From Dan Brown’s Origin
A Foundation of Religion
From Dan Brown’s Origin
Early humans had a relationship of wonder with their universe, especially with those phenomena they could not rationally understand. To solve these mysteries, they created a vast pantheon of gods and goddesses to explain anything that was beyond their understanding—thunder, tides, earthquakes, volcanoes, infertility, plagues, and even love. For the early Greeks, the ebb and flow of the ocean was attributed to the shifting moods of Poseidon. The seasonal change to winter was caused by the planet’s sadness at Persephone’s annual abduction into the underworld. For the Romans, volcanoes were believed to be the home of Vulcan—blacksmith to the gods—who worked in a giant forge beneath the mountain, causing flames to spew out of his chimney. The ancients invented countless gods to explain not only the mysteries of their planet, but also the mysteries of their own bodies. Infertility was caused by falling out of favor with the goddess Juno. Love was the result of being targeted by Eros. Epidemics were explained as a punishment sent by Apollo. When the ancients experienced gaps in their understanding of the world around them, they filled those gaps with God(s). Countless gods filled countless gaps. And yet, over the centuries, scientific knowledge increased. As the gaps in our understanding of the natural world gradually disappeared, our pantheon of gods began to shrink. For example, when we learned that the tides were caused by lunar cycles, Poseidon was no longer necessary, and we banished him as a foolish myth of an unenlightened time. The same fate befell all the gods—dying off, one by one, as they outlived their relevance to our evolving intellects. But make no mistake about it. The gods did not ‘go gentle into that good night’; it is a messy process for a culture to abandon its deities. Spiritual beliefs are etched deeply by our psyches at a young age by those we love and trust most—our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders. Therefore, any religious shifts occur over generations, and not without great angst, and often bloodshed. Zeus, the god of all gods, and the most feared and revered of all the pagan deities. Zeus, more than any other god, resisted his own extinction, mounting a violent battle against the dying of his own light, precisely as had the earlier gods Zeus had replaced. Zeus’s followers were so resistant to giving up on their god that the conquering faith of Christianity had no choice but to adopt the face of Zeus as the face of their new god. Today, we no longer believe in stories like those about Zeus—a boy raised by a goat and given power by one-eyed creatures called Cyclopes. For us, with the benefit of modern thinking, these tales have all been classified as mythology—quaint fictional stories that give us an entertaining glimpse into our superstitious past. Things are different now. We are the Moderns. We are an intellectually evolved and technologically skilled people. We do not believe in giant blacksmiths working under volcanoes or in gods that control the tides or seasons. We are nothing like our ancient ancestors. Or are we? We must consider ourselves modern rational individuals and yet our species’ most widespread religions include a whole host of magical claims—humans inexplicably rising from the dead, miraculous virgin births, vengeful gods that send plagues and floods, mystical promises of an afterlife in cloud-swept heavens or fiery hells. So just for a moment let us imagine the reaction of humankind’s future historians and anthropologists. With the benefit of perspective, will they look back on our religious beliefs and categorize them as the mythologies of an unenlightened time? Will they look at our gods as we look at Zeus? Will they collect our sacred scriptures and banish them to that dusty bookshelf of history?
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