Free Thought 1912/6

How did religion become?

Today's great religions, which originated in historical times, are already complex systems and their external life forms, the various ceremonies are the result of long development. Our sketch is not about the formation of these, but wants to show the factors that first evoked religious thoughts from people. You want to capture the standard of life that has compulsorily led to worship of spirit and worship of nature because these are the primitive beginnings of religions. Our research goes back to the small and misty self-consciousness of the animal-man: among the undeveloped living conditions of the ideas that sprouted from his disabled soul, they have become religious systems. The spiritual world of modern-born man is not suitable for an accurate examination of our question, because other factors arising from his knowledge and upbringing are confusing, but the religious spirit of modern man also contributes to certain ideas. These need to be grounded in ethnographic data and cultural-historical memories in order to construct the primitive starting points of religious thought.

Primitive man living in the abundance of the forest, or on the banks of irreplaceable rivers, or in enclosed valleys, is isolated and his almost purely vegetative life hardly rises above the animal because he is without tools, lacks experience and has not yet he has come to scourge, understand, and utilize the laws of larger contexts, He is slowly, gropingly evolving, and for the time being he can only realize the most basic things to do. These may be about picking wild plants or tumbling down weaker animals, or covering yourself with thinner and thicker skins against the weather. You can also easily learn simpler things that make your life more bearable and enjoyable: bloody and cunning hunts can be your passions. You can also have a rudimentary life experience and help, for example, keep your hiding place on a hilltop exposed to wind, storms and lightning. Foresight can also help, for example, to dig away from trees whose ripening large fruits endanger their integrity during ripening. All this talent, however, is small and pathetic; its value is only that human intelligence shines first in such things. And even if he is adept at one thing or another, and even if he understands a few simple things well, most of the phenomena of nature, and then every phenomenon that occurs in his soul, are mysterious and frightening. We can make our claim visible by thinking about lightning. The wanderer of the primeval forest could not realize that the lightning was an electric discharge and was far from the thought of being able to gain strength with a lightning rod. (Aside from the fact that he didn't have the material or the technique to make it.) In fact, to better highlight our example, consider that 120 years ago the Department of Physics at the University of Pest was filled by the Jesuit Domin, who wrote a book on the war against the heavenly wars. bell-ringing is useful and we have had to evolve to this day to protest against the lightning that our primitive human ancestor still imagined to be a god with a human invention drawn on the well-towered tower of his house instead of a bell-ring. . . In his example, the long path of development is condensed, and perhaps it may be shown that the position of primitive man at the sight of such a phenomenon could not have been higher than that lightning was huge and fearful.

In fact, we do not want to say this much in this chapter, we just wanted to show the intellectual degree of primitive man, because this is the kind of man - the religious medium - in whom religious questions are raised for the first time. Ε questions must have already accumulated in him as an animal and without jumping, he has come this far, but he can only consciously be interested in them at this stage of his development. Such is the man who, on hearing the thunder and seeing the lightning strike, first throws himself to the ground with meaningless screaming instead of an animal escape. Such is the man who, horrified by the fact of death, first searches for an answer. Uncertainty became the basic feeling of a person who had already reached the questions but could not find answers, and from this uncertainty arose the writhing behavior, which is the starting point of religiosity, because it already contains the uninformed despair of the intelligent being seeking the causes.

We have already alluded to the fact that natural objects and phenomena, on the one hand, and physical phenomena and phenomena of spiritual life, on the other, provided the first reasons for the formation of religious images. These are groups of phenomena in life that can only be understood through long experience and a sharpened intellect. Both groups are governed by complex laws, and the assumptions that primitive man could have made about them were necessarily bad, rudimentary. It was not vigorous speculation that led to these assumptions, but on the contrary an all-embracing, superficial view of the uncritical intellect, and because they were very big things, ones that reached the roots of life, the assumptions about them were mysterious, confusing and flawed: fantasy and incorrect starting was followed by an incorrect system. In terms of scope, the largest groups of thinking are these systems. Everything belongs to them, everything that is elusive, incomprehensible to him. In time, they had to develop at a very low level, because without explaining these important phenomena, he could not go a step further in his spiritual development.

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Src: http://mtdaportal.extra.hu/szabadgondolat/1912/1912_06.pdf
Original Publication: Szabadgondolat, 2.6, June 1912
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FR	Libre Pensée 1912/6
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