets of clever people appeared, in China , India , Greece and Central America to name a few. On top of asking why people started to prove why. The people in charge didn’t like being questioned and they tried to stop people asking why. This simply didn’t work because some people would still ask why even if the devil was going to stick sharp objects in their butt for eternity. Sometimes this proof was embraced and sometimes it was seen as upsetting the gods, but it often turned out particularly nasty for someone in the piece, usually the so called non believer.
This was the sign of things to come and ever since science has battled religion for the hearts and minds of the masses. Reason versus faith, proof versus dogma. In the early days religion had the upper hand, but as the science improved so the need for faith has reduced. The gods had a big head start and it took a long time for common sense to catch up. The problem was the people running the religions usually ended up with all the money and so the power because people who were about to pop their clogs would do just about anything to get into heaven. Strangely enough no matter how many peasants you had slaughtered giving all your money to a church turned out to be the sure fire way. No surprise there, but what a great scam, no one came back to disprove you and the science lot couldn’t prove anything either. So faced with three options either, A) never ending agony with the devil roasting your wedding tackle over the fires of hell. B) Rotting in a box in the ground or C) eternal bliss with your every wanton desire serviced by half naked goddess' guess what people chose.
Gods were invented to help us explain the unexplainable, to slate the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the give us something to look forward to when we die. Nothing more than that, but like all good ideas it got completely out of hand because humans by nature are greedy, selfish and self-absorbed. These are basic animal instincts that should have been overcome by our civilisation, but I fear we have a ways to go yet
Next Religion ……
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