You do not have to believe in religion to accept that they were inspired by real people. This is what I think and perhaps it’s so irrationally immune to evidence that one may consider it a belief. I am a white American and as such I have been most influenced by the religious figure of Jesus Christ. Personally, I have only been to church service twice in my life; once with an Asian friend’s family and once with my first sexual partner. There are premises to my idea wherein you have to try to see past all the devastation religion has wrought on human civilization and the human mind. Imagine religion as the first form of public education wherein morals were able to be developed in the household through stories and faith. It was the first book to go into mass production resulting in it being the very source of many of our genetic ancestor’s literacy.

If morals are not present in nature but a product of instinct then they can be lost in a society even a human one wherein the need for instinct has been replaced by work and money. To write moral truth into stone would represent the creation of natural law, I do not need the stories to be literal. Following the logic of evolution, Jesus would then signify the mutation of moral thought outside of instinct and perhaps even predicted by the Greeks when they established the concept. The crucifixion then becomes that moment of supremacy where the traits of the mutated organism begin to spread cumulatively throughout all proximal populations. All human society that has been overwhelmed by the success of our species can be seen to have incorporated some form of natural law through stories inspired by real people. I do not possess enough knowledge of religion to make this argument across multiple cultures.

Since the time of Jesus there has been many religions created many of which have grown much larger than their Semite origins. The death of Christ represents a growth in the moral consciousness of our species like a creature from the sea that has become so successful foraging on land that it has evolved to survive outside of the ocean. How do you measure human evolution? In what form does evolution take when the organism’s environment and competition is artificial and only with itself, respectfully. I’ve often wondered this alongside a desire for millions of religious folks to represent some significant aspect of human development beyond the propagation of confused ignorance. For reasons not self-evident I did not dismiss my curiosity and it has repeatedly caused me to consider religion as signifying something very real in regards to human evolution. Who is to say that the strings of reality are not bound in ways that consciousness, instinct, and fate are not merely random occurrences in an existence that contains everything except meaning? Perhaps life is a test and we strive for victory over our own lot in order to gain insight as well as acceptance for wherever the energy of mind may manifest in its next exigency.