THE EVOLUTION FROM THE CAVE

In the beginning when humans crawled out of the trees or out of the cave and started to look at the sky, they started to wonder where they came from. A greater unknown was in regard to dying and what happened after that. Looking for answers they looked at the stars, the coming and going of the sun and moon and tried to make some sense from them in the answers to their questions. Meanwhile they developed practices to see the dead on their way, from burial to cremation and even by retaining the corpses or parts of them for worship. While the biggest and strongest man in the cave received the largest share of food and controlled the rest, even he could not provide any of these answers.

The heavens however were always the driving force as humans thinking the earth was flat, marveled at coming of dawn and dusk and how temperature varied with different phases of the sun and moon. First as hunters and gathers people looked at how the seasons effected the animals they chased and this became even more important as populations settled and planted crops which depended on regular rains. To encourage these events, humans began rituals to try and encourage consistency with the creation of the first god worship such as in sun and moon. In the cave amongst the strongest came some smaller and wiser men who tried to make some sense out of these occurrences and these were revered and became cult figures whose words people followed. Obviously clever men, their explanations had to make some sort of sense and it was not long before the less intellectual were sucked in. In earlier days, stronger tribal leaders were smart enough to engage with the wise men in order to direct the people over whom they had control.

As societies developed, to maintain rule and some degree of order, it was necessary to introduce the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. Killing your neighbour, bad. Killing a neighbouring tribesman raiding your village, good. Doing what the head man said, good, and so on. Again, these local Sharman were employed to set out the broad rules within which communities were to work and at the same time to come up with appropriate punishments. These can be harsh as where Australian Aboriginals have an ultimate punishment of a culprit having the bone pointed at them after which they are expelled from the tribe and walk off to die on their own. Man was a herd animal learning not to go against the consensus no matter how wrong.

With human progression, it was then discovered that an even greater control of the population could be achieved if there was a heaven where you went to if you were collectively good, and a hell for all other activity. To make this thing work, it was necessary to set it into acceptable framework preferably with a divine god, or as in early days, by the now so called religious leaders decreeing the deity man-god in the local Pharos, which of course scored them points with the people in charge.

To keep this whole system working, the clever philosophers who made a living from this thing studied the stars and made predictions as to the seasons and why things happened. They had to be very smart with this since no one had yet worked out what happened when a person died so had to invent things which would appease what could not be explained. Being clever men, they invented supreme beings who could be resurrected for their good deeds and if not completely returned to earth as mortals, would after death be able to continue an even better life than on earth even for some with a plentiful supply of virgins. They set birth dates for their deities such as the 25th December corresponding to the end of an era leading to a new awakening of Spring and set physical occurrences to coincide with movement of stars in the heavens. Of course the instructions on what to do had to come from supreme authorities or straight from a God, so you have as an example Moses and his tablets although it was just a pity he smashed them in a rage before anyone could verify God had written them but it made a good story. For children the idea of flying back and forth on a donkey to an angel debating the number of times one had to pray a day would make great bed time reading.

Remembering that at these times few people could write as we now understand it and only a select few could document these stories which were transmitted by word of mouth. Forty years of wondering around Canaan before finding the promised land becomes an allegorical interpretations before the Canaanites organised themselves into what became Jews, and then after the shock of the Egyptian’s destroying King David’s temple, they took this as a warning and became monotheists under a God YAHWE, who as in Harry Potter became “He who cannot be named”.  

Overall, introducing this religion thing was a master stroke since now there was a formalized system for keeping whole populations in order, justifying wars by having God(s) on your side, and leaders didn’t have to prove anything because the outcome was that no one wanted not to have a hope after death, so were not ready to challenge anything sold to them. Remembering that rulers required armies of men ready to die in battle so it was convenient to assure these poor souls that they would die for a righteous cause and a great heaven would be awaiting their sacrifice. Imagine people prepared to throw away their lives if they thought that would be the end of it. Funny though, how there can be wars where you can have God on both sides or even different versions of the same religion fighting each other.

So the Romans, with probably one of the most extensive empires in history had to keep their people in line and having had as the Emperor said, these bothersome Jews giving them trouble, found the Jesus story of “Offer the other cheek” and “Give unto Caesar” a convenient way of keeping people in line and overcoming the taxation issue. Over time the Romans supported this one God concept which was easier to follow than having so many gods, each with their own ideas and they supported the clergy in order to enforce this work for them.

Until out of the desert the Arabs challenged the Roman might and having learned their lessons well, in defeating the Roman legions, they needed their own saviour outside of the his Jesus, hence around the 7th Century AD, Mohammed emerged to be built up as a counterpoint against Jesus and the Byzantine empire. As with Jesus, a large part of his early life lacks detail as the stories were put together only later as was the location of where one prayed to. With this new religion, having learned how the eventual collapse of the Roman ideology came about when people switched sides, death was prescribed as punishment should anyone renounce the new leadership and new faith. The Catholic church later learned from that and brought in its own inquisition. Meanwhile the Arabs saw they couldn’t compete against the Christian opulence of their churches and richness of symbolism so banned such ostentation from their religion. They were also not going to have anyone, challenge, drop out or renounce the new faith on threat of death.

Over time, these new Jews started to give the Roman Empire considerable annoyance which led to various uprisings mainly taxation driven, so the literature of the day went along with many seers who were touted would come along and save the Jews. This Jesus was selected out of the many contenders and facilitated by the Romans to keep the Jews in order. This new idea clearly embellished by writers of the time embellished by a traitorous Jew, Josephus lasted for hundreds of years until Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the early 4th century BC and then stepped in to try and standardise various texts and establish rules for electing future Popes. It was at this same time the Christian trinity was invented and the church proclaimed that Jesus with the stroke of a pen was now in fact, God.  

The world progressed as human animals fought each other over the centuries to establish their turfs, with leaders operating no different from those in the cave only on a larger scale, backed by their divine guides asserted their rights and cemented their dynasties. Meanwhile religious leaders equally fought to cement their areas of influence leading to some of the most horrific human destruction and torture in the names of various Gods. Over time and despite two world wars (or one extended world war depending how it is looked regarded), humans at the top of the “symbolic” tree realised that to stay there, they had to make it look like collectively they were sympathetic to the poor and weak and built in systems to give this appearance. Saddled with ancient Greek and Roman thinking of democracy, this had to be given some acknowledgement and hence this concept of one man (then one person) one vote had to be tempered to link to votes and money to influence them.

Bringing the man from his cave to the present makes very few changes. He is still in charge and controls those and all the assets around him by one means or another, whether by allowing others to have tenure on property and assets or whether allocating these to the collective. The problem has expounded with the explosion of the population and its interconnectivity where it becomes harder to keep everyone happy about their share of the meat since social media can easily show how some at the top get more than those as the bottom can even contemplate. Hence at this level people feel that they will always be left out and no longer able to believe that there is a heaven which will give earthly suffering meaning, so no longer care and will revolt no matter the cost or the consequence. But democracy has told them how everyone gets a say and law and order along with sanctity of human life matters whether black or any other colour which also puts policing in a dilemma. A country with a population of over a billion and a half realizes if a country of 330 million can’t control its population, they will only survive with a heavy hand and policies which are what the biggest man in the cave says they are, whether that means executing dissenters and low life criminals or locking people up for thought reeducation. It works for them. Meanwhile those living in “democracies” with the legal right to complain, riot, loot and scream out against their governments being too stupid to see what is coming but then they said they don’t care. Well when it comes it can only be hoped that they remember what they had and how easily it could be lost. The biggest man in the cave will always continue to win until perhaps he is put in his place and women take over and men are retained for breeding purposes only…