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Urantia Book Paper 86 Early Evolution Of Religion
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART III: The History of Urantia
: The Origin Of Urantia Life Establishment On Urantia The Marine-life Era On
Urantia Urantia During The Early Land-life Era The Mammalian Era On Urantia The
Dawn Races Of Early Man The First Human Family The Evolutionary Races Of Color
The Overcontrol Of Evolution The Planetary Prince Of Urantia The Planetary
Rebellion The Dawn Of Civilization Primitive Human Institutions The Evolution
Of Human Government Development Of The State Government On A Neighboring Planet
The Garden Of Eden Adam And Eve The Default Of Adam And Eve The Second Garden
The Midway Creatures The Violet Race After The Days Of Adam Andite Expansion In
The Orient Andite Expansion In The Occident Development Of Modern Civilization
The Evolution Of Marriage The Marriage Institution Marriage And Family Life The
Origins Of Worship Early Evolution Of Religion The Ghost Cults Fetishes,
Charms, And Magic Sin, Sacrifice, And Atonement Shamanism--medicine Men And
Priests The Evolution Of Prayer The Later Evolution Of Religion Machiventa
Melchizedek The Melchizedek Teachings In The Orient The Melchizedek Teachings
In The Levant Yahweh--god Of The Hebrews Evolution Of The God Concept Among The
Hebrews The Melchizedek Teachings In The Occident The Social Problems Of
Religion Religion In Human Experience The Real Nature Of Religion The
Foundations Of Religious Faith The Reality Of Religious Experience Growth Of
The Trinity Concept Deity And Reality Universe Levels Of Reality Origin And
Nature Of Thought Adjusters Mission And Ministry Of Thought Adjusters Relation
Of Adjusters To Universe Creatures Relation Of Adjusters To Individual Mortals
...
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Paper 86 Early Evolution Of Religion
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Introduction
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
The children of Badonan 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
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.
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.
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.
As evolution progressed, good luck became associated with good spirits and bad
luck with bad spirits. The discomfort of enforced adaptation to a changing
top of page - 956
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
top of page - 957
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.
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.
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.
[Presented by an Evening Star of Nebadon.]
top of page - 958
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART III: The History of Urantia
: The Origin Of Urantia Life Establishment On Urantia The Marine-life Era On
Urantia Urantia During The Early Land-life Era The Mammalian Era On Urantia The
Dawn Races Of Early Man The First Human Family The Evolutionary Races Of Color
The Overcontrol Of Evolution The Planetary Prince Of Urantia The Planetary
Rebellion The Dawn Of Civilization Primitive Human Institutions The Evolution
Of Human Government Development Of The State Government On A Neighboring Planet
The Garden Of Eden Adam And Eve The Default Of Adam And Eve The Second Garden
The Midway Creatures The Violet Race After The Days Of Adam Andite Expansion In
The Orient Andite Expansion In The Occident Development Of Modern Civilization
The Evolution Of Marriage The Marriage Institution Marriage And Family Life The
Origins Of Worship Early Evolution Of Religion The Ghost Cults Fetishes,
Charms, And Magic Sin, Sacrifice, And Atonement Shamanism--medicine Men And
Priests The Evolution Of Prayer The Later Evolution Of Religion Machiventa
Melchizedek The Melchizedek Teachings In The Orient The Melchizedek Teachings
In The Levant Yahweh--god Of The Hebrews Evolution Of The God Concept Among The
Hebrews The Melchizedek Teachings In The Occident The Social Problems Of
Religion Religion In Human Experience The Real Nature Of Religion The
Foundations Of Religious Faith The Reality Of Religious Experience Growth Of
The Trinity Concept Deity And Reality Universe Levels Of Reality Origin And
Nature Of Thought Adjusters Mission And Ministry Of Thought Adjusters Relation
Of Adjusters To Universe Creatures Relation Of Adjusters To Individual Mortals
The Adjuster And The Soul Personality Survival Seraphic Guardians Of Destiny
Seraphic Planetary Government The Supreme Being The Almighty Supreme God The
Supreme Supreme And Ultimate--time And Space The Bestowals Of Christ Michael
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