‘THE GROWTH OF RELIGION: A STUDY OF ITS ORIGIN DEVELOPMENT’ by JOSEPH
MCCABE is a rather rational view of religion, and how, each of these historic religions,
including Christianity, evolved from the nebula of primitive religion.
’The much favored theory that man begins with a vague awe of nature,
passes to a belief that there is a great impersonal power pervading it, and finally
shapes this power into personal spirits, does not seem to correspond to the
facts’, the author specifies at the outset itself. Something religious like
exists only in areas connected with actual entities: the dead man, living
enemies, or wild animals. Even in these things, what is seen is personification of a few real objects
in nature rather than a belief in a general diffused force. But the author has
found that the primitive people have been entertaining the belief that men survive
death and continue to be useful or malevolent to their fellows, becoming
perhaps, the foundations of religion.
But the author also gives us a subtle warning, ‘we are in
fact trying to superimpose the language of the twentieth century on to the
ideas of the man of a hundred thousand years ago and fit into those mental
boxes or categories, the wonderful experience we have built in our minds’. For
example, one needs to realize that we are applying such words as “religion and spirit,”
or even “magic,” to the hazy images or feelings of one of these primitive
creatures. One has to be at guard!
Observing that social life did not properly begin until the
Cave Period, during the Glacial Epoch, the author expresses surprise that
religion seems to have been largely developed before the Cave Period.
Exploring the remnants of tribal lifestyle in Africa, the
book notes that only one or two African tribes put their chief spirit in the
sun or moon. ‘Even in these cases the spirit is simply lodged there. Most of the
African tribes put personal spirits in trees or waters, but it is only a few of
the higher tribes who reach the idea of a general earth- spirit, a goddess of fecundity.
The phallic spirit is equally late. Nor can we say that fear made the gods. Most
Of the chief deities of the Africans are not feared. They are drowsy, lazy,
good-natured, very big black fellows; prosperous and eupeptic chiefs. The gods
or semi-gods of the Africans seem, on the whole, to be magnified dead men.’
The book then examines the early religions of America, and
Asia. On analyzing the path followed by ancient civilizations, the book
observes that all of them should go through a period of skepticism, one of weariness,
perplexity, sexual license and rigorous austerity, social disorder and social
aspiration, civil war, melancholy, and confusion. It is a stage through which
all civilizations pass, and that is the stage in which we are today.
The book ends with a long discourse on the future prospects
of religion. Just as we discovered that reliance on supernatural help was
injurious, just as magic and religion took center stage, will people realize
that the resources of their own moral strength have been insufficiently
exploited. The book ends with a note that such is the likely future.
The author, I think like all people who examined religion,
god, or observances seems to think as natural for man to have such an elaborate
structure with no metabolic contribution. Why should man desire for such a
thing? What need is being met by this? I think these questions, if asked, would
have taken the book to a different end. (I have tried to address this, see,
http://hubpages.com/politics/evolutionofreligion)
