The Great Conundrum
February 24th, 2006Religion is often dismissed as the need of people to worship something, anything. People worship the sun, the earth, ‘higher deities’, and even cows. Some people reverence humans as the closest thing to divine examples of perfection. It goes without saying that people need to have something to measure themselves against. The question is, Why?
Why do people feel the need to worship anything?
Why do people feel like this life is not enough and that there has to be an ‘afterlife’?
What if there really IS a higher deity that all of the religions sprang from?
The Lord of the Realm is of the opinion that religion was formed as way to control society - at first with common sense laws such as ‘do not sleep with your mother’ and ‘do not hurt other human beings’ - then evolved into something much more complex as people began to rely upon the religion. I honestly don’t know what to think about that train of thought.
Religion is evident in every distant country, tribe, and continent in this world. How did so many people come up with the same way to control society???
I think that there had to be some kind of event - we’ll say the Great Flood for example - that caught the attention of people everywhere and convinced them that something intelligent was ruling the world - something that they needed to pay tribute to in order to stay in favor.
Now, about that Flood. From China, to Greece, to Africa, to Central America - all of their mythology includes that event. In every one of their old stories, there was a man who escaped on a boat with his wife and some animals. I did research on this because I found it so fascinating. In every story the plot was different but the result was the same - the world was covered with water and one man built a boat (or clambered into a barrel) with his wife and some animals. After the ‘gods relented’ and the water receded, that man survived and started to repopulate the world.
I wonder if religion started with him worshipping the boat because it had saved him, or (in christianity’s case) the rainbow because he had never seen one before. In any case, the original question remains - Why did he feel the need to Worship anything? Is it because he simply did not understand it? If we take the rainbow for example - how could primitive man understand that the result of sunlight shining through a sheet of water produces a myriad of colors? He could not. Science was not developed thus far. So what does he do? He is in awe of it. Maybe he thinks that something is trying to send a message to him. (If science had been developed, he may have thought that aliens were signaling him.)
So, to put an answer to Why Men Feel the Need to Worship, it could simply be that men worship things and occurrences that they don’t understand. But why worship? Why not simply ignore? Is this an evolutionary instinct for survival - to know what is chasing you so that you can know how to avoid it? Perhaps that is why humans feel the need to ‘appease the gods’ - so that they are not stricken down where they stand. Perhaps they feel like ‘god’ is ever watching them like a tiger from a forest thicket, and if you don’t feed it enough of what it wants (meat or subservience) it will kill you.
I’m afraid that this is as close to solving the conundrum as I am willing to venture at this moment.
