Envy is the primary motivation in human society, per my observations.

Cain killed Able because God accepted Able's sacrifice but rejected Cain's.

Maybe there's a moral to that story?

Doesn't envy play a part in that tale?

My starting point on this issue is that religion is primarily used to justify our behaviors and emotions. Therefore, I have to side with the hate emotion coming first.

Yeah, I hate that someone has something I don't...

I agree. The emotion came first and religion manipulated the emotion for its own purposes.

Yes. EXACTLY.

If you're asking in a "chicken or egg" sense, here's my take:

It's not likely that hate formed the basis of religion (either in the "belief in Gods" sense, or in the "formation of original religious organizations" sense).

Belief in Gods was most likely born of our minds' fixation on finding meaning. When it's not there to be found, our minds will just create it. It's how all lunatic beliefs are born. I don't see why belief in Gods would be an exception.

Formation of the original religious organizations most likely stemmed from greed and/or lust for power and influence, just like the formation of all subsequent religious organizations.

So it probably wasn't hate that hatched into religion.

It's easy to see how religion can (and does) hatch into hate. The problem here is chronological. Since hate is based on emotion directly and doesn't require the fabrication of complex concepts, hate most likely predates any kind of religious belief.

So I'd say chronologically, hate came first, but neither created the other originally.

I'm with the consensus on this one (Hate 1st, Religion 2nd) because you don't need religion to hate...

However, my understanding of how religions developed is partial, at the most, and I've never been fully convinced by the "trying to make sense of the universe" argument, notably because religions DON'T make sense. I would suggest they also stem from hallucinatory experiences, which are reasonably easy to come by in the natural world, either through plants or mental illness.

Is it surprising such religious confusion was born of such mental confusion? So hate and religion may have appeared at the same time.

This take on it all is very insightful. Very. Just for this alone I could never hate you. :) Bless you my child.

I think hate of religion came first.

Love came first. If humans didn't love their offspring, we wouldn't be here.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first rube.

I am with EOD on this. I've never been too sure but what the word hate is a stand in albeit a convenient one for envy, greed, and a gargantuan need to be A Number One, King of the Hill, and Top of the Heap and will go to any length to achieve it. If it can't be conquered it must be destroyed. So what is hate but a tactic to chase away those little town blues?

The only thing worth hating is evil. Pershaps? And that word, evil, carries suspicion as well as it is a religious word.

Problem is one man's evil is another man's goodness in this world where even religions hate each other.

To answer your question – hatRED* is much older than religion and can be found among primates and less complex creatures.

It is quite clear all humans have some hatred in them. The decent ones learn to focus it in the appropriate direction, i.e. those who wish to undermine civilized society and cause trouble.

* Hate is the verb, and hatred is the noun. Unless you want to sound like a character out of "1984".

I haven't participated in this thread yet because of what I perceive as definitional problems with the topic.

Shinehah has given me the impetus to pull on the specs and consult my dictionaries. It turns out that "hate" is a noun as well as a verb. It's meaning? Well, "hatred." But it is a kosher noun.

That said, what exactly do we mean by "religion?" Is it a collection of human emotions--hate, envy, terror, fear of isolation, awe, love, etc--in proportions that vary from place to place and time to time? Or do we need some intellectual overlay, some sense of the divine (if not of God), some level of articulated doctrine?

If we don't require doctrine or systematic thought, it could be that animals have "religion" of an elementary sort and early hominins were on that spectrum. Hatred would have been part of that congeries of visceral impulses and have evolved in train with intelligence until we arrived at, well, wherever we have arrived.

My point is that perhaps you can't separate hatred from religion. Perhaps they are inextricably bound together.

Which is the horse? Which is the carriage?

My point is that the horse may well be the carriage.

Or at the very least sitting in it?

I would not disagree. It's like the cake batter has been made and there is no way you are going to separate the eggs from the flour at this point.

And yes. Where the hell have we arrived?

