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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
PAPER 86
EARLY EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
86:0.1
THE evolution of religion from the preceding and
primitive worship urge is not dependent on revelation.
The normal functioning of the human mind under the
directive influence of the sixth and seventh
mind-adjutants of universal spirit bestowal is wholly
sufficient to insure such development.
86:0.2
Man's earliest prereligious fear of the forces of nature
gradually became religious as nature became
personalized, spiritized, and eventually deified in
human consciousness. Religion of a primitive type was
therefore a natural biologic consequence of the
psychologic inertia of evolving animal minds after such
minds had once entertained concepts of the supernatural.
1. CHANCE: GOOD LUCK AND BAD LUCK
86:1.1
Aside from the natural worship urge, early evolutionary
religion had its roots of origin in the human
experiences of chance -- so-called luck, commonplace
happenings. Primitive man was a food hunter. The results
of hunting must ever vary, and this gives certain origin
to those experiences which man interprets as
good luck and
bad luck.
Mischance was a great factor in the lives of men and
women who lived constantly on the ragged edge of a
precarious and harassed existence.
86:1.2
The limited intellectual horizon of the savage so
concentrates the attention upon chance that luck becomes
a constant factor in his life. Primitive Urantians
struggled for existence, not for a standard of living;
they lived lives of peril in which chance played an
important role. The constant dread of unknown and unseen
calamity hung over these savages as a cloud of despair
which effectively eclipsed every pleasure; they lived in
constant dread of doing something that would bring bad
luck. Superstitious savages always feared a run of good
luck; they viewed such good fortune as a certain
harbinger of calamity.
86:1.3
This ever-present dread of bad luck was paralyzing. Why
work hard and reap bad luck -- nothing for something --
when one might drift along and encounter good luck --
something for nothing? Unthinking men forget good luck
-- take it for granted -- but they painfully remember
bad luck.
86:1.4
Early man lived in uncertainty and in constant fear of
chance -- bad luck. Life was an exciting game of chance;
existence was a gamble. It is no wonder that partially
civilized people still believe in chance and evince
lingering predispositions to gambling. Primitive man
alternated between two potent interests: the passion of
getting something for nothing and the fear of getting
nothing for something. And this gamble of existence was
the main interest and the supreme fascination of the
early savage mind.
86:1.5
The later herders held the same views of chance and
luck, while the still later agriculturists were
increasingly conscious that crops were immediately
influenced by many things over which man had little or
no control. The farmer found himself the victim of
drought, floods, hail, storms, pests, and plant
diseases, as well as heat and cold. And as all of these
natural influences affected individual prosperity, they
were regarded as good luck or bad luck.
86:1.6
This notion of chance and luck strongly pervaded the
philosophy of all ancient peoples. Even in recent times
in the Wisdom of Solomon it is said: "I returned and saw
that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither bread to the wise, nor riches to men of
understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but fate and
chance befall them all. For man knows not his fate; as
fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught
in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil
time when it falls suddenly upon them."
2. THE PERSONIFICATION OF CHANCE
86:2.1
Anxiety 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.
86:2.2
The 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.
86:2.3
The 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.
86:2.4
Man 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.
86:2.5
But 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.
86:2.6
The 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.
86:2.7
But 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.
3. DEATH -- THE INEXPLICABLE
86:3.1
Death was the supreme shock to evolving man, the most
perplexing combination of chance and mystery. Not the
sanctity of life but the shock of death inspired fear
and thus effectively fostered religion. Among savage
peoples death was ordinarily due to violence, so that
nonviolent death became increasingly mysterious. Death
as a natural and expected end of life was not clear to
the consciousness of primitive people, and it has
required age upon age for man to realize its
inevitability.
86:3.2
Early man accepted life as a fact, while he regarded
death as a visitation of some sort. All races have their
legends of men who did not die, vestigial traditions of
the early attitude toward death. Already in the human
mind there existed the nebulous concept of a hazy and
unorganized spirit world, a domain whence came all that
is inexplicable in human life, and death was added to
this long list of unexplained phenomena.
