With hindsight 20-20, I am increasingly boggled by what kept me religious way into my 40s! What conspired to blind me to live a life built around irrational belief states? Why didn’t I ask questions that now seem so obvious for me to ask and challenge the indoctrination I was subjected to?
The answer that grinds into revealing itself to me is the inertia of social conditioning. The hand-me-down worldview of ‘servility’ had done its job of coating layer upon layer of unquestioning apathy to what really made living good – freedom! Freedom to create or participate in a full life! Agreed, serf mentality is older than our species, anthropologically speaking, as we trace group and social dynamics in apes, monkeys and wolves to fish, bees and ants. Only in the past century has the human animal freed itself enough to step outside of tribal, overlord-type societies where violent power is vested in single individual (or ‘Leviathan’ as Steven Pinker would put it) as a voluntary consensus for controlling anarchy, thus effecting the surrender of personal freedoms for societal security.
So, before Leviathan became the modus operandi of disjointed but fairly aware tribes across the globe, ‘ruler’ types (powerful, paranoid, egoistic men mostly) have had to fight off opposition, coerce their populations and entice loyalty from the serfs and vassals by the strength of their ruthlessness. There already was established a priesthood that had cobbled a place for themselves (priests, shamans, soothsayers, mediums, etc) via a singular ‘loophole’ of ancient epistemology – human fear and lack of understanding of fearful events like storms, eclipses, bad dreams, and even death. The toss up to explain these would be between natural or supernatural agencies. Of course, science wasn’t advanced enough so the former could prevail. The ‘leviathans’ then co-opted this system of divine agency as the final seal of power of the ‘alpha’. Of course, the physically brave always ended up taking on the mantle of ‘lordship’ but their support and validation came from the physically weak but shrewd priesthood.
In the now and here, this same serfdom comes alive when we agree to subject ourselves to an extra-human (instead of a human and natural) power. From an evolutionary perspective, the very preponderance of non-alpha ‘serf-like’ beings following a command structure so as to keep things in ‘order’ if not for the power requirement of the ‘alpha male’, is evident in society now. We all want to be good followers and contributors to the ‘tribe’; small pawns dancing subserviently to commands of Kings and Queens! Very few alpha/king/leader/lord genes survive and even if they do, it has diluted over generations into a quiet, disengaged or profit-from-the-status-quo-system types. You’ll see these as the alpha go-getters who operate within the system to become leaders within society in democratic ways. But bondsman/slave/servant memes are legion!
I have to confess I was (and in some way still am) a slave to that memetic memory. But I never let the foundational aspect of ‘respect and mutual beneficence’, human values much deeper and richer than the ones commandeered by religion, out of sight of my worldview. I was for all intents and purposes deeply religious – attending church, participating in superstitious rituals, having priests pray over my home and my vehicles. But there always was this spark that kept lighting every now and then that showed these actions in light of the deeper construct of human interconnectedness and the only way religion could hijack any part of ‘me’ was through such ideas of anthropological enlightenment: aggrieved tolerance to ‘you-win-I-win-we-all-win’; sex and propagation to love and pleasure; mutual benefit to friendship; sharing to altruistic charity. These are among the many connections we humans have made in our collective temperament over a period of enlightenment thus drawing from the memetic imperative to an altogether human trait. I see idiotic religionists claiming this ‘goodness’ as mandated externally by supermen or yahweh or some such. What a waste!
Turning a blind eye to the iron-age, senseless, insecure, churlish, misogynistic, conformist nonsense in the bible and other holy books was integral to how I reconciled the servitude of our tens of thousands of years of social make-up to this sudden spurt of democratic individuality and freedom that the planet has achieved. But as soon as this awareness became conscious within me, I knew I could no longer allow the darkness to perpetuate. I feel almost evangelical about this sensibility and the joy it brings! I will do everything humanely possible to bring these ideas to people who surround me and rejoice as they free themselves from ancient shackles. Now, even the utility value of religion has turned a full 180 degrees in my mind – from one of comfort and hope to one of treachery and malignancy. I abhor how childish and unnecessary this whole root ideology of sycophantic ‘servility’ entombed within religion is and how easily the world will be a better place without it.
My 2 cents 