I'll let you know when we get there, presumably by smoke signal.

"My point is that perhaps you can't separate hatred from religion. Perhaps they are inextricably bound together."

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "My point is that perhaps you can't separate
> hatred from religion. Perhaps they are
> inextricably bound together."

No "inextricable" about it.

The Quakers and Bahais are both religions. They're some of the most mellow people you could meet, although they've had troubles in the past. Nowadays they work for peace and disarmament.

On the other hand, the two deadliest regimes in history were both anti-religious and responsible for tens of millions of deaths. One of them is still in existence. It is still acceptable for academics to promote their ideas. Why?

Thanks for this.

When I talk religion I am thinking specifically of the ones in America inextricable from government at this point. They are too large of a voting block for even an atheist politician to ignore and they know holding up a Bible works.

Those are the ones where the ingredients are so well mixed together the conglomeration has formed something no one should be baking.

I'm actually not too big on the word hatred and hate using it as a broad brush. Having things one's way at any cost often means one will do horrible things, but for their own selfish reasons, not because they hate who they are doing it to. And then "one" finds God to be a useful tool. How could religion escape being sucked into the agenda?

Anyways, it's complicated and those are my thoughts spurned by your welcome, to me, post.

> No "inextricable" about it.
>
> The Quakers and Bahais are both religions. They're
> some of the most mellow people you could meet,
> although they've had troubles in the past.
> Nowadays they work for peace and disarmament.

That wasn't the question. The question was which came first, hate or religion. My answer was that religion emerged along with all human emotion, including--referring to anybody's query--hatred. Neither "came first."

Secondly, if the Quakers and the Bahais "have had troubles in the past," that implies that they too arose from the complex of human emotions that I was describing.


-----------------------
> On the other hand, the two deadliest regimes in
> history were both anti-religious and responsible
> for tens of millions of deaths.

This is where you start to sound like a Canadian in a bus outside an English airport. For it is a non-sequitur. No one asked anything about "regimes," about governments, about political philosophies. That's just your obsession. The topic was the relationship between emotion and religion.

Also, your analysis is fundamentally, and characteristically, flawed. Your Skousen-esque fixation on the USSR and China assumes that "deadliness" can be determined by absolute numbers when nothing of the sort is true. What matters is how many people were killed as a proportion of the existing humans in the warring societies: it is relative, not absolute.

Was Stalin more murderous than Pol Pot, who slaughtered a full quarter of all Kampucheans? No. What about histories' various genocides? The Mongols killed, by policy, entire nations that resisted them as a means of intimidating other nations. So factually, you are just making stuff up. As usual, you're parroting your preferred flavor of propaganda.

And you miss the point that totalitarian movements function like religions; they usurp the role of religions. That's why Kim Jung Un is worshiped by many of his followers, Stalin and Mao were revered as something almost divine, so too Hitler. Like the French Revolutionaries, who literally created their own state religion, the modern tyrannies saw the power of religion over individuals and harnessed it to serve their ends. In short, the most sanguinary modern dictatorships WERE religions.


-----------------
> One of them is
> still in existence. It is still acceptable for
> academics to promote their ideas. Why?

Ah yes, another non-sequitur, an idee fixe completely divorced from the topic of the thread and the post to which you purport to reply: that academia is a left-wing political factory. You'd think that by now we would all understand that the only true visionary, the only person with a clear vision of reality, is that Canadian who delivered the local weather report to us from a bus in England.

I think hate came baked into human hard wiring. You need hate to be tribal and justify killing others to get resources. For much of our history, tribal survival depended on doing whatever hateful thing was needed to the other guys who might be threats in any way.

Religion incorporates this in many cases. It's certainly in the holy writs where we see "love" with side messages of exclusivity and justification to hate. Some religion has perfected using hate to obtain power, riches, control and grift, as we commonly see. People use the religion to satisfy the human need for tribal belonging, IMO.