Hope is what draws people to religion. The world tends to be a very cruel place, with very little remorse or regret. People see a tendency towards violence and crime; people see corruption and evil all around them. They see their toils go unmerited, slaves to the economic system of their world. Life sucks for a low-wage worker in a job with little room for promotion. They struggle to make ends meet, they struggle to buy food and pay rent and pay for clothes and heat. Meanwhile, they can see the glamour and luxury celebrities live in; they see the glory of the rich, and know they cannot obtain it. Life is going nowhere for them, there is no point to continuing on, no point in living in poverty or suffering anymore. There is no hope. But these people are needed, needed for the economy and needed for the diversity of society. You can’t have them living in hopelessness; they would be very unproductive and would have a tendency to commit suicide or to live lawlessly. You need something to keep them going, something to drive their lives, something to give them hope and to inspire them to live long lives. Something like, say, Heaven.

            And along the way you can answer all of those philosophical questions. You can answer: “Why am I the way I am?” “Why do I have these talents and these deficiencies?” “Why am I poor while others are rich?” “Why is the universe the way it is?” “Why are people the way they are?” Because to an average person, “It just is,” is not a good enough answer. People want life to have a purpose; people want life to have a goal; people want to have hope. Saying that life is simply the random interaction of billions upon billions upon billions of protons, neutrons, electrons, and any other subatomic particles you can think of, is not good enough for most people. Humans want an explanation; they want answers to their questions. But not just any answers, answers that give them a purpose. It would be counterproductive to explain everything as a random event, because if life has been created through some random process it does not have a purpose. Why are we here? We are here because this random event happened to occur; we are here because of luck. That’s not very reassuring, nor is it very inspiring. People need purpose; people need hope to keep on living. So while you are trying to give people hope and purpose, why not answer all those other questions while you’re at it. Why don’t you make something like, say, God?

            Without God, life makes no sense. Does this phrase sound familiar to anyone? There are two sides to this statement. One is what the theologians want you to believe, that life HAS to make sense, so you must believe in God, who makes sense of life. The other side is what I believe, that life does not necessarily have to make sense, but that God most definitely was created to make sense of life. I, however, am in a minority. Most want to know why the world it is the way it is; most want the world to make sense. And if you are someone in power, wanting to give people enough hope to keep on living and working, which side of the statement do you want to take? The answer to this simple political question is obvious: the one that the most people fall under.

So you create God, and He has a divine plan that explains anything and everything. Why are things the way they are? Because God intended them to be so. Simple enough. And this answer works for everything. Every disability, every malady of life, every catastrophe, and every miracle can be explained by “God has a purpose for this.” We may never be able to figure out exactly what that is, but God most definitely has a purpose for it. But people may question this master plan for the universe, so you give God the attribute of omniscience and you make God totally good. God must know what he is doing, because He knows everything, and whatever he has planned it must be good, because whatever God does is good. Add on the fact that God is omnipotent and you’ve explained every natural occurrence known to man. “Why did I happen to survive that head-on-collision? No, it can’t just be luck. It must be an act of God, because He knew I would be in this situation, and He wanted to save me. He must have a loftier purpose for me.” And the creators of religion, those who wanted to control society, created God, and saw that It was good. Good for giving people what they wanted, hope and purpose, and also good for cover, good for a fall back answer to anything. It is God’s Will. Why am I poor and he is rich? No, it’s not because he was lucky enough to be in the right place and the right time so he can start hoarding as much money as possible while gleefully sitting back and completely ignoring all the hardworking, wage earning people that make him rich. No, it’s not that it was just luck that he was born into money and you weren’t. No, it’s not luck that he was born with athletic talent and you weren’t while people will pay millions of dollars for him to play on their team for their fans who will pay hundreds of dollars to watch him and you will be a lowly worker. No, it’s not just luck that your wife contracted cancer and is slowly withering away to nothing in front of your eyes. It’s God’s Will. It all fits into His divine plan, His eternal scheme for the universe. His plan for submission and the subversion of uprisings and revolutions; His plan for hope and purpose, even in the face of the utmost despair. And remember, God is always right, and who is the clay to question the potter anyways?

And who is God anyway? Well, He is infinite and He is perfect. But what do those things really mean? Can any human actually grasp those concepts? No, and that is the point. A person cannot understand what omnipotence is, all they can understand is what it is not, namely, human powers. The same goes for omniscience and omnipresence and totally good. I don’t know what being everywhere at the same time is like, but I know what being in one place is like. God is infinite. You cannot rationalize that statement. The only concepts that a person has of the infinite is the negation of the finite, the negation of what they actually can understand and know. Finite beings cannot comprehend the meanings or intentions of infinite beings because finite beings can only think in terms of the finite. Convenient, isn’t it, that the explanation for the world is in concepts that we cannot understand or comprehend. You cannot question because you cannot comprehend, you cannot propose alternatives because you cannot understand the work and the intentions and the thoughts of the infinite.

