Origins of Organized Religion
The Shift Within: How We End Oppression and Divisiveness to Create Liberation and Indivisibility for All
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Origins of Organized Religion
The oldest evidence of organized religion, including temples, religious statues, and ritual sites, has been found in the Near East, dating back to around 11,000 years ago (9,000 BCE) in places such as Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. For the first approx 289,000 years of our existence as a species, our homo sapien ancestors did not practice religion as we now know it.
As power-over and patriarchy evolved and emerged more rapidly after the agricultural revolution social norms and language patterns emphasized male authority and that carried over to religion. This scripture from the New International Version of the Christian Bible provides an example: “Then a voice came from the throne, saying: "Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, both small and great!" - Revelations 19:5. In this scripture God is referred to as “he” and “him”. The Power-Over language found in this scripture includes “all you his servants” and “you who fear him”.
There is a chapter titled “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy” In the Pulitzer prize winning book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond that’s dedicated to the evolution of power-over and control dynamics being introduced into societies. A Kleptocracy is a government with leaders that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political powers. Diamond explains how the Agricultural Revolution created conditions for people to live sedentary for the first time.
The ability to settle & farm the land instead of living nomadic and hunting and gathering contributed to population growth and the subsequent need for new social systems to manage that growth. Prior to the agricultural revolution, most humans lived in nomadic Bands consisting of a few dozen people. Over time Bands evolved into tribes with hundreds of people, tribes evolved into chiefdoms with thousands of people, and chiefdoms evolved into states with 50,000+ people. The book explains how various social systems evolved to meet the demands of growth during each of these stages.
It was during the chiefdom stage that organized religion emerged as a means for chiefs and rulers to justify kleptocracy. In the chapter, Diamond lists four ways that the elites gained support while also maintaining a more comfortable lifestyle than the commoners.
Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute (food, labor, & eventually taxes) received, in popular ways like building infrastructure and places of worship.
Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence.
Construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.
Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as modern established religions do. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify the transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.
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