Early Evolution of Religion

86:2.1Anx­i­ety 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.

86:2.2The 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.

86:2.3The 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.

86:2.4Man 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.

86:2.5But 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 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.

86:2.6The 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.

86:2.7But 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.