The Urantia Book
PAPER 86
EARLY EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
Presented by an Evening Star of Nebadon.
86:0.1 THE evolution of religion from the
preceding and primitive worship urge is not dependent on
revelation. The normal functioning of the human mind under the
directive influence of the sixth and seventh mind-adjutants of
universal spirit bestowal is wholly sufficient to insure such
development.
86:0.2 Man's earliest prereligious fear of the
forces of nature gradually became religious as nature became
personalized, spiritized, and eventually deified in human
consciousness. Religion of a primitive type was therefore a
natural biologic consequence of the psychologic inertia of
evolving animal minds after such minds had once entertained
concepts of the supernatural.
1. CHANCE: GOOD LUCK AND BAD LUCK
86:1.1 Aside from the natural worship urge,
early evolutionary religion had its roots of origin in the human
experiences of chance -- so-called luck, commonplace happenings.
Primitive man was a food hunter. The results of hunting must
ever vary, and this gives certain origin to those experiences
which man interprets as good luck and bad luck.
Mischance was a great factor in the lives of men and women who
lived constantly on the ragged edge of a precarious and harassed
existence.
86:1.2 The limited intellectual horizon of the
savage so concentrates the attention upon chance that luck
becomes a constant factor in his life. Primitive Urantians
struggled for existence, not for a standard of living; they
lived lives of peril in which chance played an important role.
The constant dread of unknown and unseen calamity hung over
these savages as a cloud of despair which effectively eclipsed
every pleasure; they lived in constant dread of doing something
that would bring bad luck. Superstitious savages always feared a
run of good luck; they viewed such good fortune as a certain
harbinger of calamity.
86:1.3 This ever-present dread of bad luck was
paralyzing. Why work hard and reap bad luck -- nothing for
something -- when one might drift along and encounter good luck
-- something for nothing? Unthinking men forget good luck --
take it for granted -- but they painfully remember bad luck.
86:1.4 Early man lived in uncertainty and in
constant fear of chance -- bad luck. Life was an exciting game
of chance; existence was a gamble. It is no wonder that
partially civilized people still believe in chance and evince
lingering predispositions to gambling. Primitive man alternated
between two potent interests: the passion of getting something
for nothing and the fear of getting nothing for something. And
this gamble of existence was the main interest and the supreme
fascination of the early savage mind.
86:1.5 The later herders held the same views
of chance and luck, while the still later agriculturists were
increasingly conscious that crops were immediately influenced by
many things over which man had little or no control. The farmer
found himself the victim of drought, floods, hail, storms,
pests, and plant diseases, as well as heat and cold. And as all
of these natural influences affected individual prosperity, they
were regarded as good luck or bad luck.
86:1.6 This notion of chance and luck strongly
pervaded the philosophy of all ancient peoples. Even in recent
times in the Wisdom of Solomon it is said: "I returned and saw
that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
neither bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding,
nor favor to men of skill; but fate and chance befall them all.
For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net,
and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men
snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them."
2. THE PERSONIFICATION OF CHANCE
86:2.1 Anxiety was a natural state of the
savage mind. When men and women fall victims to excessive
anxiety, they are simply reverting to the natural estate of
their far-distant ancestors; and when anxiety becomes actually
painful, it inhibits activity and unfailingly institutes
evolutionary changes and biologic adaptations. Pain and
suffering are essential to progressive evolution.
86:2.2 The struggle for life is so painful
that certain backward tribes even yet howl and lament over each
new sunrise. Primitive man constantly asked, "Who is tormenting
me?" Not finding a material source for his miseries, he settled
upon a spirit explanation. And so was religion born of the fear
of the mysterious, the awe of the unseen, and the dread of the
unknown. Nature fear thus became a factor in the struggle for
existence first because of chance and then because of mystery.
86:2.3 The primitive mind was logical but
contained few ideas for intelligent association; the savage mind
was uneducated, wholly unsophisticated. If one event followed
another, the savage considered them to be cause and effect. What
civilized man regards as superstition was just plain ignorance
in the savage. Mankind has been slow to learn that there is not
necessarily any relationship between purposes and results. Human
beings are only just beginning to realize that the reactions of
existence appear between acts and their consequences. The savage
strives to personalize everything intangible and abstract, and
thus both nature and chance become personalized as ghosts --
spirits -- and later on as gods.
