It seems humans have always looked for a God somewhere, and throughout history there have been successive believers calling themselves "prophets" who say they have the answers to everyone's questions.
(There have also always been people who don't believe in a higher power, but it seems those people were never interested in commanding giant empires, pretty much did their own thing...so we don't hear about them as much.)
I've been slowing combing through Karen Armstrong's beautiful book, The History of God, which throughly answers the question, "How did all these friggin' religions get here?" And, perhaps more importantly, meticulously examines this question: "If we overlay the history of religion onto the history of human civilization, what is the universal experience? What enlightenment are we all going for here, people?"
There are so many wonderful discoveries in this book, especially for someone like me who was never taught the history of any religion in its entirely. There are also a great many subjects covered, from Platonic Theory to How Mohammed Got His Groove Back. So I hope to do a series of posts examining the major themes and issues that come up for me along the way.
The first is as much about early humanity as it is about early worship. The picture Armstrong paints of this world is a thick soup of cultures possessing mostly pagan beliefs, gathered in the Middle East around 3000 BCE. In the product development of religion, there were commonalities in the basic needs:
- People want a moral code
- People want a just society
- People want clarity in their theology
- People want responsibility and meaning to their lives
- People want to be encouraged to address weaknesses and build strengths
These big goals have been put forth over and over again by various philosophers and seekers, not changing much since the dawn of humanity. This trend reiterates what remarkably keen and generous creatures humans are. They didn't necessarily need a belief in a higher power to survive, but they needed balance, stability, a through line, a reason to keep going and getting better.
A lot of these needs can be attributed to the terrible sadness of guilt, and guilt springs from a lack of personal dignity - the more miserable people are, the more they need a god to tell them there is a greater system in which they are a part. Education and employment in western civilization has led to greater innate personal dignity, which makes living in a godless world easier, because people with jobs and intellectual curiosity don't walk around hating themselves as much.
But the plebes of BCE were not so lucky. Imagine roughly 20 billion people who have only recently figured out how agriculture works. The heyday of Classical Greece and Roman Empire is still a ways off. These people needed to know what the point of it all was, stat.
But they didn't look for a war-mongering god. They looked for a god of compassion, and eventually the main one to emerge was Yahweh, and ultimately He became basically the same "One God" that the Jews, Christians and even Muslims acknowledged.
What these people sought (and let's remember, these are our ancestors we're talking about) was a reason for why they were so special, so creative, so dominant over other creatures of the earth, yet still so flawed, so capable of fear, weakness, stupid mistakes, losing their keys, never finding clean underwear...
It was a given that the world was terribly unfair, that horrible things went wrong, that there were strong people and weak people, which meant there were rich and poor. Equality - something so trumpeted in today's world - was never the goal. Justice was the goal. Compassion and justice towards less fortunate, so no strong person could take oppress the weak or dishonestly take advantage of their position.
From this comes the ancient practice of giving alms to the poor, and also having some kind of moral code, not just for personal use, but to make sure that if some egregious crime is committed, society would demand some kind of punishment or reparation without igniting endless blood feuds.
(It's funny, in history and art classes I would always be assigned a period to study and then would inevitably want to study the period preceding it - because the cause and effect is what is important - and writing about this pre-Greek period makes me understand why the Greeks were so amazingly cool - they just went ahead and established basic civilization as we know it, specifically in terms of justice and education.)
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| Ancient T-Shirt of Yahweh |
Among the many notions of God that sprang up during this period, the more notions of God become closer to man, the angrier and more hateful they become. The farther God is away from us, up in the skies or heavens or ineffable ether, the more compassionate and understanding he becomes.
It's also interesting to examine people's understanding of whether humans are innately good or evil. I have always thought that Christians preached humans as wretchedly evil therefore desperately need salvation. Whereas I was raised to think humans were the best thing ever. Now I'm not so sure.
What makes sense to me is the awareness that our potential as humans is phenomenal, and we are capable of immense beauty, kindness, heroism, all that; but that we are also terribly flawed, and no person will find lasting peace or success until they can acknowledge both their potential and also the obstacles that stand in their way. And standard education and rationality strives for correctness, for excellence, but rarely gives us tools to examine and heal our deepest flaws, blindspots, and scars.
However, I don't see how salvation gives us those tools, either.
While we argue about what tools to bring with us, what is undeniably beautiful about this quest for self-awareness is that rather than a perfect morality and achievement, we get a balance: a never-ending cycle of progress that will sustain us all our lives. It's a quest that sounds relatively simple in today's world, but in 1000 BCE it was an impressive path to take. How sad it is that, instead of a quest for balance and peace, religion would later become a quest for certainty, and war-torn borderline between people.
