How Religions Might Have Started: The Faith of Fred

Thanatophobia has a strong evolutionary basis; of course we are wired with an intense dread of our own demise and an inability to imagine a world without that entity we call "I" (although Mark Twain quipped that such a world without him existed for all of time before he was born so why should it bother him if that state returned following his death?).  Combining an intense dread of death with knowledge of death's inevitability has created the existentialist crisis that peddlers of religious explanations, especially of the metaphysical variety, have preyed on.  Imagine 100 people scared and trying to figure out how to console themselves with their mortality.  99 admit that they have no idea about what happens after death since no one has gone there and returned.  Maybe one guy, let's call him Fred, says quite loudly and angrily that he has a vision that they are all going to eternal bliss - all they have to do is follow him.  In fact, he has a book he just discovered, an ancient text that promises such a reward, and punishment for those who do not believe.  

Our brains are drawn to charismatic certainty, even ideas that are almost certainly wrong.  Honest equivocation seems weak, flip-flopping.  Fred does not sound weak.  He seems to be sure of himself.  Maybe he is on to something. 

So perhaps half in that first generation join the new Religion of Fred (what do they have to lose?) and spend their lives consoled with the idea that they have tapped into a way to dodge death (only their bodies will seem to die - their spirits will live forever).  The problem is those other 50 who keep bringing up those pesky doubts.  If they could just find some way to silence them.

Then something bad happens to this group, perhaps a drought or a flood.  The Followers of Fred pounce on this as proof that if everyone followed the new faith, this never would have happened.  Fred Followers sacrifice a couple of free thinkers in an imaginatively horrific way (after all they are acting for God who hates people do doubt), burning them alive or drowning them while everyone, including their family members are forced to watch.  Following the execution, people are asked if they would like to join the Faith of Fred. 

What do you know?  Membership goes through the roof.  Now those who have not done the reasonable thing and join to save their own hides are seen as obstinate, even dangerous.  They are ostracized by Fred's Faith, denied jobs, told they can't hold property, and occasionally rounded up and executed or tortured.  But they still do not break, not all of them anyway.

After many generations of this, you will see what you see now:   one dominant, loudly confident religion with a long and bloody history of suppressing all dissidents.  But since the ashes of those who resisted have long since cooled, the victims mostly nameless and forgotten, the great-great-great grandchildren of those who mouthed words they did not really believe to avoid the pyre or the gallows forgot or were never informed of the circumstances of their ancestors' renunciation of their faith.   Like Marilyn Albright, who discovered her family was Jewish but had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, they live blissfully unaware of the torment the Faith of Fred has caused and the alternate belief systems (including none at all) that Fred snuffed out.   They light candles, sing songs, hold hands, and get together for special holidays whose non-Fred origins are politely forgotten.

With the passage of time, the Word of Fred becomes enshrouded in a misty fog that modern adherents say excuses its obvious logical and moral lapses.   Maybe Fred made some statements about things he never thought anyone would be able to test, and when those statements are proven to be not just false but patently absurd (such as that the Earth is the center of the universe, flat, and only 7,000 years sold), the error is forgiven, forgotten, or politely ignored.

So asking people to renounce Fred outright seems too much.  Let them keep their softer, gentler Fred, just as long as we all remember that we can never rely on the Teachings of Fred to shape foreign policy, train surgeons, or decide the number and timing of our children.