Settle down children, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there were some lazy people. They weren’t as fit and strong as the rest, but they did have one thing that the others didn’t, smarts. They saw bad things happening in nature. Crops failing, storms, thunder, floods, disease and famine. They new not what caused it but they also knew that no-one else did. They became the “wise men” of the villages by inventing stories to explain away these phenomenon, in exchange, they were fed and housed. Other people with smarts were sceptical, equally they were in need of feeding and lazy too. So they made up ever more fearful stories, knowing, as we do, that if you can make a population scared you can control it. And so gods were born, great, terrifying monsters who sought worship and meekness from the population (and who conveniently only talked to the lazy people with smarts). These gods were fickle, like the weather. If you did the slightest thing wrong (or it was a bit stormy) then you would be destroyed by them at a whim. Even if you did nothing wrong, the Wise Men With Smarts (but no compulsion to, y’know, actually do any work) would find a reason for their hatred of you. The trouble is, each of the men with smarts quite liked the idea of not working and being fed. But other men with smarts popped up from time to time with even better stories. This upset them and so exclusivity was born. Their god was the one true god, if you worshipped anyone else’s god then terrible things would happen to you (and even if you didn’t, terrible things would happen to you anyways, but they always managed to explain that one away. See above). Now, as I said, if you create an imaginary bogeyman, you can keep the population scared, subjugated, but not forever. Eventually they’ll start saying “but I live my life as I’m told, why do bad things still happen to me?”, so you need to find another god, tell the population that the other people are evil in worshipping the other god and it will make their god unhappy. The population lose out, the guys with smarts win. As they’re the ones who always stay home when everyone else goes to war. Over the years, worship of the wood, the water, the star, the moon and the sun have continued, each generation becoming more twisted than the next, until writing was invented and the stories, spread through hundreds of years like chinese whispers, were put down in text. Eventually, the people with smarts’ lost lineage or were forgotten, the teachings became of the books, not of the smarts and religions carried on like headless monstrosities, no longer serving the people at the top, but perverted into being the “truth” for each of the populations, nomatter how twisted and wrong that truth was. And that, my dears, is why religions tend to be a crock of shite. Sadly, our leaders cannot use religion any more to subvert us and have moved onto other bogeymen such as terrorists, immigrants and paedophiles, because if we were less scared as the sheep we are, perhaps we’d start asking questions of them that they don’t really want to answer.