Mormonism used to be for people who want to know everything. Never underestimate the utility of horn dog epistemology.

Religion is fairy tales for grown ups, but so what? Isn't everything else? Doesn't it all depend on whether or not you like whoever made up what you currently believe? Which, in turn, depends on their ability to manipulate language to suit their needs?

In other words, "reality" belongs to the best liars.

It's all show business, kid!

Everyone is after ratings, not truths. Not just religious leaders who need followers anymore. Self worth is measured in them.

Religion is for people that can't figure out how to live a good life on their own just by being a good human being.

I have a somewhat different view of religion. Its purpose is to create a framework for creating an artificial tribe larger than can be sustained by extended family alone. It is, in effect, an artificial family.

Its purpose is not to help adherents lead a better life. It is to insure loyalty and cooperation with the tribe. A better individual life is a side effect.

I think it interesting that most of the Eurasian religions that still exist today got their start, or codified their scripture, in a relatively small window in human history, near the start of the iron age*. Iron and steel are rather difficult to make and require a complex social infrastructure. Small tribes of extended family were no longer sufficient. Iron and steel were really useful, for both war and farming, so religions sprang up to sustain larger tribes.

* Christianity and Islam came later, but they can be viewed as Judaism v 2.0 and v 3.0, all from the god of Abraham.

An insightful post. Gods are indeed a product of economic organization. That said, I think you have the causality wrong.

Humans have always been religious. Hunter-gatherers, including pre-HSS hominins, were religious but only in small localized ways. They shared some ideas more broadly, like burial practices, but there is no evidence of significant supra-clan organization anywhere. Religions and religions were "small" clannish affairs.

The sudden arrival of "big gods," meaning large-scale religions that included tens or hundreds of thousands of adherents rather than just a couple of hundred, came as a result of the Agricultural Revolution. In short, the new technology caused populations to expand by orders of magnitude with population densities increasing commensurately.

How do you "herd" a species that evolved to function in highly mobile hunter-gatherer bands when they exist in vastly greater numbers and concentrations and their food supply demands immobility and such centrally-organized and -maintained infrastructure as irrigation networks? Through organized states that cull the economic surpluses produced by agriculture through taxation and use those resources to build the infrastructure, collect the taxes, enforce law and order, and--when these new societies bump into each other--conduct military operations.

Religions played a major role in legitimizing and reinforcing these new systems. Accordingly, the earliest empires, complex states, and imperial religions arose simultaneously in the agricultural cradles: Mesopotamia and neighboring parts of Anatolia, the Nile River Valley, northern and southern China (millet and wheat in the north, rice in the south), etc.* Shared gods with the backing of powerful states were a major form of "glue," legitimizing and sustaining the new polities and increasing the probability that individuals and local clans would view members of the new super-clans as insiders rather than outsiders.

There was indeed a quantitative change in religions around 600 BCE, a period called the Axial Age but that came long after the emergence of the big religions and big gods.





*Hence Karl Wittfogel's choice of the term "Oriental Despotism" in his seminal work, which spawned a ton of work in this field.

Ah, the Axial Age. I was not aware of the designation.

I agree that religion was around long before the Axial Age. What changed in the Axial Age is that many of the people and sacred texts that define brand name religions to this day got their start between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE, plus a couple more centuries wiggle room for a few of them. The earlier Eurasian religions pretty much died out. I guess the notable exception would be Hinduism, which predates the Axial Age, and remains polytheistic to this day. (I suppose Japan may be an exception too, but I will plead guilty to Eurocentric parochialism. LW knows a lot about East Asian religions. I can recognize the principal writing systems of East Asia, a low bar to clear))

Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster (probably before 7th century BCE), the solidifying of the Pentateuch, the Hindu Upanishads (dates are pretty squishy on that too). That's a pretty remarkable cast for such a short time period.

None of this applies outside of Eurasia (entire western hemisphere, Australia, Africa), and even within Eurasia, excluding Christianity and Islam as simply variants of Judaism is kind of cheating. They are the number 1 and number 2 most widely practiced religions on earth, and they have particular people associated with their founding as well, though Paul may be more important to the spread of Christianity than Jesus.

Anyway, interesting points, and I learned a name for what I was trying to describe. :)

A productive discussion.