86:3.3
All human disease and natural death was at first
believed to be due to spirit influence. Even at the
present time some civilized races regard disease as
having been produced by "the enemy" and depend upon
religious ceremonies to effect healing. Later and more
complex systems of theology still ascribe death to the
action of the spirit world, all of which has led to such
doctrines as original sin and the fall of man.
86:3.4
It was the realization of impotency before the mighty
forces of nature, together with the recognition of human
weakness before the visitations of sickness and death,
that impelled the savage to seek for help from the
supermaterial world, which he vaguely visualized as the
source of these mysterious vicissitudes of life.
4. THE DEATH-SURVIVAL CONCEPT
86:4.1
The concept of a supermaterial phase of mortal
personality was born of the unconscious and purely
accidental association of the occurrences of everyday
life plus the ghost dream. The simultaneous dreaming
about a departed chief by several members of his tribe
seemed to constitute convincing evidence that the old
chief had really returned in some form. It was all very
real to the savage who would awaken from such dreams
reeking with sweat, trembling, and screaming.
86:4.2
The dream origin of the belief in a future existence
explains the tendency always to imagine unseen things in
the terms of things seen. And presently this new
dream-ghost-future-life concept began effectively to
antidote the death fear associated with the biologic
instinct of self-preservation.
86:4.3
Early man was also much concerned about his breath,
especially in cold climates, where it appeared as a
cloud when exhaled. The
breath of life
was regarded as the one phenomenon which differentiated
the living and the dead. He knew the breath could leave
the body, and his dreams of doing all sorts of queer
things while asleep convinced him that there was
something immaterial about a human being. The most
primitive idea of the human soul, the ghost, was derived
from the breath-dream idea-system.
86:4.4
Eventually the savage conceived of himself as a double
-- body and breath. The breath minus the body equaled a
spirit, a ghost. While having a very definite human
origin, ghosts, or spirits, were regarded as superhuman.
And this belief in the existence of disembodied spirits
seemed to explain the occurrence of the unusual, the
extraordinary, the infrequent, and the inexplicable.
86:4.5
The primitive doctrine of survival after death was not
necessarily a belief in immortality. Beings who could
not count over twenty could hardly conceive of infinity
and eternity; they rather thought of recurring
incarnations.
86:4.6
The orange race was especially given to belief in
transmigration and reincarnation. This idea of
reincarnation originated in the observance of hereditary
and trait resemblance of offspring to ancestors. The
custom of naming children after grandparents and other
ancestors was due to belief in reincarnation. Some
later-day races believed that man died from three to
seven times. This belief (residual from the teachings of
Adam about the mansion worlds), and many other remnants
of revealed religion, can be found among the otherwise
absurd doctrines of twentieth-century barbarians.
86:4.7
Early man entertained no ideas of hell or future
punishment. The savage looked upon the future life as
just like this one, minus all ill luck. Later on, a
separate destiny for good ghosts and bad ghosts --
heaven and hell -- was conceived. But since many
primitive races believed that man entered the next life
just as he left this one, they did not relish the idea
of becoming old and decrepit. The aged much preferred to
be killed before becoming too infirm.
86:4.8
Almost every group had a different idea regarding the
destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed that weak
men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades as a
fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these
unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter
shadows. The early Andites thought their ghosts returned
to the ancestral homelands. The Chinese and Egyptians
once believed that soul and body remained together.
Among the Egyptians this led to careful tomb
construction and efforts at body preservation. Even
modern peoples seek to arrest the decay of the dead. The
Hebrews conceived that a phantom replica of the
individual went down to Sheol; it could not return to
the land of the living. They did make that important
advance in the doctrine of the evolution of the soul.
