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Life Force
To investigate religion's roots it is necessary to go back in time, beyond that of Yahweh and monotheism, even beyond the Ancient Egyptians, Hindu Sanskrit, and indeed Chinese and Japanese philosophies.
Religion arrived when humanity found it was unable to understand the complexity of the surrounding natural environment.
When ancient man looked at the skies, he saw thunder and lightning, the rising sun, and also changes to the seasons. Trees and plants didn’t remain the same, poking through the soil, rising up, producing seed and fruit, and then, dying again. Ancient man saw a process, a whole cycle evolve and depart before his eyes. Initially he was fed and the environment tended to his needs. He may have needed to move, roam perhaps, the land falling dormant while the ‘gods’ rested in autumn and winter? Life returned again in spring; the ‘gods’ awakening after their time of rest.
Of course there were the good years, the years when there was much to be taken from the lands, seas and rivers. These good years often preceded or followed the bad years. This was strange, different, things never remaining the same. Something, someone must be the cause of these changes; there had to be all powerful beings or a being.
The good years were the years of abundance, and to the ancients, this must have been a time when the environment was pleased. The ‘gods’ were happy. There was enough for everyone, and there was a plentiful supply which could even be stored for times when there was little. Co-incidence could also have played its part. A rainstorm relieving a drought may have been ‘caused’ after someone was appeased; a good deed practiced, a dance performed, even the coincidental death of a person or animal transpiring prior to the relief of a dry period. Religion was beginning; the roots were waiting to be absorbed into the psyche of the mystified masses.
Next came the shamans, the sangomas, medicine men and the many other predictors. They were able to read the seasons, predict the future, see into the unknown in simple people’s faces. There were the stars, some of them moving across the sky, some of them falling towards earth, their bright lights with tails arriving and disappearing as the ‘gods’ came and went.
As the mysteries of nature unfolded before humanities developing thoughts, so the ‘gods’ arrived. They lived in animals, trees, dark places, the sky, mountain ranges; anywhere that could not be explained! With the birth of an evolving humanity, so came the birth of an evolving religion. There were angry gods, bolts of lightning and roaring thunder, there were loving gods, plants and animals. There were also miracle gods, gods that cured, gods that killed, and gods that needed sacrifice.
Religion and humanity are synonymous. Man has always looked to the heavens, and still does, even if some of us deny it.
Lewis J Rhodes 2011
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