Fear Created the Gods

And they've been fucking us over ever since

The Bible is the work of several men saying it’s the Word of God. There could have been women involved in the process, but the men said no. Men have had a problem including women in things other than squeezing large people out of small orifices for some time now.

Out of all the fucked-up shit we did as a species, the way we treated women qualifies as most fornicated, because patriarchal bullshit oppressed half the population for almost all of history, with much room for improvement remaining. Overdoing the God stuff also ranks high.

There is little need for a scorecard. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics. Most of humanity has been screwed over by a merciless minority since a hairy smelly buff dude bashed the brains out of his rivals with a Wildebeest femur, declaring himself Penis Numero Uno of the cave and getting all the Daryl Hannah he desired. Ruthlessness and brutality combined with a yearning to control others often pays off; this survival-of-the-fittest-on-steroids reality has marred Homo sapiens’ path since troglodyte times.

We are a species that encoded the idea of “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing” into our genes. The stimulus-response nature of our biological being prompted us to keep engaging in that which generated a swift positive result, and to hell with anyone or anything that stood in our way. There are and have been plenty of nice people, but it’s often the meanest motherfuckers who make the rules . . . and make history. This stark reality led to humanity perpetuating a series of species-level failures that plagued our existence and doomed we bipeds to mediocrity on the precipice of self-destruction.

One of those perpetual failures involves we humans going way too hard on religion. This is a brief overview of how it fucked us as a species.

Fear created the first gods.

The skies opened in a terrible storm; lightning flashed, and thunder crashed. “What the shit was that?” someone exclaimed.

“The flashy-crashy gods are angered by our lack of babies. You must have sex with me to appease them.”

“. . .”

“For realz. Get naked or the sky spirits will strike you down.”

Someone bought that. And then later, as humanity gradually coalesced into larger and less nomadic groups, there was an eclipse or some shit and people lost their shit and some dude in fancy attire said only I can bring back the sun! But I need virgins! Lots and lots of virgins.

The lies we tell and believe are what make society. Shared fiction is the root of all civilization, and we began with the supernatural because we didn’t know the square root of fuck all about how things work. Our evolutionarily programmed propensity for being scared shitless made us seek answers about the hidden forces in the earth and sky, and “God did it” was always popular reasoning. Actually, it was “gods” first. Monotheism came later. The better the story, the more people bought into it. The more who accepted the fiction, the greater a source of power it became.

The beliefs led to rituals: prayers, songs, offerings, and sacrifices. Then the preachers began to create a system around these beliefs, a set of moral codes. These codes formed the basis of laws. The laws supported hierarchies. The substance of such codes varied wildly across civilizations. Some said, “Bacon is fantastic!” and others were all “Eating bacon is forbidden!” Certain cultures were easy going about sex, and others overly uptight about who was permitted to slide what appendage into which orifice. Humanity’s moral and legal codes may differ, but the existence of these codes is universal. All human societies create them. We create them. They are stories we made up that people chose to believe, a communal lie. We use them to compel, to control, so that we may form orderly societies that are secure and can grow. The ones that are most successful often conquer others, because life is competition.

The stories that dictate our behavior don’t have to make sense. They often contain contradictions and aren’t necessarily beneficial to the mass of society. Consider the rationalization for the nuclear arms race; sinking countless billions into a project designed to obliterate all life on Earth seems illogical no matter how you spin it. 

Humans are often dumber than a box of otter snot. Muddling through, coming up with stupid ass shit to form a society that screws over the majority to the benefit of a minority. All because that minority was able to profit from the telling of a convincing lie. Why are humans so susceptible to such fictions, and permit ourselves to be ruled by them? The answer is simple: myth is a bonding force. Shared stories allow us to work together in numbers far beyond what other hominids can accomplish. A troop of chimpanzees loses its cohesion once it reaches about 150 members. Humans built empires containing millions of subjects because enough people believed the hierarchical structure and mythology the empire imposed. There wasn’t a genetic instinct for such mass cooperation, it was communal fictions creating potent social links that bound civilizations together across land and ocean alike.

