Why didn't Atheism dominate from the beginning?

Question

God(s) have been a part of many cultures since cultures have been recorded. Was the arguement more convincing then? Were people dumber back then? What reason did they have to believe?

These days a majority of religous people are raised that way and just accept it, but at one point it wasn't and then people started believing......Why?

Answer 1

The world used to be a much scarier place. People needed something to give meaning to the kinds of suffering they saw all around them.

For example, one to two thirds of Europe was killed by the plague. Entire villages died awful, painful deaths. It's much easier for survivors to deal with that if they can say, "Well, they're all in a better place, and it happened for a reason."

Answer 2

Well, from the beginning it was more about having a way to explain things. If a storm blew thru and destroyed my farm, but not yours, obviously I did something to tick off one of the Gods. There were just as many reasons back then as there are today to believe, it's just that the reasons themselves have changed. Only primitive people think a tornado is driven by a God. ( I know! I know! Many believed Katrina was God's destruction... which would make God a killer of innocent people when all he had to do was point his finger and had the "evil" people drop dead). Like I said, only Primitive people believe things in nature are driven by God(s) for a direct reason.

I think the ideas that get thrown around causes the #'s to raise and/or drop. Charismatics usually have alot to do with that. Or a lot of conflict, such as war (if you noticed, Evangelical Christianity did not hit it's peak till Bush took us to war in Iraq and then drummed up the Homosexual topic).

Answer 3

Because people don't like being wrong and the opportunity to have some higher power to blame it all on was just too tempting for them to resist. It's their way of trying to off-put the blame for bad luck, bad days, bad decisions, and why their kids turned out the way they did (this brings me to my usual "parents have no right to complain about how their kids turn out if they're not willing to be more active in their childrens' lives" rant, but I'll skip that for now as it's looooooooooooooong). It's never their fault, it's all "God's fault" or "a part of God's plan" or "The devil made me do it" or some bullsh!t like that.

I was raised in a Cristian household, but I wasn't buying anything they were trying to force into my skull in catechism at all and by the time I was eight I was an atheist, even though I continued my studies on every religion I could find books about.

Answer 4

One valid reason is because the church and the state and the tribe and the person's identity were all one and the same. One would be traitorous to give up one's religion, and also one would lose cultural and racial identity. Another is because of ignorance. These people didn't understand anything and the natural world is a scary, dangerous place, so myths were created to give humanity some solace. Creating a God or Gods in control of the universe, then propitiating that God/s in some way allows the primitive human to feel he has some control over nature, some way to escape suffering or redress injustice. It is undeniable that religion played important psychological roles in primitive societies, but it is time to grow up now that we don't think the sky is a dome with holes in it.

Answer 5

Humans have been emotional animals for far longer than they have been reasoning ones. Religion thrives because it plays on human emotional insecurities.

People don't like thinking that we're just on a rock hurtling through space. They'd rather think that we're part of some grand plan.

We are also uneasy with the fact that we just die after a while. Memories seem alive to us, so we can't imagine them going away.

Early on, the world was a very scary place with not much known of how things worked. Back then, the only thing we could think of to explain lightning was that some being somewhere was angry. We just didn't have more information.

There are, of course, many other reasons, too, all based on emotional insecurities and lack of knowledge.

Answer 6

To an ignorant person who knows nothing of science or the natural causes of things in the real world, when someting bad, scary, or new happens they react with fear. They assume there must be a "reason" for what happened, and they're perfectly willing to accept that the thing was caused by supernatural beings who are older, stronger, and wiser than humans and who control everything. Those "gods" were supplied readily by tribe leaders, political leaders, kings, priests -- anyone in a position of authority. Those people knew (and still do know) that making themselves appear to know "the will of the gods" makes them appear more powerful and important to the ignorant masses, and the ignorant masses are more likely to follow their instructions no matter how inane they are.

In general people were more *ignorant* back then (not dumber -- they just didn't have thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge to draw from, and the discipline of the scientific method to weed out superstition from fact). That's one reason why there were so many gods in ancient times, gods for everything in nature, gods for every different culture, gods for love and war and peace and sailing and eating and sleeping and...well, you get it. Some of the natural explanations for things that people learned left the plethora of gods behind, but it was mainly politics and power that focused people on the smaller number of gods we have today. Religion today *IS* politics, and its goal is to keep its followers in line by keeping them from thinking too much and discovering the real, natural, provable facts that science provides. As long as the believers buy into the fairytales, they can still be controlled by religious leaders (who are often the same as or allied with political leaders), and the masses can be kept in line.
Education and rational thought are the only ways to throw off the shackles of superstition and control wielded by religion...we're getting there slowly but surely, but there is still an awful lot of fear in the world, perpetuated by religion, that needs to be overcome with education.

Answer 7

Not dumber, just that the thought systems were in progress. However, note that the Buddha and others expressed information from their enlightenment experiences that correspond to things we know from quantum physics. What this means is that -- regardless of the current world view and thought systems and belief systems -- the direct experience that's called 'enlightenment' is the same. Unfortunately, 99.99999% of us let others like Jesus and the Buddha get the experience and then form belief systems based on their experiences. Worse, in Jesus' case, they change his message completely (to one they want to hear) and then make the guy into a magical being, unlike the rest of us.

Answer 8

We are a curious people. We need to have an explaination for all things and since scientific inquiry didn't exist in the regimented fashion that it does now, that inquiry became part of religions and believe systems. Atheism doesn't explain things to people like religions do. The opiate if you will is a necessary one for most people.

Answer 9

Ogg and Gugug make agreement. Ogg say, "Gugug, I give you great stone, but Gugug take care Ogg's wife when Ogg die." "Gugug do! Give big shiney stone!"

Now. You have a contract here, void of established law. If Ogg no longer exists when he dies, what compulsion does Gugug have to fulfill his side of the bargain?

During the early stages of the development of the social contract, an afterlife was absolutely vital to the establishment of society -- it gave a way for a contract to remain valid even after death. "Ogg agree. Here stone. Gugug have, but Gugug not do promise, Ogg come back haunt Gugug! Tell shaman woman, 'Gugug bad man!' She punish Gugug!"

Via this belief, propagated by shamans and tribal wise men/women, formed the basis of the social contract's after-death responsibility to continue to fulfill promises. With the establishment of contractual written law, and legal due process, such a belief was no longer needed, but, because it had become well established by the time of Hammurabi, it became a lasting component of civiliazation.

Answer 10

The first sign a species is becoming sentient is when they have evolved to the point where they can abstract enough to invent a god. The first time a species achieves sentient maturity is when they get rid of their gods. Today, many of us have reached the mature state, now if we can only get believers to slow down their breeding until they catch up to us.