The Later Evolution of Religion

92:6.1Twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Uran­tia re­li­gions pre­sent an in­ter­est­ing study of the so­cial evo­lu­tion of man’s wor­ship im­pulse. Many faiths have pro­gressed very lit­tle since the days of the ghost cult. The Pyg­mies of Africa have no re­li­gious re­ac­tions as a class, al­though some of them be­lieve slightly in a spirit en­vi­ron­ment. They are to­day just where prim­i­tive man was when the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion be­gan. The ba­sic be­lief of prim­i­tive re­li­gion was sur­vival af­ter death. The idea of wor­ship­ing a per­sonal God in­di­cates ad­vanced evo­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ment, even the first stage of rev­e­la­tion. The Dyaks have evolved only the most prim­i­tive re­li­gious prac­tices. The com­par­a­tively re­cent Es­ki­mos and Amerinds had very mea­ger con­cepts of God; they be­lieved in ghosts and had an in­def­i­nite idea of sur­vival of some sort af­ter death. Pres­ent-day na­tive Aus­tralians have only a ghost fear, dread of the dark, and a crude an­ces­tor ven­er­a­tion. The Zu­lus are just evolv­ing a re­li­gion of ghost fear and sac­ri­fice. Many African tribes, ex­cept through mis­sion­ary work of Chris­tians and Mo­hammedans, are not yet be­yond the fe­tish stage of re­li­gious evo­lu­tion. But some groups have long held to the idea of mono­the­ism, like the one­time Thra­cians, who also be­lieved in im­mor­tal­ity.

92:6.2On Uran­tia, evo­lu­tion­ary and rev­e­la­tory re­li­gion are pro­gress­ing side by side while they blend and co­a­lesce into the di­ver­si­fied the­o­logic sys­tems found in the world in the times of the in­dite­ment of these pa­pers. These re­li­gions, the re­li­gions of twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Uran­tia, may be enu­mer­ated as fol­lows:

92:6.31. Hin­duism—the most an­cient.

92:6.42. The He­brew re­li­gion.

92:6.53. Bud­dhism.

92:6.64. The Con­fu­cian teach­ings.

92:6.75. The Taoist be­liefs.

92:6.86. Zoroas­tri­an­ism.

92:6.97. Shinto.

92:6.108. Jain­ism.

92:6.119. Chris­tian­ity.

92:6.1210. Is­lam.

92:6.1311. Sikhism—the most re­cent.

92:6.14The most ad­vanced re­li­gions of an­cient times were Hin­duism and Ju­daism, and each re­spec­tively has greatly in­flu­enced the course of re­li­gious de­vel­op­ment in Ori­ent and Oc­ci­dent. Both Hin­dus and He­brews be­lieved that their re­li­gions were in­spired and re­vealed, and they be­lieved all oth­ers to be deca­dent forms of the one true faith.

92:6.15In­dia is di­vided among Hindu, Sikh, Mo­hammedan, and Jain, each pic­tur­ing God, man, and the uni­verse as these are var­i­ously con­ceived. China fol­lows the Taoist and the Con­fu­cian teach­ings; Shinto is revered in Japan.

92:6.16The great in­ter­na­tional, in­ter­ra­cial faiths are the He­braic, Bud­dhist, Chris­tian, and Is­lamic. Bud­dhism stretches from Cey­lon and Burma through Ti­bet and China to Japan. It has shown an adapt­abil­ity to the mores of many peo­ples that has been equaled only by Chris­tian­ity.

92:6.17The He­brew re­li­gion en­com­passes the philo­sophic tran­si­tion from poly­the­ism to mono­the­ism; it is an evo­lu­tion­ary link be­tween the re­li­gions of evo­lu­tion and the re­li­gions of rev­e­la­tion. The He­brews were the only west­ern peo­ple to fol­low their early evo­lu­tion­ary gods straight through to the God of rev­e­la­tion. But this truth never be­came widely ac­cepted un­til the days of Isa­iah, who once again taught the blended idea of a racial de­ity com­bined with a Uni­ver­sal Cre­ator: “O Lord of Hosts, God of Is­rael, you are God, even you alone; you have made heaven and earth.” At one time the hope of the sur­vival of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion lay in the sub­lime He­braic con­cepts of good­ness and the ad­vanced Hel­lenic con­cepts of beauty.

92:6.18The Chris­tian re­li­gion is the re­li­gion about the life and teach­ings of Christ based upon the the­ol­ogy of Ju­daism, mod­i­fied fur­ther through the as­sim­i­la­tion of cer­tain Zoroas­trian teach­ings and Greek phi­los­o­phy, and for­mu­lated pri­mar­ily by three in­di­vid­u­als: Philo, Pe­ter, and Paul. It has passed through many phases of evo­lu­tion since the time of Paul and has be­come so thor­oughly Oc­ci­den­tal­ized that many non-Eu­ro­pean peo­ples very nat­u­rally look upon Chris­tian­ity as a strange rev­e­la­tion of a strange God and for strangers.

92:6.19Is­lam is the re­li­gio-cul­tural con­nec­tive of North Africa, the Lev­ant, and south­east­ern Asia. It was Jew­ish the­ol­ogy in con­nec­tion with the later Chris­tian teach­ings that made Is­lam mono­the­is­tic. The fol­low­ers of Mo­hammed stum­bled at the ad­vanced teach­ings of the Trin­ity; they could not com­pre­hend the doc­trine of three di­vine per­son­al­i­ties and one De­ity. It is al­ways dif­fi­cult to in­duce evo­lu­tion­ary minds sud­denly to ac­cept ad­vanced re­vealed truth. Man is an evo­lu­tion­ary crea­ture and in the main must get his re­li­gion by evo­lu­tion­ary tech­niques.

92:6.20An­ces­tor wor­ship one­time con­sti­tuted a de­cided ad­vance in re­li­gious evo­lu­tion, but it is both amaz­ing and re­gret­table that this prim­i­tive con­cept per­sists in China, Japan, and In­dia amidst so much that is rel­a­tively more ad­vanced, such as Bud­dhism and Hin­duism. In the Oc­ci­dent, an­ces­tor wor­ship de­vel­oped into the ven­er­a­tion of na­tional gods and re­spect for racial heroes. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury this hero-ven­er­at­ing na­tion­al­is­tic re­li­gion makes its ap­pear­ance in the var­i­ous rad­i­cal and na­tion­al­is­tic sec­u­larisms which char­ac­ter­ize many races and na­tions of the Oc­ci­dent. Much of this same at­ti­tude is also found in the great uni­ver­si­ties and the larger in­dus­trial com­mu­ni­ties of the En­glish-speak­ing peo­ples. Not very dif­fer­ent from these con­cepts is the idea that re­li­gion is but “a shared quest of the good life.” The “na­tional re­li­gions” are noth­ing more than a re­ver­sion to the early Ro­man em­peror wor­ship and to Shinto—wor­ship of the state in the im­pe­rial fam­ily.