86:2.4 Man naturally tends to believe that
which he deems best for him, that which is in his immediate or
remote interest; self-interest largely obscures logic. The
difference between the minds of savage and civilized men is more
one of content than of nature, of degree rather than of quality.
86:2.5 But to continue to ascribe things
difficult of comprehension to supernatural causes is nothing
less than a lazy and convenient way of avoiding all forms of
intellectual hard work. Luck is merely a term coined to cover
the inexplicable in any age of human existence; it designates
those phenomena which men are unable or unwilling to penetrate.
Chance is a word which signifies that man is too ignorant or too
indolent to determine causes. Men regard a natural occurrence as
an accident or as bad luck only when they are destitute of
curiosity and imagination, when the races lack initiative and
adventure. Exploration of the phenomena of life sooner or later
destroys man's belief in chance, luck, and so-called accidents,
substituting therefor a universe of law and order wherein all
effects are preceded by definite causes. Thus is the fear of
existence replaced by the joy of living.
86:2.6 The savage looked upon all nature as
alive, as possessed by something. Civilized man still kicks and
curses those inanimate objects which get in his way and bump
him. Primitive man never regarded anything as accidental; always
was everything intentional. To primitive man the domain of fate,
the function of luck, the spirit world, was just as unorganized
and haphazard as was primitive society. Luck was looked upon as
the whimsical and temperamental reaction of the spirit world;
later on, as the humor of the gods.
86:2.7 But all religions did not develop from
animism. Other concepts of the supernatural were contemporaneous
with animism, and these beliefs also led to worship. Naturalism
is not a religion -- it is the offspring of religion.
3. DEATH -- THE INEXPLICABLE
86:3.1 Death was the supreme shock to evolving
man, the most perplexing combination of chance and mystery. Not
the sanctity of life but the shock of death inspired fear and
thus effectively fostered religion. Among savage peoples death
was ordinarily due to violence, so that nonviolent death became
increasingly mysterious. Death as a natural and expected end of
life was not clear to the consciousness of primitive people, and
it has required age upon age for man to realize its
inevitability.
86:3.2 Early man accepted life as a fact,
while he regarded death as a visitation of some sort. All races
have their legends of men who did not die, vestigial traditions
of the early attitude toward death. Already in the human mind
there existed the nebulous concept of a hazy and unorganized
spirit world, a domain whence came all that is inexplicable in
human life, and death was added to this long list of unexplained
phenomena.
86:3.3 All human disease and natural death was
at first believed to be due to spirit influence. Even at the
present time some civilized races regard disease as having been
produced by "the enemy" and depend upon religious ceremonies to
effect healing. Later and more complex systems of theology still
ascribe death to the action of the spirit world, all of which
has led to such doctrines as original sin and the fall of man.
86:3.4 It was the realization of impotency
before the mighty forces of nature, together with the
recognition of human weakness before the visitations of sickness
and death, that impelled the savage to seek for help from the
supermaterial world, which he vaguely visualized as the source
of these mysterious vicissitudes of life.
4. THE DEATH-SURVIVAL CONCEPT
86:4.1 The concept of a supermaterial phase of
mortal personality was born of the unconscious and purely
accidental association of the occurrences of everyday life plus
the ghost dream. The simultaneous dreaming about a departed
chief by several members of his tribe seemed to constitute
convincing evidence that the old chief had really returned in
some form. It was all very real to the savage who would awaken
from such dreams reeking with sweat, trembling, and screaming.
86:4.2 The dream origin of the belief in a
future existence explains the tendency always to imagine unseen
things in the terms of things seen. And presently this new
dream-ghost-future-life concept began effectively to antidote
the death fear associated with the biologic instinct of
self-preservation.
