From Dope to Pope.

In the place where I was born, there is a magnificent cathedral, one of the most impressive in all of Europe. It's an amazing sight, hard to look at without feeling a sense of awe, and inside you step into the vast collective quiet of hundreds of hushed voices, even the most raucous of tourists cowed into the pretence of respect. The vicars and priests hover in their cassocks, with folded hands and ethereal smiles, just in case anyone has a question, physical or metaphysic.

Even the most hardened of atheists, or agnostics must admit, religion has come a long way.

I mean Jesus, if religion was always just a bunch of bullshit, how did it come to have all this cool stuff..? What happened in the big "SHAZAM!!!" Such a transformation is indeed miraculous, I mean, no other single institution of man throughout history can boast of such a plethora of architecture, riches, pomp and ritual.

One senses divine power.

Or does one..?

Any good detective works from a couple of very basic principles: One of which is the time honoured playground cliché of "Who started it..? and the second of which is "Follow the money". Which is what we will do.

Despite our nice clothes and personal hygene products - we remain what we have always been: curious tool-making apes. If you have kids, you get a million questions a day, "What's that..?", "What's it for..?", "Who made it..?", and of course the ubiquitous "Why..?".

Ever since forever we have been (and still are) used to the things around us being made. So at some point, someone was always going to poke his head out of the furs some cold bright morning, look out of the cave and ask the first big question.

And someone was gonna have to answer, prolly whichever poor bastard was the oldest. Answer A, while being the most honest, is unsatisfying - both to the questioner - who remains none the wiser, and to the answerer, because - let's face it - we old people like to prove we are smarter than you young fuckers.

Answer B, while being right on the money, is massively unnituitive. Having read quite a bit of ancient history I have never found an instance of some ancient race's creation myth being built around "shit just happens".

So, sooner or later, back in the day, some old geezer who'd had enough of feeling like a dumbass probably decided to attempt Answer C. Okay, so he probably didn't come up with the Great Woombah straight off the bat, but probably specified some kind of agent. The actual details don't matter - that an active and necessarily supernatural agent was invented - or seemed just to be "the right answer to give" - because, if you notice, hidden in the question "Who made all this shit..?" is the assumption that this shit is made.

And what is made, demands a maker.

The second most obvious of questions is one prompted not so much by our familliarity with constructed objects but with language. I'm no linguist, but I notice that sometimes the transitions between states - awake to asleep, sane to crazy, are sometimes related using the verbs and prepositions of movement - the same ones we use to say stuff like "He went to the shop" or, "he came back from the library" and "he turned the corner".

Perhaps this doesn't occur in all languages, the Turkish language for "Went crazy" translates as "Deli oldu" - the 'oldu' part being the "became" - ie. "crazy became" - or he "became crazy". Which is actually more realistic. Though they do use the expression 'turned the corner' for a transition from poverty to riches.

Anyway, in English we say - "He went to sleep" although he didn't actually move at all, and "he went crazy" although again, crazy is not a place. And other things, like 'death's door', and 'coming back from the dead'. I hope we've come to an agreement..? If not, I'll turn nasty.

So it's perhaps not too far fetched to say that - just as "who made this..?" implies that X is made - the second most obvious question...

... demands that Mummy has gone somewhere...

You'd have to be one hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch to hit little Tommy with answer A.

Answer B requires a metaphysic bent almost certainly waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond your average paloelithic old geezer.

And so we are left with a variant of answer C. Death as a place to go. Again, the details don't matter. That there is a place, and that Mummy went there - and in such haste indeed that she not only forgot to pack her undies but left her entire fucking body behind too - begs other questions: What went there..? and what kind of place is death..?

But those are questions that don't really matter to the case in hand. Not yet anyway.

So our paleolithic questioner is left with a new place to go, though one which is not really all that practical to visit on a whim, and a new toy - a God (or whatever) which might prove more useful. Afterall - mankind's second most natural urge, after learning the intrinsic properties of something new, is to wonder about how to use it. Sticks get picked up, swished about a bit, and after the essential stickness has been explored, get turned into tools. Leading to question three:

Answer A is not only a conversation ender, it also strikes the questioner as a bit weird - afterall, the answerer has previously specified that God (or whatever) made everything. i. "Huh - this guy makes the sky and the earth and stuff and yet he can't even make a deer wander past the mouth of my cave every morning..? I smell bullshit."

So your smart answerer, perhaps anticipating the questioner's reaction to answer A, and having already gone out on a limb with the whole "God did it" scenario, might do a bit of hedging and come up with something like answer B.

But answer B is still a bit of a disappointment. It also makes the questioner want to explore what the division between "my bullshit" and "things worthy of God's intervention" might be. I mean - let's face it, wholesale catastrophe and suffering were never far away in the old-old days. Sooner or later, something would happen, and the whole tribe would be battering down old-geezer's door asking what kind of a guy this God is, to discount someone's entire family getting run over by an irritated mammoth as "bullshit".

Tricky.

Trouble is, answer C - God as amenable to petition - is a real slippery slope.

"God, pass the salt please."
...
"Hey, c'mon God, Jesus fucking christ, it's just over there, get your ass in gear already."
...
"Hey old geezer !!! OLD GEEZER !!! that god you told me about won't pass me the salt..! Hey!!!"

ie. Disgruntled paleolithic punters.

