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Friday, October 23, 2015

It's All About Power

We have had this problem before, you want to talk about religion, but you don't want to talk about the Bible, and now you don't want to talk about the Koran either. I made the statement, perhaps erroneously, that Christianity is the only religion that says "love you enemies". Later I backed off and admitted that the only two I was sure didn't say that were Judaism and Islam. Now you seem to be questioning whether anybody ever said "love your enemies", or that anybody even knew they had enemies. The only way to solve this is to look it up. You may or may not believe what it says, but at least you will know what it says. How can you decide whether or not you believe something until you know what it says?

I think the first time I came across the following was in "This Believing World" by Isaac Azimov, a book that I heard about from some guy I knew in high school: Early man formulated religion in an attempt to influence the forces of Nature, upon which he was so dependent. By appeasing the spirits, he hoped to improve his success in hunting and gathering, predicting the weather, healing the sick, and contending with his enemies. Early humans must have felt threatened by a host of things over which they had little control, so they appealed to the spirits to help them deal with those things.

A few years later, I read a book, the title of which I have forgotten, by Alfred Adler who, I believe, was a disciple of Sigmund Freud. Adler asserted that almost everything people do is motivated by their eternal quest for power. People like to control stuff, it's in their nature. Even when acting passively, people are trying to control someone or something indirectly. If they can't control it by force, they will try to control it by manipulation. Even running away from something is an effort to control it. If you can't remove the threat from your presence, you can remove your presence from the threat, which accomplishes the same thing.

Humans have always been both territorial and hierarchal. They like to control land and they like to control other people. If you want to control a lot of territory, you can't do it by yourself, so first you need to control some other people. Religion is one way to do that. You can only do so much with police power, to really control people you need to control their hearts and minds so they will obey your directives even when you or your enforcers are not around.

The early Hebrews might not have personally known anybody in the land of Canaan, but they certainly knew that the Canaanites were their enemies. You don't set out to dispossess and exterminate people who are your friends. If any of the Hebrews asked the question, "What did the Canaanites do to deserve what we are planning to do to them?", Moses explained that they have angered the God of Israel by worshiping false gods and committing unspeakable abominations. Without that kind of motivation, I doubt that the Hebrews would have busted out of Egypt and trekked across the desert to conquer a place that most of them couldn't have located on a map. To be fair, Moses was probably sincere in his own beliefs. If he didn't get them directly from God like it says in the Bible, he at least figured out that this was the best way to organize his people for their own good. If all he wanted was power and glory for himself, he could have stayed in Egypt where he was already pretty high up on the totem pole.

The Hebrews in the time of Moses probably didn't believe in life after death. They might have gotten some ideas about it from the Egyptians, but they believed that only the pharaoh was immortal. I'm not sure when the Hebrews started contemplating the possibility of immortality for regular people, but there was a substantial faction who were looking into that before Jesus came along. The Zoroastrians of Persia may have pioneered the concept of Heaven, Hell, and the Resurrection as early as 1,000 BC, and they had significant contact with the Hebrews a few centuries later. Whoever thought of it first, the belief in the immortality of the human soul was a quantum leap for religion. Now, instead of just influencing the harvest and the outcome of battles, people could aspire to overcome death itself. If that isn't the ultimate power trip, I don't know what is.

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