86:4.3 Early man was also much concerned about
his breath, especially in cold climates, where it appeared as a
cloud when exhaled. The breath of life was regarded as
the one phenomenon which differentiated the living and the dead.
He knew the breath could leave the body, and his dreams of doing
all sorts of queer things while asleep convinced him that there
was something immaterial about a human being. The most primitive
idea of the human soul, the ghost, was derived from the
breath-dream idea-system.
86:4.4 Eventually the savage conceived of
himself as a double -- body and breath. The breath minus the
body equaled a spirit, a ghost. While having a very definite
human origin, ghosts, or spirits, were regarded as superhuman.
And this belief in the existence of disembodied spirits seemed
to explain the occurrence of the unusual, the extraordinary, the
infrequent, and the inexplicable.
86:4.5 The primitive doctrine of survival
after death was not necessarily a belief in immortality. Beings
who could not count over twenty could hardly conceive of
infinity and eternity; they rather thought of recurring
incarnations.
86:4.6 The orange race was especially given to
belief in transmigration and reincarnation. This idea of
reincarnation originated in the observance of hereditary and
trait resemblance of offspring to ancestors. The custom of
naming children after grandparents and other ancestors was due
to belief in reincarnation. Some later-day races believed that
man died from three to seven times. This belief (residual from
the teachings of Adam about the mansion worlds), and many other
remnants of revealed religion, can be found among the otherwise
absurd doctrines of twentieth-century barbarians.
86:4.7 Early man entertained no ideas of hell
or future punishment. The savage looked upon the future life as
just like this one, minus all ill luck. Later on, a separate
destiny for good ghosts and bad ghosts -- heaven and hell -- was
conceived. But since many primitive races believed that man
entered the next life just as he left this one, they did not
relish the idea of becoming old and decrepit. The aged much
preferred to be killed before becoming too infirm.
86:4.8 Almost every group had a different idea
regarding the destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed
that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades as a
fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust
specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows. The early
Andites thought their ghosts returned to the ancestral
homelands. The Chinese and Egyptians once believed that soul and
body remained together. Among the Egyptians this led to careful
tomb construction and efforts at body preservation. Even modern
peoples seek to arrest the decay of the dead. The Hebrews
conceived that a phantom replica of the individual went down to
Sheol; it could not return to the land of the living. They did
make that important advance in the doctrine of the evolution of
the soul.
5. THE GHOST-SOUL CONCEPT
86:5.1 The nonmaterial part of man has been
variously termed ghost, spirit, shade, phantom, specter, and
latterly soul. The soul was early man's dream double; it
was in every way exactly like the mortal himself except that it
was not responsive to touch. The belief in dream doubles led
directly to the notion that all things animate and inanimate had
souls as well as men. This concept tended long to perpetuate the
nature-spirit beliefs; the Eskimos still conceive that
everything in nature has a spirit.
86:5.2 The ghost soul could be heard and seen,
but not touched. Gradually the dream life of the race so
developed and expanded the activities of this evolving spirit
world that death was finally regarded as "giving up the ghost."
All primitive tribes, except those little above animals, have
developed some concept of the soul. As civilization advances,
this superstitious concept of the soul is destroyed, and man is
wholly dependent on revelation and personal religious experience
for his new idea of the soul as the joint creation of the
God-knowing mortal mind and its indwelling divine spirit, the
Thought Adjuster.
86:5.3 Early mortals usually failed to
differentiate the concepts of an indwelling spirit and a soul of
evolutionary nature. The savage was much confused as to whether
the ghost soul was native to the body or was an external agency
in possession of the body. The absence of reasoned thought in
the presence of perplexity explains the gross inconsistencies of
the savage view of souls, ghosts, and spirits.
86:5.4 The soul was thought of as being
related to the body as the perfume to the flower. The ancients
believed that the soul could leave the body in various ways, as
in:
1. Ordinary and transient fainting.
2. Sleeping, natural dreaming.
3. Coma and unconsciousness
associated with disease and accidents.
4. Death, permanent departure.
86:5.5 The savage looked upon sneezing as an
abortive attempt of the soul to escape from the body. Being
awake and on guard, the body was able to thwart the soul's
attempted escape. Later on, sneezing was always accompanied by
some religious expression, such as "God bless you!"