What kind of fictions? Beyond the obvious one about gods, consider the multiple times I’ve asked you to buy my book. You need money to purchase it, and money is some serious bullshit. We just made it up. If there is an apocalypse, you might as well wipe your ass with that paper in your wallet. The numbers in your bank account will be as real as the Easter Bunny, because the lies supporting your hoarded wealth will evaporate in the harsh reality of how much food, guns, ammo, and medicine you stashed in a bunker for when the zombies come for that tasty brain of yours.

Money, as much as I enjoy having it, is a fiction that impelled large groups to work together and subjugate peoples and planet. Spiritual coin can be spent as well. Religion, for all its ills, has shown itself to be a pervasive part of societal function. Supernatural comforts have often been more valued than natural aids to those facing massive inequality and rampant despair. To the lowest members of society God has given their lives meaning and even dignity because of their perceived solemn relationship with a higher power.

Napoleon Bonaparte referred to religion as “excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” He said it’s what prevents poor from murdering rich, an idea he took from famed author and philosopher of the French Enlightenment Voltaire, who wrote, “There is no god, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.” I remember a quirky old British history professor during my undergraduate days telling the class how the typical medieval peasant was far more concerned about getting into heaven than where their next meal was coming from.

None of this is fair.

We are not created equal. There are natural, biological inequalities among all creatures, and the struggle to survive is one of competition. Nature doesn’t care about the individual, only the species. Some are just better equipped for survival based on the luck of their genetic code. Inequality is not just inborn but has a tendency to exacerbate with the increasing complexity of a civilization. It was these genetic differences that first contributed to social inequalities. This isn’t perpetuating some “scientific racism” bullshit. Certain things were naturally selected early in humanity’s crawling out of the muck, including not just strength and speed, but creativity and intelligence. Fortuitous genetics coupled with a lot of random chance promoted the stratification of the species into rulers and ruled early on, and every new discovery or useful tool or invention was seized by those with the ability to do so to further elevate one group and subjugate another.

A good story is a powerful tool of subjugation. One hyper-muscled maniac with a penchant for killing wouldn’t rule the tribe for long if a prehistoric Poindexter convinced enough of his fellow troglodytes their leader had ghosts in his blood and the only way to appease the spirits was by spilling Gorak’s guts on the ground. Such competitions were all too common, because survival was at stake. It bred pugnacity and pride, acquisitiveness and alliance-making. History is the battle of minorities watched by majorities awaiting a victor to lead them; the innovative are followed by those who imitate, providing the labor to create a civilization.

To be powerful, to mold societal behavior, stories need to meet certain criteria. Simplicity is a must, because that makes it possible to get the masses to understand it. It can’t be easy to disprove either. Gorak has ghosts in his blood, but they’re invisible and speak only to me. Prove me wrong. It also must be told as an absolute truth. Muhammad didn’t conquer the Arabian Peninsula because he had a vague idea of some new monotheism called Islam. He spoke with certainty as the unequivocal prophet of God. The story must also have a contagious, evangelical quality to it; sometimes that evangelizing involved conquerors gesturing toward sharp implements of death that awaited reluctant converts.

After centuries of subjugation by the Roman Empire, Christianity came to eventually rule it because so many accepted the story. Religion and politics have often worked well together. With the preachers saying such and such leader is chosen by God, that leader in turn shared the wealth extracted from the peasants with the clergy in exchange for their support. The story also needs to hold people accountable and incentivize certain behaviors. Loyalty and conformity are valued and rewarded; disobedience to the morals and laws are shamed and punished. The system becomes ingrained in the culture and takes on a life of its own. Again, it’s all bullshit. It’s just stuff we made up that caught on and proved resilient to what the environment threw at it. For a time, at least. The myths evolve. Usually gradually, but sometimes via a rapid revolution.

