Supreme Beings   Part Four

Did God give us the Industrial Revolution?  Nope.  Did he sit explain to Benjamin Franklin and/or Thomas Edison how electricity works? No way.  Did he bring forth the microwave oven?  Not a chance.  Did he give his guidance to anything that humanity has done? You can bet on it, Bubba.  Faith in the cause of  God has sent more people off to die than anything else.

If I had faith, I wouldn't even worry about such silly things as proof.  That is about the most ridiculous statement I have ever typed.  If there were any proof, I wouldn't need faith.  Faith is the ability to believe in the Loch Ness Monster, even though you know that it just isn't possible.  Faith is the ability to believe in a creator that screws up your life just to make sure that you are his loyal follower.  I don't need to have my life screwed up by the being that loves me supremely.  And I am a little confused just exactly how making my life miserable is supposed to make me love this God in return.

I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow.  I have faith that winter will come, and then spring will return.  I do not have faith that the Son is going to rise again soon.  I do not have faith that somewhere out in space is a place where all the righteous dead people who have or will ever live get to hang out after they stop living.  Jesus!  I should give Jesus a break, and just throw religion into a homogenous stew pot. From here on out, we'll look at effects of religion on money.

I wanna talk about money.  During the first sentence of this series, humans had no use for money.  Unga , who picked more berries than her family could eat, knew that Grur would happily trade the extra rabbit he killed for some of them.  Nobody was rich and famous, but they all chipped in to make sure that the whole tribe got fed.  There was no concept of rich and famous.  Once a belly was full, a thirst was quenched, and a bitch was bred, life was good.  Grur didn't know that he could be obese if he made Gart give him the fish he caught for his own family.  The first real inkling of that kind of thought came when the Jones moved into the valley next door.  They looked a little different than Grur's tribe, and they had more kids.  If they were breeding so much faster, they must have something Grur's buddies were supposed to have, but didn't because the Jones' had it instead.  Meet the ground floor of racism.

The spirits might have favored the Jones' with more meat, or fatter berries.  But Grur's group simply bashed in the Jones' heads, and then the spirits gave Grur's folk more meat, and all the berries.  The Gods were on Grur's side.  Okay, so now Grur's tribe had the best stuff, but the idea of having more had been planted, and if the spirits liked Grur's tribe better, mightn't they like Grur a little more than the rest of the group?

So Grur did the only sensible thing.  He bashed in the heads of the other guys in the tribe who might be able to beat him in a fair fight.  When everyone was afraid that Grur might bash in their heads, he found that he could be pitifully obese, and have more kids than anyone else in the tribe.  He could sit around and act tough, and let everyone else gather and hunt and generally take care of him.  In exchange, he personally talked to the gods on behalf of everyone.  And they saw that it was good.  Grur taught his favorite son how the scam worked, and the favorite son bashed in his dad's head, and took over.  Government was born, and the gods liked it.  But there still wasn't any such thing as money.

And then Grur Junior heard about the Smiths, who lived in the mountains and made things out of a rock called metal.  Grur Junior wanted to bash in their heads, but metal rock was harder than rock rock, and the gods gave him a better idea.  He sent off some of the old women, and some sheep, and the Smiths gave him some metal.  Now, when Grur Junior had to deal with the Shoemachers, he could give them some of this metal instead of giving up his breeding stock and livestock.

While development of minted coinage was a thousandfold more complicated than illustrated here, the basic premise is the same.  For so long as tangible items could be traded for tangible services, money was not needed.  With the invention of god, intangible services were added to the mix, and a method of recouping investment had to be developed.  Government and religion began as a single institution.  Your king was god.  The emperor was god.  Government acted on the behalf of god.  The human workers of the king of religion had to be fed, even though their only product was a thing called faith.

Crossing the mountains didn't disprove god.  Sailing the seas didn't take us into the bowels of heaven.  Blasting above the earth on mighty rockets didn't bring us face to face with angels.  Apparently, God is impervious to science and logic.  Funny that god didn't need money before it was invented, though.  It seems so much more versatile than fruit and vegetables and small game.  It defies logic, that s/he didn't come up with money sooner, considering how important it has always been.

But let us consider: when there isn't enough drinkable water, and there isn't enough affordable food.. then what?  When no amount of flocking like sheep to the sanctuary of temple stops the lunatics from shooting your kids at the bus stop?  When the man who promised you that heaven was coming soon is convicted of embezzlement, or child pornography, or child trafficking?  Why are there homeless people anywhere in the world, and yet TV evangelists are driving Bentleys and living in mansions?  Did God tell those people to live the wanton lifestyle?  And never mind about the homeless and the hungry, who could be fed and housed with the money that is wasted on excesses within the church.
Can I get a Hallelujah?