> I guess the notable exception would be
> Hinduism, which predates the Axial Age, and
> remains polytheistic to this day.

Hinduism is generally regarded as what is left over after identifying the other Indian traditions; and the earlier forms of Hinduism show parallels to other earlier Asian religions. The god Indra, for example, is not Indo-European: it was absorbed when the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures moved south from the southern tip of the Urals to exploit the metal deposits in the Zeravshan mountain range and there came into close contact with the BMAC culture on the way to India and then Iran. But then Hinduism absorbed the Indo-European import, Indra, as well as a number of other deities and beliefs. So Hinduism too stems from a variety of sources.


-------------
> (I suppose
> Japan may be an exception too. . .

And Shamanism in general ("Shaman," incidentally is a Turkic word then borrowed into other Asian religious vocabularies). If you examine the mountain shrines to the Mongol/Turkic/Saka/Scythian god Tengri, which I have done in situ, you will immediately see parallels to the oldest Shinto shrines and sacred groves. And there we get a hint of the trans-Eurasian connections that I think you underestimate.


-------------
> Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster (probably
> before 7th century BCE), the solidifying of the
> Pentateuch, the Hindu Upanishads (dates are pretty
> squishy on that too). That's a pretty remarkable
> cast for such a short time period.

First, specialists date the origins of Zoroastrianism and the Vedic religion to between 1500 and 1000 BCE. At that point the two branches of the Abashevo/Sintashta/Andronovo people and culture still spoke the same basic language. In short, the Avesta and the Vedas are mutually intelligible; and the members of those traditions shared the same pantheon, although the gods of one side were the devils of the other and vice versa as one might expect from two rival factions of the same movement. The big change in Zoroastrianism came in the Axial Age and represented a reform movement. I'm not sure if your dating of Zoroaster is meant as a treatment of the first or the second historical period.


--------------
> None of this applies outside of Eurasia (entire
> western hemisphere, Australia, Africa),

That is true.


------------
> . . . and even within Eurasia. . .

That is NOT true.

The Yamnaya pantheon was shared everywhere the Indo-Europeans went. In their religion the Father God, for example, was Dyeus Pater. Anyone who speaks any European language will recognize "Pater" as "Father." It takes a little more effort to see the ubiquity of Dyeus, but the cognates are Zeus in Greek, Jupiter (the two words dyeus pater combined into one) in Latin, Dievas in the Baltic tongues, and Dyaus in Sanskrit. TThere are cognates of that name for most of the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Indian, early Persian, Thracian, Ilyrian, Albanian, Anatolian, and other civilizations of Eurasia--even the Hittites had the early Indo-European pantheon and the story of Demeter and Neptune, both of which have names whose cognates may be found all over Eurasia except in China and Southeast Asia.

Another way to make the point is to consider the horse sacrifice. The Rig Veda mentioned a very specific way of carving up a horse for annual religious sacrifices. Anthropologists didn't know what to make of that until they discovered horses that had been sacrificed precisely as outlined in the RV in the Sintashta region ca 2000 BCE. Then they discovered identical or nearly-identical horse sacrifices in Mongolia and Manchuria all the way across to the Baltic, Scandanavia, even Ireland. Why was such a sacrifice coterminal with Indo-European influence? Because the horse was the key to the Indo-European economic, cultural, and religious universe. And this sacrifice reached well into China as well.

To summarize the point, there are very few parts of Eurasia whose post-2000 BCE religions were not variations on Indo-European themes.


-----------------
> . . . excluding Christianity and Islam
> as simply variants of Judaism is kind of cheating.

But you just said above that "Christianity and Islam . . . can be viewed as Judaism v 2.0 and v 3.0." That is precisely my point.


---------------------
> . . . They are the number 1 and number 2 most widely
> practiced religions on earth. . .

Does that make them less derivative of Judaism?


----------------
. . . and they have
> particular people associated with their founding
> as well. . .

Does that make them less derivative of Judaism?

The crux of the matter, I think, is that you cannot understand any religion if you ignore its wellsprings. The sources of Islam and Christianity lie squarely in the YHWH reforms of the 6th century BCE. Without that creation neither of Judaism's progeny would ever have been born.

