Chapter 2: Gods

Ah. Religion. This is where things started to go wrong. Picture our proto-human Timmys, just starting to get along with self awareness and developing an imagination. Even before a written language he would have mentally assigned capital letters to the important events that affected his existence, such as Sun, Moon and Leopard-That-Ate-My-Wife. As generations survived, stories of proto-Timmy's survival would have endured. This awareness of all the beneficial and horrid forces that blighted Timmy and his familiy led to rituals of Deification. Deification begat Worship: they needed to encourage the Good Things and discourage the Bad. Worshiping the Gods became a safe option. If things were good, then it worked. If things weren't . . .well, it didn't cost them anything.

Skip ahead to a huge population explosion and migration. Our Timmy tribe did this when they procreated faster than the indigenous food supply. Eventually our Timmys (and their stories) discover science and move from the nomadic hunter-gatherer society to an organised agricultural environment. They stayed in a single place. And procreated even more enthusiastically (as demanded by most species' survival genes). They need the Good Things to feed themselves because their planet tilts at 23 degrees and brings quite harsh seasons (dependent on the latitude they migrated to). And so the Leopard-That-Ate-My-Wife is replaced by the Drought-That-Ate-My-Crops and the Bloody-Cold-That-Froze-Us-All. And so they prayed . . .

"Remaining in one place and procreating" eventually leads to city-states and empires. Compress a few thousand Timmys into a well and they start to find other Bad Things. Invisible Things. Things-That-Made-My-Wife-Bleed-And-Die. Let's call them spirits and witches and find someone to blame (and burn).

And, of course, our well of organised, imaginative, self aware Timmys decided to create leaders to deal with all the troublesome issues of the day. Like making sure that they are not murdered in their sleep by Bad Things, Visible or Invisible. "We pay our tithes; why aren't you protecting us?" So started institutions like the Inquisition. Serves you right, Timmy.

Civilisation reaches a point where science, as proven by the creation of complex architecture for church buildings, sundials for time keeping, almanacs for predictive weather forecasts, astronomy for navigation, metallurgy for weapons and armor, and the like, has now made the worship of all those old Gods irrelevant. Primitive, even! What began to replace all those deities and pantheons was a growing need for a single deity; a monotheism.

And that is where it gets really interesting!