Togetherness

Togetherness

Animals all through nature tend to band together for many reasons.  Safety and procreation are the main ones but I'm sure there are many others.  Fish form schools, dolphins form pods and there are many ants in an ant hill.  Predators do it, too.

There are great benefits of numbers.  Ants can kill prey many times larger than they are while bees store food.  Lions and wolves work in teams to feed themselves.

A post on Twitter by @FreeAtheism got me thinking that maybe that's why religion works for so many.

Is it also built into our psyche from eons of togetherness to form religions to take the place of working together when we had to hunt to survive?  If you study history, you will find that religions came about at the time when we were starting to break the dependence on daily hunting.

We started farming and raising animals for food.  We didn't need to be together for those reasons anymore but we still kept our tribes anyway.  Why?

Because we, like many other species, are social animals; but intelligence started to separate us.  The con men among us seized this opportunity to bring us back together and profit from it.  Religions grew from there. 

Before you ask, yes there are true believers out there and there are believing preachers, too.

As atheism grows, we are seeing us tend to band together as well.  We are forming small groups which, I predict will grow as reason overtakes faith.  I won't live to see atheism become a major force in the world, but the younger readers of this just might.

Can't happen soon enough for me.

Walk the Path in Grace