February 14th, 2021
Religion originated from the desire of people to understand the forces that controlled their lives. In the distant past, the world was a mysterious and often capricious place; it made little sense to the human mind. Of all the different mental modules in the human mind, the social reasoning module seemed like the best fit. So people attempted to explain the operation of the universe in terms of the actions of powerful people. This in turn provided a ready solution to their problems: kissing up to the powerful people. Of course, those powerful people who controlled the universe weren’t accessible, but there was a simple answer to that: they were invisible. They lived up in the sky, where people couldn’t reach them. But they had the power to control things. People called them ‘gods’.
At first, it was easy: there was a god for everything. One god controlled the rains; another controlled the winds; another controlled how well the crops grew, and another decided whether to unleash plagues upon people. Each community’s pantheon grew until it included a crowd of gods, and the priests were kept busy figuring out the relationships among all those deities. These tales became a major component of each culture’s backbone.
Of course, when societies clashed, they supposed that their gods clashed as well. “My god can beat your god” was a common expectation. Of course, for one god to beat a competing god, it had to be more powerful; that expectation in turn drove a consolidation of gods. Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews was, at first, just one more god among many worshipped by the peoples of that region, but eventually the Hebrews came up with the idea that Yahweh was the only god; they institutionalized the concept in their first two commandments:
I am the biggest, baddest god.
You shall have no other gods before me.
This simplified religion; now there was only one god to deal with. That meant fewer temples, fewer sacrifices, fewer rituals, and more free time on the Sabbath.
This one god handled everything. No matter what happened, you always had a ready explanation for it: god did it. Of course, sometimes it still made no sense. For example, why would god kill a good person and not kill a bad person. There was even a good explanation for this: “God works in mysterious ways.”
Times change
With modern times, we have draped ourselves in the robes of rationalism and religion has become old hat to many. Yes, here in America there are still plenty of religious people, but the shine is off; religion is no longer broadly accepted as the one ultimate answer for everything. This has been hard for the feeble-minded to cope with; they really appreciated the simple universe that religion gave them.
So they have come up with a new system. It’s basically the same as religion. The world is still controlled by powerful people, but now these powerful people operate in groups and control the world through secretive manipulations. They are not physically invisible, but they are effectively hidden from public view by the secrecy of their activities. They don’t control everything; rainfall remains out of their reach, for example. But the operations of society are under their control. This religion is polytheistic and open-minded: almost any group can be considered to be a conspiracy. It’s the Democrats; it’s the Jews; it’s Antifa; it’s the Proud Boys; it’s the Girl Scouts.
There’s a magnificent game that should be required playing at every gathering of conspiracy theorists: Illuminati. It could serve as their bible.
In operational terms, conspiracy theories are no different from religions.