It’s not just religious stories that are powerful bonding forces. It worked for Nazism, communism, and liberalism. In the thirteenth century the Magna Carta put forth the idea that kings were not in fact permitted to do whatever dafuq they pleased, but could be subject to the law. Five centuries later a group of American enslavers took it a step further by writing a Declaration of Independence proclaiming certain “unalienable Rights,” but only for white dudes. Unalienable Rights? The fuck are those? Objectively speaking, there are no such things. Evolution has no point, no purpose. Natural selection is a process.

People are not biologically equal. The tall person can pluck fruit from higher up in the tree than the short one can. Neither has a “right” to that fruit, it’s just about physical ability. If you want to discuss rights, you must invent a set of rules and get lots of buy-in. If the tribe is mostly short folks, they can coerce or cajole the tall ones into sharing that fruit. They can make it law that tall people are fruit pickers who must give it to the short people. It’s not a physical law of the universe like gravity or thermodynamics, rather just another human fiction.

The earliest orders may have been determined via a battle of titans, both physical and intellectual, winning followers to their sides, but such biological meritocracies turned to feces in short order. Once the hierarchy was in place, inheritance became important, because I don’t want some other dude’s crotch goblin getting the benefits of my hard work. Hereditary titles are a shit system of governance; before long we had brainless fuckpuddles running kingdoms into the ground while ruling over potential Curies and Dardens and Einsteins who were forced to toil each day at mindless tasks, told it was their lot in life.

The systems created by myths work because they have true believers, adherents ready to spread the gospel and enforce the rules. But even though these methods of cooperation are often oppressive and exploitative, they persist. One thing that helped them survive was that even those lower in the pecking order, compared to their ancestors, often benefited from the new establishment. Empires brought stability, communal languages, and the sharing and spreading of useful ideas and technologies. In a prior age a region could be full of small tribes that often warred with one another, but a conqueror brought them all together as one, more or less. It sucked for the conquered, but generations later there were often improvements in society that resulted, even though the process of creating the empire was often unnecessarily cruel, even genocidal.

We are living in the most peaceful era in human history, but countless millions died violently and billions more were brutally subjugated to bring it about. There is still plenty of war, but comparatively speaking for the entirety of the species, you’re less likely to die a violent death now than at any other time that has come before.

All societies across time discriminate in some way. Some are worse than others, but classification of peoples into rulers and ruled, with levels in between, based purely on imaginary reasoning, seems critical to a functioning human civilization. And once in place, the system reinforces itself because those on top have access to the resources to keep themselves there, and those on the bottom are kept hungry and ignorant with little or no path to rising to a superior level in the hierarchy. For much of history many didn’t even consider attempting to change their station. The story they were told was that God put them there and they better suck it up or face eternal hellfire or some shit. A lot of effort goes into reinforcing the hierarchy, via both myth repetition and force, because those on top have much to lose.

There is evidence that some religion is good and has served as a binding force that has actually helped to create peace, despite all the wars it also started, by giving societies shared myths and values to bind them together. Religion has the power to turn hundreds of small, constantly combative tribes into a single large tribe that is less likely to fight amongst itself because of their communal beliefs. Then Prophet Muhammad dies and his son-in-law and father-in-law squabble over the Muslim leadership and things go to shit again. Or, on Halloween of 1517 Martin Luther says, “Treat or treat, motherfuckers!” and (allegedly) nails a list to the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg detailing ninety-five reasons the Catholic Church can eat a bag of shit. This launches numerous wars causing millions of deaths.

Humanity trends toward unity, which is a good thing because once unified we fight less and compare notes and work together for both societal and technological advancement. Ironically, religion helped create the unity that promoted scientific knowledge that disproved a multitude of religious beliefs.

Alas, despite ample progress in loosening religion’s iron grip on various cultures, we still have people murdering unbelievers and dropping bombs on civilians and denying science and saying women aren’t allowed sovereignty over their own bodies.

All history is the history of thought. By understanding the thinking that has gone into repeating this mistake of putting far too much faith in non-existent deities, we can progress toward making the mistake less often, and perhaps surviving and even thriving as a species that is worthy of the name Homo sapiens.

Perhaps one day we will become wise humans.

Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teach who says “fuck” a lot. Get my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.

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