Evo-Religion

The argument regularly comes up that humans have an innate desire to worship a god, thus there must be a god.

Sorry, but this logic may be flawed. I believe our desire to worship something comes from evolution. Okay, let's go back to, say, 30,000 years ago when humans were organizing into clans and tribes. A religion provided unity, continuity, and some sense of being for the tribe. This held them together and made them not only more efficient as a fighting force, but they also functioned as a more coherent group. The religion provided other benefits like order, structure, and enabled perpetuation of the group. Those wandering groups of homo sapiens who were not well organized through a religious order simply died out or were wiped out by competitive groups.

The Egyptians became the masters of using religion to create order and structure for their society. For an amazing several thousands of years their society changed little. When progressives pharaohs came along and tried to change the order or the religion, they were erased from history.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were long enamored with Egyptian civilization, and in fact, they both invaded the place. Through the contact with Egypt, their religious concepts and ideas permeated throughout the Mediterranean. Hmmm, controlling and providing order to society by using a deity is a GREAT IDEA!

Best of all, the deity, who can bring pleasure or pain, helps people to override their destructive human nature. If you piss off the deity you'll get punished, and if you make him or her happy, you'll get a reward. And, so, this helped make citizens behave, to an extent.

The Romans caught on quick and adopted Christianity as their official religion. Yeah, that's the religion that the Hebrews ripped from the Egyptians, and then the intellectual Greeks put their New Age spin to it. Yeah, real basic stuff -- if you're an evangelical Christian you just have to say a three sentence prayer and you go up to heaven, where you pet lions and sing hymns to God for a zillion years. If you're a little shit and refuse to say the prayer, you swim in a lake of fire with Hitler and a billion Muslims. Now, I remember when that river in Cleveland caught on fire in the 1970s — I suppose that's what hell will be like, except me and all the other people will be right in the middle of it. Yuck.

But I digress ... the point being is that the Roman Catholic Church is just like ancient Egyptian religion. Its function is to provide order and perpetuation. The purpose of perpetuation is to impose more order on we lawless and generally crappy human beings.

So, getting back to my point, religion evolved in our brains through Natural Selection, and when we stopped evolving, religion continued to evolve socially. A modern example of this are all the mega-churches popping around town. People got bored with traditional church services, with the stale hymns and the lady in the choir who always sang off-key. These new mega-churches provide live praise bands, multi-media, drama presentations, and even pyrotechnics! Yeah, serious. So, the organism, in order to perpetuate itself, has adapted to changing cultural trends. The beast feeds on that evolved desire to worship that some of us still have. And in turn, we feed the beast.

The end.