Ironically, parts of the Bible as codified in those reforms bear strong witness to the secondary Indo-European influences that stemmed from the Indo-European Zorastrians (the Book of Job, Song of Songs, the Second Book of Daniel [now extirpated]), Philistines, Greeks ("the high shall be made low and the low shall be made high" and similar late biblical terms are word-for-word identical to Hesiod's Works and Days), and others.


-------------------
> Anyway, interesting points, and I learned a name
> for what I was trying to describe. :)

There are reasons for the timing, extent, and uniformity of the Axial Age changes. I'll explain those some other time or perhaps offline.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2025 05:04AM by Lot's Wife.

>In short, the Avesta and the Vedas are mutually intelligible; and the members of those traditions shared the same pantheon, although the gods of one side were the devils of the other and vice versa as one might expect from two rival factions of the same movement.

We have an example of that right here in the good old USA. In North Dakota there is a large semi-terminal (it sometimes fills enough to overflow the basin boundary, much to the annoyance of Canada, where the overflow goes - "you're contaminating our biota!") named Devils Lake by the white settlers.

There is a major First Nations reservation on the shores of the lake named the Spirit Lake Reservation. Two different points of view in choosing a name.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2025 09:08AM by Brother Of Jerry.

Very cool.

> * Christianity and Islam came later, but they can
> be viewed as Judaism v 2.0 and v 3.0, all from the
> god of Abraham.

The emergence of Judaism occurred in the 6th century BCE, in the Axial Age, along with Hinduism, early Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as the evolution of Greek religion away from polytheism and towards monotheism ("God" appears instead of "god" in philosophers' works). In Canaan there was no clear "Abrahamic" religion before then, just myths of an ancient patriarch that were as nationalist as they were religious.

Like their neighbors and relatives, the vast majority of Hebrews were polytheists who made sacrifices according to the agricultural calendar. Indeed, the early Hebrews built temples not just to their male god but also to his consort, Asherah.

The "big" religion of Judaism was born in the reign of King Josiah, who empowered the YHWH cult with its Zoroastrian-inspired monotheism and sponsored the "discovery" of the Book of Deuteronomy, which had improbably languished unnoticed for centuries in a dusty corner of the Holy of Holies.

Even then the power of the Jewish state and the YHWH cult were limited by the paucity and poverty of the inhabitants of Palestine. YHWH was a big idea if not yet a big god. He would only become transcendent when the Abrahamic mythology was adopted by imperial states like the Roman Empire and Islam. To that extent, YHWH's rise to superstardom only happened when he was embraced by rich political leaders in the early centuries CE.

How do you explain America's rejection of state religion?

Was it a real need, or was it more a way to stick it to the British crown?

Well Bradley, you only need to look to history to see how very dangerous and deadly "state religion" is. Henry VIII, his daughter Mary and even Elizabeth I. Let alone a little thing called the Inquisition. And those are just small examples not that long in the past when that decision was made for the US.

I would say the notion of a state religion was at odds with "nature's God", a popular adaptation of the religious ideas of the Iroquois Confederacy. The latter would have been the right zeitgeist to establish religious freedom. No such thing would happen today.

Remember that the Puritans came to North America for religious freedom, but only for themselves. They persecuted those who didn’t conform.

By the time of the Constitution, there were a variety of ‘established’ denominations in the colonies, meaning that the colony levied taxes to support them.

Creating a national religion would have meant choosing which denominations to support and which to reject - an impossible task.

Established churches continued past the ratification of the amendment; providing tax support was eventually discontinued.

Sharticle of Faith Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Religion is for people that can't figure out how
> to live a good life on their own just by being a
> good human being.

Religion is about a lot of things. The problem today is that there isn't much hope. Between the AI apocalypse/mass unemployment, nuclear war and the climate crisis people need something that helps them escape all the problems created by the modern world.

Religion is all about money.

Dave the Atheist Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Religion is all about money.

Religion was around before money.

Have you ever seen "They Live"? It's a good watch. This guy gets glasses which help him see things as they really are. When he looks at a dollar bill through them it says, "This is your God".

Money itself is now a religion.

Good discussion, but one key thing that's been left out is fear.

