Early Evolution of Religion

86:6.1Man in­her­ited a nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment, ac­quired a so­cial en­vi­ron­ment, and imag­ined a ghost en­vi­ron­ment. The state is man’s re­ac­tion to his nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment, the home to his so­cial en­vi­ron­ment, the church to his il­lu­sory ghost en­vi­ron­ment.

86:6.2Very early in the his­tory of man­kind the re­al­i­ties of the imag­i­nary world of ghosts and spir­its be­came uni­ver­sally be­lieved, and this newly imag­ined spirit world be­came a power in prim­i­tive so­ci­ety. The men­tal and moral life of all man­kind was mod­i­fied for all time by the ap­pear­ance of this new fac­tor in hu­man think­ing and act­ing.

86:6.3Into this ma­jor premise of il­lu­sion and ig­no­rance, mor­tal fear has packed all of the sub­se­quent su­per­sti­tion and re­li­gion of prim­i­tive peo­ples. This was man’s only re­li­gion up to the times of rev­e­la­tion, and to­day many of the world’s races have only this crude re­li­gion of evo­lu­tion.

86:6.4As evo­lu­tion pro­gressed, good luck be­came as­so­ci­ated with good spir­its and bad luck with bad spir­its. The dis­com­fort of en­forced adap­ta­tion to a chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment was re­garded as ill luck, the dis­plea­sure of the spirit ghosts. Prim­i­tive man slowly evolved re­li­gion out of his in­nate wor­ship urge and his mis­con­cep­tion of chance. Civ­i­lized man pro­vides schemes of in­sur­ance to over­come these chance oc­cur­rences; mod­ern sci­ence puts an ac­tu­ary with math­e­mat­i­cal reck­on­ing in the place of fic­ti­tious spir­its and whim­si­cal gods.

86:6.5Each pass­ing gen­er­a­tion smiles at the fool­ish su­per­sti­tions of its an­ces­tors while it goes on en­ter­tain­ing those fal­la­cies of thought and wor­ship which will give cause for fur­ther smil­ing on the part of en­light­ened pos­ter­ity.

86:6.6But at last the mind of prim­i­tive man was oc­cu­pied with thoughts which tran­scended all of his in­her­ent bi­o­logic urges; at last man was about to evolve an art of liv­ing based on some­thing more than re­sponse to ma­te­rial stim­uli. The be­gin­nings of a prim­i­tive philo­sophic life pol­icy were emerg­ing. A super­nat­u­ral stan­dard of liv­ing was about to ap­pear, for, if the spirit ghost in anger vis­its ill luck and in plea­sure good for­tune, then must hu­man con­duct be reg­u­lated ac­cord­ingly. The con­cept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this long be­fore the times of any rev­e­la­tion on earth.

86:6.7With the emer­gence of these con­cepts, there was ini­ti­ated the long and waste­ful strug­gle to ap­pease the ever-dis­pleased spir­its, the slav­ish bond­age to evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gious fear, that long waste of hu­man ef­fort upon tombs, tem­ples, sac­ri­fices, and priest­hoods. It was a ter­ri­ble and fright­ful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man therein achieved a nat­u­ral con­scious­ness of rel­a­tive right and wrong; hu­man ethics was born!