( You can go under the first picture to skip the intro.

Before you give up on the long read on yet an other “atheism vs religion” speech, I promise there’s interesting ideas here that I almost never saw discussed on the internet. )

Since it’s not the subject here, but it’s what I’ll argue for with this post,

I’ll simply state a simple version of my beliefs :

Every religious, spiritual, or paranormal beliefs are just made up stories that some people ended up believing in.

And just to be clear, I don’t think that Faith in itself is a bad thing. I think any person doing a lot of good in his life is a good person, and that’s what really count in the end.

But there is no denying that religions and beliefs are the source of a lot of conflict over the world and through History.

Photo by KEEM IBARRA on Unsplash

Conflicts that might have been avoided if the religions under them weren’t so mystical.

Usually, understanding something soothes a lot of the anger we could have toward it, and religion is no exception.

So,

I found a book a few years ago which made a lot of things click together for me.

It helped me see religion in a new light and accept its good sides a little bit more… I still see a lot of downsides to it, but that’s a story for an other day.

I always thought there had to something that explained how every civilisation appeared to believe in some kind of god, spirits or religion. How else would different beliefs emerge all around the world, and apparently even before the human race knew how to write?

I never found an answer to that, but Dr. Lynne Kelly did. She also wrote a book about it after 8 years of research for her PhD. I was lucky enough to stumble on an internet forum we both read.

The forum post in question is there, on Art of Memory…

Its name already gave away my punch-line, so I’ll say it blankly :

The stories of gods and spirits were created to be memory tools.

I know it may not make a ton of sense for the average person.

Memorization doesn’t hold the same place in our world as it once did.

But one of the place that memory holds in today’s world is :

Memory competitions.

Events where competitors meet to sit silently in front of pages full of numbers, shuffled decks of cards, lists of words and more challenges to test their memory.

At these competitions, impressive feats of memory are not uncommon.

Feats such as being able to recite thousands decimals of Pi or memorizing a full page of random numbers in a few minutes.

But these people are not super-humans, they simply know and practice memorization techniques.

One of the most popular techniques consists in imagining a place you know well in your head, moving through it and placing images at known locations to memorize them.

There is also a few tricks people use in order to make the images more memorable, mostly, making it very unusual and triggering some kind of emotion if possible, laughter, love, hate, …

But why would our ancestors need memory techniques?

And what would they need to memorize?

Why memorize? To survive. There was no written knowledge yet. Everything has to be memorized. Everything, is a lot. Also, kind-of remembering, doesn’t really cut it when your life and that of everyone you know depends on it.

So, developing techniques makes a lot of sense.

Memorize what? Thousands of species, time, healing and other craft, etc.

I don’t know about you, but even if I learned to differentiate many different species, I’d end up mixing my thoughts together after barely a few weeks.

Was the leaves with 4 pointy ends poisonous or was it the one with 5 pointy ends? I, for one, would try to keep some clues outside of my head to double-check my memories.

And that’s exactly what people did.

Photo by Inja Pavlić on Unsplash

Who holds all the weird, sacred items in any indigenous story we’ve ever been told?

The old Shaman.

The one who knows how to heal, who other listens to, who tells the stories and guides the ceremonies.

As someone who have practiced a few memory techniques myself for a few years prior to reading that, and someone who was in need for any type of explanation for all this sacred and spiritual stuff, everything all seemed to click together perfectly.

If you’re a firm believer, I don’t expect to change your mind.

But if you just want some explanation that makes sense, I suggest you just keep reading on memory techniques, try it for yourself and see if it’s just some philosophical rambling or not.

Then just think about how the stories people told themselves would have evolved with the settlement of villages, their expansion into cities, the arrival of writing.

How a few generations can render a lot of the previously sacred knowledge more or less useless. How people grew more and more distant from the religious authorities and, after a few generations, forgot all about its origins. And how the stories would have needed to evolve, but didn’t, in part, because people might have forgotten it was just that, a story.

Then, major civilization, each with their own religion, came in contact.

Their religions were each threatened of corruption or oblivion by each other.

Those beliefs were created to help people survive, but also to help them live well. The people didn’t remember how they came to be, but they knew they were there to protect them, and that they were crucial.

But they were never supposed to remain as-is. They should have evolved along with the civilisations they’re guiding.

A society keeping a static religion is like a tree outgrowing its support. It helps in the beginning, but if it’s not adjusted it starts harming more than helping. At some point it may not even be needed anymore, but if it remains as is, it’ll either kill what it should help, or would fall appart and let the tree grow, scarred.

Thanks for reading all the way here! That was my first blog post so I’ll appreciate any feedback!

If you want details on memory techniques, I suggest you visit Art of Memory it’s the best resource to learn on the subject in my opinion.

If you want to read more on memory techniques used by indigenous tribes, I suggest you look at 36 Memory Experiments on Lynne Kelly’s web site, or read her book : The Memory Code