Let's take a look at a brief
history of
religion shall we?
ok, good.
Now we have to think back to when human kind was nothing but a bunch of
primitive tribes wandering around with bones in their
hair and shouting "yabba-dabba-doo" (like all my generation I believe that
cavemen used baby
mammoths for
vacuum cleaners and use lame geological-related puns to name everything). Well anyway, one of these Paleolithic
sages had to have come across the idea of "gods". And he started making one for every
phenomenon that he couldn't explain.
Lightning: "oh that Ork-ooga"
Earthquakes: "that's when Jugga-ppft blows his nose"
Floods: "caused by the mighty drool of Guuk the pig-god"
So the great
shaman tells the people that these things are caused by gods, and everyone just shrugs and goes on hunting and gathering (really, when everyday is a
struggle for survival do you have much time for appeasing and cowering? I don't think so).
From here religion began to grow, with the advent of tools and the wheel men started having more and more free time, this led to more
procreation mainly, but it also led to more time to listen to that
crazy shaman and his rantings. Well as most
memes do, religion started to grow and spread, and every time they needed something, they found a god to pray to for it. So religion grew, gods grew. By the time the
Romans came around they had gods for everything. Gods for
love and
war, gods for
wine and
cheese, personal gods (called
geniuses), and even a god of "gee I hope my
wife doesn't find out what I did with the
slave girl".
Meanwhile in
Egypt there was some debate over how many gods there were, the
people knew that there were a ton of gods, but they had some wacky
pharaoh telling them that "
Ra" was the only god. The
priests got together and strung him up by an uncomfortable
appendage. Also you had the
Hebrews, these wacky guys wandering around the desert who only had one god. Man what are they thinking! "Who do they prey to when their
tea gets
tepid?" said the other nations of the world. Some
nations thought the Hebrews were so
radical that they kill them all, but they were wiley (much like the coyote, only without the
ACME catalog to sell them defective
rocket-skates).
Then came along this guy
Jesus, they say he didn't have a father and some of those Hebrews said he was the son of their god. Well, we all know what the Romans did to him (once again strung up by uncomfortable appendages, and if you think that nails don't hurt, just take a shot at your
cat with the
nailgun and see what kind of noise it makes). Well enough people believed that this Jesus-dude was the
son of god and they started spreading the message to others. And they found that, "hey when people haven't actually met the guy it sounds pretty good!". So they got to converting, and pretty soon most of the world was on the "one-god
bandwagon" (with the aid of more stringing up of people by even more uncomfortable appendages).
Note: It seemed the Romans had a bit of a problem with this so they added a bunch of
saints, just so they had someone to pray to when their
quill ran out of
ink, or when they were low on food, etc...
In the east they had their own gods, the the Jesus-followers eventually got there, and up till now most people live in a "one-god
paradigm". To most people this god no longer has a name, it's just called "god" (I imagine a
white being with "g-o-d" printed in black letters across it's
chest). Our
deity has been abstracted, and with each passing
generation this abstraction becomes more and more apparent. Religion is on the
wane, the percentage of population who no longer believes in any diety grows with each passing generation. A few centuries from now people will look on our religion (and dub it "
mythology") the same way we do now to the
ancient beliefs of the
Greeks and Norse people.
Yes I know there are many inaccuracies in this node, but it is meant to be more humorous than accurate.
Rook: This is
satire and was never meant to be accurate. (did you
read the writeup, or just the node title?