War, famile, pestilence. Death in some form. These are the things that can end a declining culture and rejuvenate it. The things that can end the cultural cycle and start it all over again. (
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf)
They are also the names of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the bible. This is no coincidence. The cycle has repeated itself endlessly ever since the first city was founded many thousands of years ago and people have noticed patterns over time and used religion as a method to help people to live in a way that makes them more likely to survive and less likely to die. This was obviously not done through rigorous analysis, but as an emergent property of living in the world. Many groups of people throughout all of history tried many different things and the ones that worked best spread and became dominant. The ultimate result of this to data are the abrahamic religions.
Other religious stories that have root in physical reality: The Flood.
Ten thousand years ago or so large parts of the world were covered in miles of ice. It got warmer, the ice melted, and enormous inland lakes formed. As the land shifted over time, sometimes there would be a breach in these lakes and they would flow into the ocean, taking anything in the path along with it. So imagine waking up one day, and there is a new river next door. Right where the other village with those Other people used to be. A river which disappears after a few days or weeks. How do you interpret this? Obviously it must be the work of god. Which means they must have done Something to deserve it, for the gods are merciful and love us. So how do you avoid it happening to you? Don't piss off the gods. Follow their rules. And in this way the religion as a whole is enforced.
Sodom and Gomorrah.
From time to time, groups of people go insane and kill one another. It happened in rome, it happened twenty times in the 20th century, it has happened countless times on smaller scales. Calhoun provides some clue as to why.
The Tower of Babel.
In ancient mesopotamia, some 3-4000 years ago, in the area we today call the middle east and egypt, there lived the at the time most advanced people in the world. We know about them because they had everything we do: They had writing, laws, trade, cities, kings and centralized government. About the only things we have that they didn't is modern technology and knowledge of the physical world. And we know about them because they wrote stuff. Mostly boring political stuff, and business ledgers.
There were a number of different groups, and they all communicated and traded with one another, much like we do today between nations. Different languages technically speaking, but they could all communicate, they were on the same wavelength. Close enough to a common language for the purposes of a narrative allegory. They also had huge temples called ziggurats, which may be where the inspiration for the tower came from.
And then they collapsed, as the romans did, as many other cultures did. As we are presently doing. We can't definitively prove why, but given the knowledge of the cultural cycle as per Glubb and modern knowledge of the brain, especially narcissism and the amygdala, we can surmise that what happened then is the same thing that is happening now. We had a high culture, became decadent, and are presently spiraling down until one of the horsemen get us, and there is no realistic chance of stopping it. We know
how to stop it on a purely technical level, but we don't
want to for psychological reasons.
So what does this all mean? Religion Matters. Which pisses me off as an atheist, but atheism also demands that we look at the world objectively. We killed god, and we are now paying the price.