86:5.6 Early in evolution sleep was regarded
as proving that the ghost soul could be absent from the body,
and it was believed that it could be called back by speaking or
shouting the sleeper's name. In other forms of unconsciousness
the soul was thought to be farther away, perhaps trying to
escape for good -- impending death. Dreams were looked upon as
the experiences of the soul during sleep while temporarily
absent from the body. The savage believes his dreams to be just
as real as any part of his waking experience. The ancients made
a practice of awaking sleepers gradually so that the soul might
have time to get back into the body.
86:5.7 All down through the ages men have
stood in awe of the apparitions of the night season, and the
Hebrews were no exception. They truly believed that God spoke to
them in dreams, despite the injunctions of Moses against this
idea. And Moses was right, for ordinary dreams are not the
methods employed by the personalities of the spiritual world
when they seek to communicate with material beings.
86:5.8 The ancients believed that souls could
enter animals or even inanimate objects. This culminated in the
werewolf ideas of animal identification. A person could be a
law-abiding citizen by day, but when he fell asleep, his soul
could enter a wolf or some other animal to prowl about on
nocturnal depredations.
86:5.9 Primitive men thought that the soul was
associated with the breath, and that its qualities could be
imparted or transferred by the breath. The brave chief would
breathe upon the newborn child, thereby imparting courage. Among
early Christians the ceremony of bestowing the Holy Spirit was
accompanied by breathing on the candidates. Said the Psalmist:
"By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the host
of them by the breath of his mouth." It was long the custom of
the eldest son to try to catch the last breath of his dying
father.
86:5.10 The shadow came, later on, to be
feared and revered equally with the breath. The reflection of
oneself in the water was also sometimes looked upon as proof of
the double self, and mirrors were regarded with superstitious
awe. Even now many civilized persons turn the mirror to the wall
in the event of death. Some backward tribes still believe that
the making of pictures, drawings, models, or images removes all
or a part of the soul from the body; hence such are forbidden.
86:5.11 The soul was generally thought of as
being identified with the breath, but it was also located by
various peoples in the head, hair, heart, liver, blood, and fat.
The "crying out of Abel's blood from the ground" is expressive
of the onetime belief in the presence of the ghost in the blood.
The Semites taught that the soul resided in the bodily fat, and
among many the eating of animal fat was taboo. Head hunting was
a method of capturing an enemy's soul, as was scalping. In
recent times the eyes have been regarded as the windows of the
soul.
86:5.12 Those who held the doctrine of three
or four souls believed that the loss of one soul meant
discomfort, two illness, three death. One soul lived in the
breath, one in the head, one in the hair, one in the heart. The
sick were advised to stroll about in the open air with the hope
of recapturing their strayed souls. The greatest of the medicine
men were supposed to exchange the sick soul of a diseased person
for a new one, the "new birth."
86:5.13 The children of Badanan developed a
belief in two souls, the breath and the shadow. The early Nodite
races regarded man as consisting of two persons, soul and body.
This philosophy of human existence was later reflected in the
Greek viewpoint. The Greeks themselves believed in three souls;
the vegetative resided in the stomach, the animal in the heart,
the intellectual in the head. The Eskimos believe that man has
three parts: body, soul, and name.
6. THE GHOST-SPIRIT ENVIRONMENT
86:6.1 Man inherited a natural environment,
acquired a social environment, and imagined a ghost environment.
The state is man's reaction to his natural environment, the home
to his social environment, the church to his illusory ghost
environment.
86:6.2 Very early in the history of mankind
the realities of the imaginary world of ghosts and spirits
became universally believed, and this newly imagined spirit
world became a power in primitive society. The mental and moral
life of all mankind was modified for all time by the appearance
of this new factor in human thinking and acting.
86:6.3 Into this major premise of illusion and
ignorance, mortal fear has packed all of the subsequent
superstition and religion of primitive peoples. This was man's
only religion up to the times of revelation, and today many of
the world's races have only this crude religion of evolution.