LW mentioned the Ag Revolution. The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a risky bet for human survival.

Staying in one place instead of having to move all the time living in the rain forest or on the steppes following the mammoth or bison herds was nice, but fear of the unknown came with it.

Would the rains come? Would the winter be too harsh? Would the crops fail? Would the storms be too violent?

Also interesting to note that the regions that have the first complex societies and religions (Indus River Valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt) all had one thing in common: a consistent water supply and fertile ground for growing crops.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2025 02:04PM by anybody.

> Staying in one place instead of having to move all
> the time living in the rain forest or on the
> steppes following the mammoth or bison heards was
> nice, but fear of the unknown came with it.

Sure, but it the foraging populations lived in existential fear too--and without significant stores of foods like the early agriculturalists amassed. If anything, the farmers probably had fewer acute fears.


---------------
> Also interesting to note that the regions that
> have the first complex societies and religions
> (Indus River Valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt) all had
> one thing in common: a consistent water supply and
> fertile ground for growing crops.

I did say that. I mentioned the importance of "irrigation" in the early agricultural civilizations, including "Mesopotamia and neighboring parts of Anatolia, the Nile River Valley, northern and southern China." Wittfogel's retrospectively obvious argument was that you need a state to organize the maintenance and distribution of water for crops.

I think that modern people today sometimes forget how a non-scientific or non-technological society, even an advanced one like ancient Rome, had very different ideas about religion than we do now.

The gods weren't your friends. You didn't have a personal relationship with them as evangelicals claim they do with Jesus. Ths gods could grant favours and just as easily take them away. The gods were to be appeased.

While reading your comments, I thought of the two different aspects of the Roman Saturnalia (the origin of the modern Christmas festival). It began as a religious offering with sacrifices (and with all of the associated religious hierarchy), but wound up being a big party and celebration — just as it is today.

Perhaps it's always been this way. Nobody knows who built Stonehenge, but it probably had some sacred or religious meaning that's been lost to history. We do know from the large amount of pig bones and trash that have been found there they had big end of the year barbecues and somebody was having a good time.

Not trying to argue or quibble.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2025 08:26AM by anybody.

> Not trying to argue or quibble.

Not taken that way. These topics are fascinating.

I once attended a lecture on the rise of culture where I heard something that really stuck with me: culture is the child of water. A reliable water supply is not sufficient for the rise of major cultures, but it is necessary. As for fertile soils, Egypt and China, along the Yangtze, both had annual floods which brought in a new layer of topsoil, which kept the soil from being depleted by the farming practices. I assume the Indus valley also has annual floods.

OTOH, Mesopotamia had a severe problem with salt contamination caused by irrigation in its southern regions near the Persian gulf. Incidentally, the same thing happened in Lyman, WY, just east of Evanston, though I think the contamination agent was trona (a high-sodium chemical soup) rather than straight salt. You need enough good irrigation water that some of it runs off, or eventually you get salt contamination of some form.

Your first paragraph is probably based, directly or indirectly, on Wittfogel. Civilization arose from agriculture, and agriculture was dependent on water: usually in the form of rivers that flooded regularly and thereby provided constant fertility. The state, police forces, military forces, rudimentary legal systems, and large-scale religions were the political manifestation of the irrigation networks.

Don't forget geometry and mathematics. Somebody had to figure out which fields belonged to which village or clan after the Nile floodwaters receded, how and where to dig irrigation canals in Mesopotamia, etc.

More importantly, how would you know when to plant? Who kept track of time? What signs foretold the weather? This was too much of a job now for the clan patriarch or tribal shaman. Professional priests and religion arose to fill that function.

The earliest known possible religious edifice is Göbekli Tepe built ca. 9500 BCE at the end of the last Ice Age after the climate stabilized to what we know today.