5. THE GHOST-SOUL CONCEPT
86:5.1
The nonmaterial part of man has been variously termed
ghost, spirit, shade, phantom, specter, and latterly
soul. The
soul was early man's dream double; it was in every way
exactly like the mortal himself except that it was not
responsive to touch. The belief in dream doubles led
directly to the notion that all things animate and
inanimate had souls as well as men. This concept tended
long to perpetuate the nature-spirit beliefs; the
Eskimos still conceive that everything in nature has a
spirit.
86:5.2
The ghost soul could be heard and seen, but not touched.
Gradually the dream life of the race so developed and
expanded the activities of this evolving spirit world
that death was finally regarded as "giving up the
ghost." All primitive tribes, except those little above
animals, have developed some concept of the soul. As
civilization advances, this superstitious concept of the
soul is destroyed, and man is wholly dependent on
revelation and personal religious experience for his new
idea of the soul as the joint creation of the
God-knowing mortal mind and its indwelling divine
spirit, the Thought Adjuster.
86:5.3
Early mortals usually failed to differentiate the
concepts of an indwelling spirit and a soul of
evolutionary nature. The savage was much confused as to
whether the ghost soul was native to the body or was an
external agency in possession of the body. The absence
of reasoned thought in the presence of perplexity
explains the gross inconsistencies of the savage view of
souls, ghosts, and spirits.
86:5.4
The soul was thought of as being related to the body as
the perfume to the flower. The ancients believed that
the soul could leave the body in various ways, as in:
1. Ordinary and transient fainting.
2. Sleeping, natural dreaming.
3. Coma and unconsciousness associated with disease and
accidents.
4. Death, permanent departure.
86:5.5
The savage looked upon sneezing as an abortive attempt
of the soul to escape from the body. Being awake and on
guard, the body was able to thwart the soul's attempted
escape. Later on, sneezing was always accompanied by
some religious expression, such as "God bless you!"
86:5.6
Early in evolution sleep was regarded as proving that
the ghost soul could be absent from the body, and it was
believed that it could be called back by speaking or
shouting the sleeper's name. In other forms of
unconsciousness the soul was thought to be farther away,
perhaps trying to escape for good -- impending death.
Dreams were looked upon as the experiences of the soul
during sleep while temporarily absent from the body. The
savage believes his dreams to be just as real as any
part of his waking experience. The ancients made a
practice of awaking sleepers gradually so that the soul
might have time to get back into the body.
86:5.7
All down through the ages men have stood in awe of the
apparitions of the night season, and the Hebrews were no
exception. They truly believed that God spoke to them in
dreams, despite the injunctions of Moses against this
idea. And Moses was right, for ordinary dreams are not
the methods employed by the personalities of the
spiritual world when they seek to communicate with
material beings.
86:5.8
The ancients believed that souls could enter animals or
even inanimate objects. This culminated in the werewolf
ideas of animal identification. A person could be a
law-abiding citizen by day, but when he fell asleep, his
soul could enter a wolf or some other animal to prowl
about on nocturnal depredations.
86:5.9
Primitive men thought that the soul was associated with
the breath, and that its qualities could be imparted or
transferred by the breath. The brave chief would breathe
upon the newborn child, thereby imparting courage. Among
early Christians the ceremony of bestowing the Holy
Spirit was accompanied by breathing on the candidates.
Said the Psalmist: "By the word of the Lord were the
heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of
his mouth." It was long the custom of the eldest son to
try to catch the last breath of his dying father.
86:5.10
The shadow came, later on, to be feared and revered
equally with the breath. The reflection of oneself in
the water was also sometimes looked upon as proof of the
double self, and mirrors were regarded with
superstitious awe. Even now many civilized persons turn
the mirror to the wall in the event of death. Some
backward tribes still believe that the making of
pictures, drawings, models, or images removes all or a
part of the soul from the body; hence such are
forbidden.
86:5.11
The soul was generally thought of as being identified
with the breath, but it was also located by various
peoples in the head, hair, heart, liver, blood, and fat.