Okay, so most people didn't have salt-shakers in those days. But that aside, what's Old Geezer gonna say..? After all, if god created the world and everything, proverbially passing the salt should be... er, easy. He's either got to admit - with answer A - that he just made the whole lot up, and suffer the consequences of his protracted deception, or - with answer B - destroy God's credibility, and probably lose his audience. (And let's face it - everyone loves an audience - we are all attention whores). So what does Old Geezer have to invent to preserve god's integrity..?

(a) A scale of things that it's okay to ask god to do for you. And excuses as to why, sometimes, god still doesn't bother even then.

(b) Some reason why god is too busy to do the mundane everyday shit anyway.

Now, poor Old Geezer racks his brain. There are two ways to do (a). One way is to make the things god is willing to do for you so big, that the likelihood of a situation arising in which you actually qualify for God's help is so low that you won't be constantly hanging off poor Old Geezer's ass about why god didn't turn up and do the biz (yet again). Life and death situations are particularly good for this, afterall, when God doesn't save you, you aren't around to complain about it to your local ever-lovin' Old Geezer. Or if you lose a war, then you're too busy being killed/raped/enslaved to ask, and even then, someone will just say "their god was more powerful than ours" to which you'll be obliged to answer "Oh good, so it wasn't that we were just lousy at fighting then."

Smiles all round.

However, that's not quite good enough for life/death scenarios where someone (not in danger) is trying to secure divine intervention for another. The classic sick child that we discussed on the other post. That, for any amateur Old Geezer-cum-theologian trying to back up his new and shiny God-concept, is a real bugger.

Which leads us to the other way to do (a). Ritual.

The making of elaborate, or costly, rituals solves two problems neatly. Number one, when nothing happens, the blame can be shifted from god, to the people doing the ritual.

"You call that a sacrifice bozo..?"
"Nooo - I said draw it facing West you idiot WEST !!!"
I suspect that candle doesn't have real child's blood in it, does it."

Basically, the situation gets messed about until, if the whole divine intervention thing actually does work - then God did it, and if it doesn't - you fucked up. A neat little catch 22.

And number two, if it takes half an hour to even draw the magic circle, you're most likely to walk around the table and pass yourself the salt.

To counter the problem of (b) 'why God seems always too busy to do house calls', Old Geezerwould have had to cook up a varient of one of two answers, very probably depending the social type of the people he's dealing with. If the people are warlike, then God will very probably be busy "fighting off ice giants alongside the spirits of dead warriors" or something, and if the people are more sedentary, then God is more likely to be busy making sure the world keeps ticking over - pushing up the sun every morning, making the crops grow on time, bringing the rain, you know - all respectable Godly pursuits.

It is at this point, with the idea of 'God the tool' successfully absorbed into the group psyche, that the roles of the questioner, and the Old Geezer attempting to answer those questions begin to mutate.

It's also where the second principle of detection come in - Follow the money.

Here perhaps an analogy must be drawn to modern times. The stockbroker or economic expert. To an outsider, the stockmarket is a great big, almost supernaturally complex system, but, alluringly, also one that sometimes produces vast dividends. And who are its high-priests..? You got it. Their speciality is to convince their petitioners (after first convincing themselves) that they know what they are doing. In reality, the stockmarket is pretty much wholly random. A duck on a keyboard buying and selling with the haphazard peck of its beak will - and this must be stressed - in the long run do just as well as any economist with a bunch of degrees, masters and doctorates and a killer, never-fail, Nobel-prize-winning investment system.

Of course, just try telling anyone that. (My advice - don't - just buy them a copy of 'Black Swan' and watch their preconceptions crumble ).

Anyway - The aformentioned Catch22 of "screwing up the ritual" opens up a new niche in the host society - that of the 'expert ritual conductor', the Witch-Doctor - the Priest. In the same way that me 'constantly buying the wrong shares', and yet seeing others all around reaping the rewards of sound investments, will tend to push me into declaring myself an idiot and seeking 'expert' help in the form of an economist - equally, my seeming inability to get God to divinely intervene on my behalf while all around me I hear of, and perhaps even see, other people's children miraculously recovering from the illnesses that killed mine, or harvesting bumper crops while I'm left with a field full of withered, bug-blighted stems... Will lead me to seek an expert in ritual.

And who will I go to first..? You got it - the guy who started all this crap in the first place, the guy with all the answers - Old Geezer.

But this time Old Geezer has a glint in his eye. Afterall, he's an old man, and chasing down gazelle's for dinner is a young-man's work. A man's gotta keep an eye on his pension...

And this is another reason why religious ceremonies seem to have evolved into ever more intricate forms, conducted in strange languages, by weird guys in bizzare costumes inside dedicated structures. It is because once a specialized ritual-conducting-caste takes off, it is in its interest to put the rituals ever further out of the reach of the average petitioner because intervening with God is where their bread and butter comes from.

ie. the more bizzare and complex the ritual, the more costly or time-consuming its accoutrements are to aquire - the less likely the petitioner is to tell Old Geezer where to shove his "Whatever you feel it's worth" up his ass, and go do a little spiritual DIY all on his lonesome.

So, in short, religions - protected and promoted by their handy Catch 22 - mine the deep seams of hope that run through humanity. They are the sacred holding companies, brokering deals with God. So -Duh - Of course they are rich. With or without God. I mean MacDonalds do okay, and nobody believes in the clown, do they..?