So, you’ve got this Perfect Being that people cannot even attempt to understand, and He is the answer to every question, the purpose behind everything. And while you are handing out hope and purpose to those who most desperately need it the most, you infuse them with morality. It’s like slipping a pill into your dog’s food; you know they’ll eat the food, and hope that they down the medication as well. Now, I’m not saying that trying to subvert some behaviors is necessarily a bad thing. It does seem, however, like a somewhat underhanded and like a definite means to controlling a society’s behavior. This drug serves as an antidepressant, gives hope, and inspires people to keep on living through thick and thin. Side effect: you have to do what we, I mean God says, or else. That’s what the fire and brimstone of the Great Awakening was all about. Scaring people into morality with threats of an afterlife. No one really knows what happens when you die, but it would be a great scare tactic to believe that each person has a soul that could be punished eternally for going against what God has decreed. Except the whole “or else” part kind of takes away from hope, so we’ll give God the power to forgive and we’ll say that God loves you no matter what, but you’ll have no idea what this love is since it is God’s Love, an infinite love. So, not only do they use the threat of this afterlife thing, but they also create a system of guilt to further gain compliance. The concept of eternal damnation may be too abstract and hard to conceptualize, but disregarding the love of your creator and the disappointment that follows, now that is something a person can actually conceive, and it is a potent tool.

So you fabricate an afterlife, and you fabricate guilt, and you use them against the masses. You try to control the masses, and use them towards your purposes, be that as peons or serfs or factory workers. You can get them to travel to the Middle East to retake the Holy Land, and, well, steal some stuff along the way, at least during the later Crusades. Anyways, those high up in the Church and those in charge of the Establishment still, although it has lessened greatly since, say, the Renaissance, have power over the people. They have created a culture where it seems like most of the believers will accept whatever they are told, and not even think twice about it. Or they have created a culture that has been indoctrinated and trained to think a certain way, the way of the Establishment, and will see the world with their concept, their order, understand things in their way. By controlling what people believe and what they think, you can control their behavior; you can get them to do what you want because you have created a framework and limited their mind to a singular way of thinking.

I have been told that God is supposed to the first priority in your life. God is not to be forgotten, even though He often is so. The implications are two fold. First, God is the first priority and should be considered in every instance and every action that occurs during life. This is the framework; God is supposed to be salient. The saliency of God leads to the saliency of His ideals, which leads to the saliency of what you are supposed to do and what will happen if you do not act in accordance with what you are supposed to do. Second, failure leads to guilt. If God is not your first priority, the guilt that is imposed upon you will make you try to do so; you will feel the need to put yourself within the framework. You will, or at least attempt to, fix their problem for them. If you do not act as you are supposed, act against God, you are supposed to feel guilty, and more than likely you will feel guilty. And because this guilt feels far worse than the pleasure pursued by acting against God, you will feel the need to never make that same mistake again. This cycle of guilt and self-punishment will lead you back to doing what they want. In either case, any action outside of the created framework results in a feeling of guilt, which then results in a more determined resolve to think and act within the framework. The problem of getting people to stay within the framework is solved automatically by the principles those people believe. It is both remarkable and ingenious.

The question remains, what will they do with this control? If there is no purpose to life, why are they trying to control people? To this, I do not have an answer. Perhaps it is to keep the rich rich, because it gives people a reason not to cause too much of an uproar by not making material success in this life an ultimate goal. Maybe it is to create a greater order and structure to society, because if there are no moral consequences to this life, you could delve into complete and utter chaos that would be very much like Hobbes’ State of Nature. It is a possibility that the hedonism of the few who have power, those who want to be as happy as they possibly can be in this life, they know that their theory of life cannot apply to everyone. If everyone were seeking to be as happy as they possibly can be, nothing would be accomplished. If you think that only happiness in this life matters, why would you go to work, why would you do anything but have fun all day long for your entire life? It would be just like communism; it’s unrealistic, society would crumble. And that is probably the answer; religion is meant as a control on the masses in order to keep a well-ordered society. You teach the people to not be overly ambitious. You tell them that while happiness in this life is good, you have to accept you can’t have fun all the time. You teach them obedience. You teach them to act in a certain way, and you teach them to not do certain things. You constrict their behavior through their beliefs, which you teach them. And you get social order. You emerge from the chaos of the State of Nature and you have a structured society.

But, no, it goes deeper than that. It’s not just teaching that while happiness in this life is good, you have to accept you can’t have fun all the time; it borders on teaching what happiness is. You are supposed to praise God, and you are supposed to celebrate God. Simple equation: God=Happiness, and a true happiness or a real happiness at that. And so the concept of happiness is changed. God is the number one priority; God is the most salient. You are supposed to praise God as much as possible, and therefore happiness is infused into your life as much as possible. Accordingly, a sense of optimism is supposed to be felt throughout life. A sense that it doesn’t matter what goes down, good or bad, ‘cuz I got God. And this new happiness, this new sense that the “happiness” of life doesn’t really matter; it eliminates feelings of revolution. By getting people to believe that excelling in this life, outside of the framework handed down by God, they are less likely to fight what others may see as injustice. Acceptance of the social order, because it doesn’t really matter, leads to abuses of the social order. If you can get someone to not care about you taking advantage of them, won’t you continue to take advantage of them?

 

Religion: The Original Prozac. Hope to keep you going. A new happiness to help you ignore abuse; to help keep you happy and hopeful. Guilt to keep you within the system; to make you want to keep yourself within the system. And the decree that you should spread the Word, and thus propagate the system and spread the system. Ingenious.