############

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Recent findings suggest a settlement at Göbekli Tepe, with domestic structures, extensive cereal processing, a water supply, and tools associated with daily life.[7] This contrasts with a previous interpretation of the site as a sanctuary used by nomads, with few or no permanent inhabitants.[1] No definitive purpose has been determined for the megalithic structures, which have been popularly described as the "world's first temple[s]".[8] They were likely roofed and appear to have regularly collapsed, been inundated by landslides, and subsequently repaired or rebuilt.[9][10] The architecture and iconography are similar to other contemporary sites in the vicinity, such as Karahan Tepe.[11]

The site was first noted in a 1963 archaeological survey. German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt recognised its significance in 1994 and began excavations there the following year. After he died in 2014, work continued as a joint project of Istanbul University, Şanlıurfa Museum, and the German Archaeological Institute, under the direction of Turkish prehistorian Necmi Karul. Göbekli Tepe was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, recognising its outstanding universal value as "one of the first manifestations of human-made monumental architecture".[12] As of 2021, around 10% of the site has been excavated.[13] Additional areas were examined by geophysical surveys, which showed the mound to contain at least 20 large enclosures.[14]


############

Mohenjo-Daro Priest Sculpture, ca 2000 BCE
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest-King_(sculpture)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2025 11:46PM by anybody.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.


--------------
> Don't forget geometry and mathematics.

I did not. Those disciplines arose from the combination of economic rents and the need for irrigation and transportation systems engendered by the Agricultural Revolution.


--------------
> More importantly, how would you know when to
> plant? Who kept track of time? What signs
> foretold the weather?

Hence the lunar calendar. As for "foretelling the weather," neither "professional priests" nor "religion" were any help with that.



---------------
> The earliest known possible religious edifice is
> Göbekli Tepe built ca. 9500 BCE at the end of the
> last Ice Age after the climate stabilized to what
> we know today.

Only if you assume that the cave paintings in Iberia and France, in which fires were periodically used to give initiates the impression of movement of sacred animals, were not "religious edifices." So too the burial rituals and rudimentary monuments built to memorialize the dead by various human groups for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Were not those cemeteries and graves and grave markers "religious edifices?"


-----------
> Recent findings suggest a settlement at Göbekli
> Tepe, with domestic structures, extensive cereal
> processing, a water supply, and tools associated
> with daily life.[7]

Yes. Hence my reference to "Mesopotamia and neighboring parts of Anatolia" as one of the cradles of agriculture.


-----------------
> Mohenjo-Daro Priest Sculpture, ca 2000 BCE
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest-King_(sculp
> ture)

I'm not sure what this reference means. Yes, the Harappan culture was quite advanced. Yes, it had interesting art and monumental structures throughout northwestern India and into Bactria-Margiana until it collapsed in the early second millennium. But what does that mean? Were not such monumental structures exactly what one would expect of a region that had been practicing agriculture for at least four thousand years?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/30/2025 12:46AM by Lot's Wife.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Humans are fallible. At some point, one of those early spiritual leaders would have been asked something they wouldn't be able to answer or take advantage of their position in some way.

Instead of saying they didn't know or didn't have an answer, they just made something up.

That's when things went off the rails.

But they still got people to build massive complexes like Cahokia or the Dolmen de Soto.

The Mohenjo-Daro statue picture was just for illustration.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/2025 12:19AM by anybody.

> Humans are fallible. At some point, one of those
> early spiritual leaders would have been asked
> something they wouldn't be able to answer or take
> advantage of their position in some way.
>
> Instead of saying they didn't know or didn't have
> an answer, they just made something up.

Yeah, I don't think there was a "point" at which "spiritual leaders" started "making something up." Deceiving and being deceived is inherent in the human condition.


------------------
> That's when things went off the rails.

Things were always off the rails.


-------------------
> But they still got people to build massive
> complexes like Cahokia or the Dolmen de Soto.


"But?"

Surely there is no contradiction, no "but," between leaders deceiving their followers and the construction of polities, cities, and monuments. The pyramids were never in the interests of the slaves who built them, nor were the terracotta armies buried in the Shaanxi desert.

Civilization is founded on deception.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Surely there is no contradiction, no "but,"
> between leaders deceiving their followers and the
> construction of polities, cities, and monuments.
> The pyramids were never in the interests of the
> slaves who built them, nor were the terracotta
> armies buried in the Shaanxi desert.
>
> Civilization is founded on deception.


How do you get masses of people to do something?

Fear? Love? Pride? Force? Greed?

Here's where things get complicated.

There aren't any records or evidence for Cahokia, the Mayan Pyramids, or the Neolithic tombs in Eurasia, but there is for the Egyptian Pyramids.

