Forum:Santa Clausism
First of all, this text is gonna sound somewhat gnostic atheist in that I implicitly postulate that religion is entirely manmade. That's not entirely my point of view, since I'd rather describe myself as an agnostic atheist, so just consider it an unproved (but reasonable!) hypothesis.
I hope that I'm not about to write something that's written somewhere else on RW, although it's rather close to RW's mission, so if there already is a page about it, please let me know.
While there are certainly other aspects, like trying to make sense of the universe without scientific knowledge (creation), coping with death (soul, afterlife) and a tool for political legitimacy (most kingdoms in documented history, your favorite "muslim" terrorist group), I'd like to focus on the significance of religion for the upbringing of children.
Reason for this is that I sometimes found parents slightly surprised by the fact that their children had respect on the border to outright fear to your average christmas market Santa Claus (probably roughly equivalent to the shopping mall Santa in the US), although they actually should know that he's a nice old man giving away presents and stuff like that. I see a whole lot of similarities between Santa Claus and powers attributed to God/gods (I'll focus on the Christian one, I know him better than the others):
- He's supposed to know if any given child has been naughty or nice - while not real omniscience, this is probably close enough for children.
- He will judge you based on a certain moral system, so better heed to the set of virtues your parents taught you.
- Good behaviour will be rewarded, bad behaviour will be punished (I'm not sure if the punishment part is common, but I was told that naughty children would run the risk to "get the birch" from Santa's helper. The last part is similar to the God-Satan dichotomy in Christianity - in order to keep God's/Santa's slate clean, another figure with negative connotation has to be invented who's in charge of the dirty work)
This leads me to the hypothesis that religion-like characteristics can evolve from the simple need of parents having trouble to cope with the upbringing of their children and tend invent a more powerful entity which coincidentally has the same moral system as the parents do. The rewards/punishment has changed to adapt to the times - parents arguably have become more restrained in psychologically abusing their children by threatening eternal damnation, and are prosperous enough to buy a heap of presents once or twice a year, so the nebulous evaluation of one's life at its end has been replaced by a more tangible annual evaluation.
With this in mind, I imagine the formation of a monotheistic religion in the late bronze or early iron age to have happened roughly like this: At one day, in some tribe, parents used threatened eternal damnation to a child who stole the neighbor's child's toy doll, and promised salvation if it admitted its failure and gave the doll back. The parents of the child the doll was stolen from were impressed by the honesty of the child, asked its parents how they did it, and also adopted the eternal damnation idea. The next generation, these children used the same strategy on their children - over the course of generations, more and more parents adopted it, and over time, they actually believed in the eternal damnation thing, because that's what their parents and their parent's parents said. Some day, a child asked how the world came to be. The parents, unwilling to admit that they had no idea, made an actual intelligence of some sort out of whatever force decides if they deserved eternal damnation or not, and attributed the creation of the world to it.
It could very well have happened the other way around - first inventing (a) god(s) who created the world, and then refitting him into the eternal judge. I think it's more likely to create polytheism that way, because nature is diverse. However, as we have seen in the case of Judaism, a monolatrism (which is a special form of polytheism) can evolve into a monotheism, and in this context it doesn't matter that much anyway.
So, what do you think about this? --87.145.134.96 (talk) 16:06, 4 February 2016 (UTC)