The "crying out of Abel's blood from the ground" is
expressive of the onetime belief in the presence of the
ghost in the blood. The Semites taught that the soul
resided in the bodily fat, and among many the eating of
animal fat was taboo. Head hunting was a method of
capturing an enemy's soul, as was scalping. In recent
times the eyes have been regarded as the windows of the
soul.
86:5.12
Those who held the doctrine of three or four souls
believed that the loss of one soul meant discomfort, two
illness, three death. One soul lived in the breath, one
in the head, one in the hair, one in the heart. The sick
were advised to stroll about in the open air with the
hope of recapturing their strayed souls. The greatest of
the medicine men were supposed to exchange the sick soul
of a diseased person for a new one, the "new birth."
86:5.13
The children of Badanan developed a belief in two souls,
the breath and the shadow. The early Nodite races
regarded man as consisting of two persons, soul and
body. This philosophy of human existence was later
reflected in the Greek viewpoint. The Greeks themselves
believed in three souls; the vegetative resided in the
stomach, the animal in the heart, the intellectual in
the head. The Eskimos believe that man has three parts:
body, soul, and name.
6. THE GHOST-SPIRIT ENVIRONMENT
86:6.1
Man 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.
86:6.2
Very 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.
86:6.3
Into 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.
86:6.4
As 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.
86:6.5
Each 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.
86:6.6
But 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.
86:6.7
With 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!
7. THE FUNCTION OF PRIMITIVE RELIGION
86:7.1
The savage felt the need of insurance, and he therefore
willingly paid his burdensome premiums of fear,
superstition, dread, and priest gifts toward his policy
of magic insurance against ill luck. Primitive religion
was simply the payment of premiums on insurance against
the perils of the forests; civilized man pays material
premiums against the accidents of industry and the
exigencies of modern modes of living.
86:7.2
Modern society is removing the business of insurance
from the realm of priests and religion, placing it in
the domain of economics. Religion is concerning itself
increasingly with the insurance of life beyond the
grave. Modern men, at least those who think, no longer
pay wasteful premiums to control luck. Religion is
slowly ascending to higher philosophic levels in
contrast with its former function as a scheme of
insurance against bad luck.
86:7.3
But these ancient ideas of religion prevented men from
becoming fatalistic and hopelessly pessimistic; they
believed they could at least do something to influence
fate. The religion of ghost fear impressed upon men that
they must
regulate their conduct, that there was a
supermaterial world which was in control of human
destiny.
86:7.4
Modern civilized races are just emerging from ghost fear
as an explanation of luck and the commonplace
inequalities of existence. Mankind is achieving
emancipation from the bondage of the ghost-spirit
explanation of ill luck. But while men are giving up the
erroneous doctrine of a spirit cause of the vicissitudes
of life, they exhibit a surprising willingness to accept
an almost equally fallacious teaching which bids them
attribute all human inequalities to political
misadaptation, social injustice, and industrial
competition. But new legislation, increasing
philanthropy, and more industrial reorganization,
however good in and of themselves, will not remedy the
facts of birth and the accidents of living. Only
comprehension of facts and wise manipulation within the
laws of nature will enable man to get what he wants and
to avoid what he does not want. Scientific knowledge,
leading to scientific action, is the only antidote for
so-called accidental ills.
86:7.5
Industry, war, slavery, and civil government arose in
response to the social evolution of man in his natural
environment; religion similarly arose as his response to
the illusory environment of the imaginary ghost world.
Religion was an evolutionary development of
self-maintenance, and it has worked, notwithstanding
that it was originally erroneous in concept and utterly
illogical.
86:7.6
Primitive religion prepared the soil of the human mind,
by the powerful and awesome force of false fear, for the
bestowal of a bona fide spiritual force of supernatural
origin, the Thought Adjuster. And the divine Adjusters
have ever since labored to transmute God-fear into
God-love. Evolution may be slow, but it is unerringly
effective.
86:7.7
Presented by an Evening Star of Nebadon.
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