The Pyramids weren't built by slaves. That much we do know from the records of the workers and receipts for food for the work teams. A small, permanent group of skilled workers and their families lived on-site year round. Archeologists also found that the workers injuries were medically treated — something that wouldn't be done for disposable slaves. The permanent full-time work force was assisted by levies of men from towns and villages from all over the country in the off season after the harvest.

These findings make the Pyramids look more like a massive public works program rather than something built for the mere vanity of the Pharaoh.

Perhaps these people were sold a lie. Perhaps they did it out of pride. That part remains unknown.

Maybe it was pride like the cathedral builders in medieval Europe who knew they would never see the work completed in their own lifetime

#############

Google AI summary:

The pyramids were not built by slaves; rather, they were constructed by a paid workforce of skilled Egyptian laborers and peasants who worked on a rotating basis, as evidenced by the discovery of their tombs, gravesites, and nearby villages at Giza, complete with provisions for the afterlife. The popular myth of slave labor stems from Judeo-Christian traditions and Hollywood films, not actual archaeological findings.
Evidence against slave labor:
Worker Villages: Archaeologists have found workers' villages near the pyramids containing dormitories, bakeries, and other facilities, suggesting a well-organized, paid workforce.
Worker Tombs: Humble gravesites were found near the pharaohs' tombs, but they contained grave goods necessary for the afterlife, a kindness unlikely to be given to slaves.
Graffiti and Records: Graffiti found inside the Giza monuments reveals that workers were organized into teams with names like "Friends of Khufu," indicating a professional, organized, and possibly voluntary labor system.
Paid Labor: Workers were paid in food and beer, with the food rations being substantial and high-quality, demonstrating they were valued laborers, not enslaved people.
Why the misconception persists:
Hollywood and Popular Culture: Movies like The Ten Commandments and other popular media have contributed to the enduring image of slaves toiling under the pharaoh's whip.
Religious Narratives: The Judeo-Christian tradition's depiction of Jewish slaves building pyramids also plays a significant role.
Misinterpretation of Ancient Egyptian Society: There were indeed slaves in ancient Egypt, but evidence indicates the pyramid builders were a different group of laborers.
Who built the pyramids instead?
Skilled Craftsmen: A core group of skilled craftsmen and architects were essential for the project.
Seasonal Laborers: Many laborers were likely peasants and farmers who worked on the project during the agricultural off-season.
Organized Workforce: The project was a massive, organized state effort, potentially utilizing conscripted labor or a rotating system of motivated workers rather than a permanent enslaved workforce.

############

Harvard Archaeological Magazine Article

Not slaves. Archaeologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiFoYSYg4OQAxXPPUQIHT36LAMQFnoECCoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizamedia.rc.fas.harvard.edu%2Fimages%2FMFA-images%2FGiza%2FGizaImage%2Ffull%2Flibrary%2Flehner_harvard_mag.pdf&usg=AOvVaw00_4EXEzSyNFCcNELE-UT2&opi=89978449



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/2025 09:02AM by anybody.

I think religion came about because people wanted answers to the big "why?" questions -- why are we here, where are we going, what happens to us after we die? Plus the easiest explanation to utter calamities is that "god" was unhappy with you. Thus, "god" needed to be placated.

Religion also caters to social needs, and the politically powerful figured out long ago that it can be used to control the masses.

>>>I think religion came about because people wanted answers to the big "why?"

There is never an end to the "Why?" questions...

And then come the "How" questions, because of the need to do our best to control what comes next.

Are there really people who say, and mean, "Whatever will be, will be"?

Yeah. I do lean toward, "whateverwillbewillbe" and mean it.

Every time Peggy Lee sang, "Is that all there is?", I was like, "Yes, Peggy. It is."

Why isn't what is right in front of our faces enough? Challenging and easy and beautiful and ugly at the same time.
Options. The truth won't make you free but options will.

Humans think they are soooooooo special.

Amen to all that!

>> Are there really people who say, and mean, "Whatever will be, will be"?

At this point of my life, I'm one of those people. I became comfortable with not knowing. I became comfortable enough in my own skin to not worry about being judged and found wanting.

Show business is snow business. All the world is a stage.