Everything Is F*cked

Spiritual Religions

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From the pagan and animalistic rituals of early human cultures, to the pagan
gods of antiquity, to the grandiose monotheistic religions that still exist today,
the majority of human history has been dominated by a belief in supernatural
forces and, most important, the hope that certain actions and beliefs in this life
would lead to rewards and improvement in the next life.
This  preoccupation  with  the  next  life  developed  because  for  most  of
human  history,  everything  was  completely  fucked  and  99  percent  of  the
population had no hope of material or physical improvement in their lives. If
you think things are bad today, just think about the plagues that wiped out a
third  of  the  population  on  an  entire  continent,
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 or  the  wars  that  involved
selling tens of thousands of children into slavery.
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In fact, things were so bad
in  the  old  days  that  the  only  way  to  keep  everyone  sane  was  by  promising
them  hope  in  an  afterlife.  Old-school  religion  held  the  fabric  of  society
together  because  it  gave  the  masses  a  guarantee  that  their  suffering  was
meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.
In  case  you  haven’t  noticed,  spiritual  religions  are  incredibly  resilient.
They  last  hundreds,  if  not  thousands,  of  years.  This  is  because  supernatural
beliefs  can  never  be  proven  or  disproven.  Therefore,  once  a  supernatural
belief gets lodged as someone’s God Value, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge
it.
Spiritual  religions  are  also  powerful  because  they  often  encourage  hope
through death, which has the nice side effect of making a lot of people willing
to die for their unverifiable beliefs. Hard to compete with that.