86:6.4 As evolution progressed, good luck
became associated with good spirits and bad luck with bad
spirits. The discomfort of enforced adaptation to a changing
environment was regarded as ill luck, the displeasure of the
spirit ghosts. Primitive man slowly evolved religion out of his
innate worship urge and his misconception of chance. Civilized
man provides schemes of insurance to overcome these chance
occurrences; modern science puts an actuary with mathematical
reckoning in the place of fictitious spirits and whimsical gods.
86:6.5 Each passing generation smiles at the
foolish superstitions of its ancestors while it goes on
entertaining those fallacies of thought and worship which will
give cause for further smiling on the part of enlightened
posterity.
86:6.6 But at last the mind of primitive man
was occupied with thoughts which transcended all of his inherent
biologic urges; at last man was about to evolve an art of living
based on something more than response to material stimuli. The
beginnings of a primitive philosophic life policy were emerging.
A supernatural standard of living was about to appear, for, if
the spirit ghost in anger visits ill luck and in pleasure good
fortune, then must human conduct be regulated accordingly. The
concept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this
long before the times of any revelation on earth.
86:6.7 With the emergence of these concepts,
there was initiated the long and wasteful struggle to appease
the ever-displeased spirits, the slavish bondage to evolutionary
religious fear, that long waste of human effort upon tombs,
temples, sacrifices, and priesthoods. It was a terrible and
frightful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man
therein achieved a natural consciousness of relative right and
wrong; human ethics was born!
7. THE FUNCTION OF PRIMITIVE RELIGION
86:7.1 The savage felt the need of insurance,
and he therefore willingly paid his burdensome premiums of fear,
superstition, dread, and priest gifts toward his policy of magic
insurance against ill luck. Primitive religion was simply the
payment of premiums on insurance against the perils of the
forests; civilized man pays material premiums against the
accidents of industry and the exigencies of modern modes of
living.
86:7.2 Modern society is removing the business
of insurance from the realm of priests and religion, placing it
in the domain of economics. Religion is concerning itself
increasingly with the insurance of life beyond the grave. Modern
men, at least those who think, no longer pay wasteful premiums
to control luck. Religion is slowly ascending to higher
philosophic levels in contrast with its former function as a
scheme of insurance against bad luck.
86:7.3 But these ancient ideas of religion
prevented men from becoming fatalistic and hopelessly
pessimistic; they believed they could at least do something to
influence fate. The religion of ghost fear impressed upon men
that they must regulate their conduct, that there was a
supermaterial world which was in control of human destiny.
86:7.4 Modern civilized races are just
emerging from ghost fear as an explanation of luck and the
commonplace inequalities of existence. Mankind is achieving
emancipation from the bondage of the ghost-spirit explanation of
ill luck. But while men are giving up the erroneous doctrine of
a spirit cause of the vicissitudes of life, they exhibit a
surprising willingness to accept an almost equally fallacious
teaching which bids them attribute all human inequalities to
political misadaptation, social injustice, and industrial
competition. But new legislation, increasing philanthropy, and
more industrial reorganization, however good in and of
themselves, will not remedy the facts of birth and the accidents
of living. Only comprehension of facts and wise manipulation
within the laws of nature will enable man to get what he wants
and to avoid what he does not want. Scientific knowledge,
leading to scientific action, is the only antidote for so-called
accidental ills.
86:7.5 Industry, war, slavery, and civil
government arose in response to the social evolution of man in
his natural environment; religion similarly arose as his
response to the illusory environment of the imaginary ghost
world. Religion was an evolutionary development of
self-maintenance, and it has worked, notwithstanding that it was
originally erroneous in concept and utterly illogical.
86:7.6 Primitive religion prepared the soil of
the human mind, by the powerful and awesome force of false fear,
for the bestowal of a bona fide spiritual force of supernatural
origin, the Thought Adjuster. And the divine Adjusters have ever
since labored to transmute God-fear into God-love. Evolution may
be slow, but it is unerringly effective.
86:7.7
Presented by an Evening Star of Nebadon.
