Tyranny of Religion
By: Steve Raymond
The emergence of radical nationalist religious movements is a reaction to the diminishing prominence of religion in society. So this is a good time to begin the process of emancipating the world from the tyranny of religion, which has hindered creativity, stifled genius and demonized both natural instincts and pleasurable experiences for millennia.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist who has researched the origins of religious thought has concluded that religion began as "the shared reverence for the supernatural, sacred, or spiritual as well as the symbols, rituals, and worship that are associated with it". In other words, religion was the result of psychological mechanisms that evolved to fabricate rationales for ecological problems unrelated to the concept of religion.
From the time our species changed from being primarily hunter-gatherers until the time that the disciplines of science and psychology were developed, homo sapiens didn't have the knowledge that we have today. Our ancestors were unable to comprehend the reason for natural phenomena. They conceptualized that the natural world functioned for a reason and they wanted to know why things happened. Human knowledge was not sufficient to understand the reason for natural occurrences or human nature, so conspiracy theories were created as explanations. Combining the 'reverence' people had for natural occurrences with the sense of awe they had for possible imaginary spirits or supernatural beings, the stories connected invented spirits with explanations.
Those in leadership positions and the more intelligent of our species began to realize that by constructing awe-inspiring stories that would 'clarify' and give answers for the enigmas, they could use this 'wisdom' as a unifying force to manipulate the masses. Eventually, moral codes and ethics concepts were developed for each society, using the conspiracy theories as guidelines. As communities grew larger, legal systems and regulations were based on the contrived stories. This created cohesion within societies, unified groups of people, helped civilizations develop and communities grow larger. Eventually the development of writing allowed the conspiracy theories to not only endure as established values, but also to influence thinking for thousands of years and to spread throughout an increasingly interconnected world.
Because of the development script, fantastic fables such as the preposterous assertion that there is an invisible, undetectable intelligent all-knowing "god" controlling the universe have persisted for thousands of years. They have been influencing the way that people thought, acted and lived throughout recorded history. Moral codes that were developed as integral elements of these conspiracy theories further enhanced the ability of priests, kings, emperors and leaders of various societies to control their communities. Using religion to organize and then manipulate the masses in order to 'convert' or oppose another community or group of people based on a rulers' desires, his megalomania, or his own personal interpretation of a faith was commonplace. It is easy to take a group of empathetic people, 'educate' them to hold like-minded beliefs and then group them together and manipulate them.
However, by their very nature, religions that are used to unite groups of people are, at the same time responsible for the degradation of civil liberties. Throughout history, women have been the most affected and their civil liberties have been degraded the most by religions. When the natural world was a much more dangerous place than it is today. Women were subservient to men because males were physically stronger and considered to be the protectors, while the physically weaker gender was expected to give birth and then remain in the safety of their homes to nurture the children. Then when women's inferior status became an element of religious philosophies, legal systems were developed that enshrined misogyny. The reality of this philosophy is that domestic violence is rife in strongly religious cultures where women are not protected by governments or by the courts.
