CREATING RELIGION OUT OF NEED AND CONVENIENCE
If you were at this cocktail party with a room full of people and you were at the very end of the room, away from the entrance and you said to the person next to you: “we have to keep an eye on the door because Mary is about to arrive”
This person then tells the other one standing next to her: “I hear that Mary is due any time now, we have to watch out for her”
The next people in the middle of the room then passes it on to her peers standing next to them: “We heard that Mary was pregnant and due at any moment…we really have to be considerate and give her some help”
Yet again the story is repeated to one closer to the entrance: “Mary is about to drop her baby, it is due any time now and we have to be ready to drive her to the hospital”
One more person receives the message and passes it on: “Mary is having birthing pains and we have to drive her to the hospital because she has no husband to drive her there we must help her out”
The last one to receive the message then says to the person standing in the doorway: “Mary’s water just broke and she is having a bastard baby…the son of a bitch of the father won’t have anything to do with her so we have to drive her to the County Hospital”
Then Mary appears at the door, slim, radiant without the baby. The person who greets her says: “I thought you were having a baby?”
Mary: “But I am not even pregnant!”
It is not too far- fetched for something like that to happen in a room full of people; now add to the formula cultural and racial differences, geographic locations and distances, centuries and special interests.
We all know that history is written by the victors and it is cleaned up, sanitized if you will for consumption. After the passage of time a particular tale gets embedded in the culture and the general population…in the case of the Scriptures it was a population of illiterates and superstitious folks.
Is it plausible that the guys on the top of the food chain wanted to safeguard their positions and when they realized that the best way to keep the general population obedient and subservient was to feed them religion…the more the better, the more outlandish and exaggerated the easier it was for the masses to embrace it.
Also, we should realize something very obvious about the Scriptures. When you speak in verse it is easier to remember a refrain, one that rhymes and has an established order and style than extemporaneous story telling. So that it wasn’t only great-grandpa adding the thought that Mary was pregnant but he also interjected that Mary was a virgin and she was visited by the Holy Spirit and impregnated with the son of God…you see, great-grandpa had a very creative imagination.
Some religions are created just that way…we can even witness the process if we pay close attention. There are several religions that were born in the next to the last century and they were so obviously fabricated and filled with exaggerations, lies and assumptions that society had classified them as fringe cults…the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are but a couple of good examples.
We can use another analogy for example; it was a huge leap forward in the field of geology when someone theorized that the forces that created the Earth as we find it today (erosion, sedimentation, volcanic activity, continental drift, glacial activity, etc.) are still at work and we can study them today. Prior to that, geology was encumbered by creationism and geologists assumed the world was created a long time ago and they were only studying something that happened by willful intent in the distant past, but not happening now.
But the evidence of all these science fields kept piling up in favor of evolution and to discredit Creationism. It was no longer accepted to say that the world was 6,000 years old when you had conflicting evidence that it was much older than that…albeit we have some folks that still believe this Creationism crap to this day.
Religious creation occurs when one person either through madness, corruption, or ambition, makes up a story, and other people believe it. Those other people repeat it, but in the repeating also clean it up and embellish it a little to make it a better story. Different crazy/corrupt/ambitious people over time will take those stories handed down and try to take them off in different directions (Joseph Smith for example). Other legends get folded in and merged (like theologizing Bigfoot) and become a part of the larger myth.
You are also aware that our present religions incorporate many aspects of other ancient beliefs or sets of beliefs…like you see some of the Egyptians’ in the concept of monotheism and we could go on and on.
In a world without controls, these stories spread and grow unabated. The process of religious creation is going on all the time, and this is an example of how all modern religions came to be. Just because they happened a long time ago doesn't make them any more legitimate.
PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.bible-people.info/Joseph2.htm
http://www.bible-topten.com/films.htm
http://www.bible-topten.com/films.htm
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