this is an example of one of my ‘what if’ days

Suppose for a moment that Religion had never progressed to the SOLE Diety stage, that we were still practicing multiple autonomous dieties ranging from the small god of furry creatures that end their existence in “Squeek!!” to the tribal elder spirit that overseas life of all the tribe. Each as independent and unique as the humans that ‘put them in power’.

I, personal opinion of course, think that we would never have developed ‘omnipresent’ states. I think its a long term propaganda ploy to acclimate people into accepting that ONE is more wise and intelligent that MANY. It opens the door to ‘they’re too stoopid to make those decisions for themselves’ and have it be accepted by the many out of laziness, fear, apathy, what-have-you. (things change, yet they so stay the same, no?)

You can see signs of old pagan ritual in many of the holidays we still celebrate under the guise of ‘Sun of God’, and many of the aspects, (solstice, sun dies for three days and rises on the third, as an example) are replicated in MANY different religions, some are near mirror images of the one we currently tout as “THE WORD”. (virgin birth, dies on cross, rises three days later, wisemen, etc etc etc. And you will find hints of things like ‘Great flood’ and other points along the way. )

Now, a lot of the parallels are due to unwritten histories. Words were memorized, passed down generation to generation, and why epic poems of come ‘tribes’ are so long and convoluted and, well, strange,,, BUT, what happened when said tribe grew so large that there was a split, for whatever reason, (lost thirteenth tribe of Israel, just an example,,,). The words would still be there in some of the people, but the tribe being split, the words would evolve in new directions. (My theory on the 13th tribe: it became the Saracens, which eventually became Islam, and I am not alone on this seeing how The Abraham Accords came into being. Someone noted that there were commonalities in belief, with a defined split at some point, but brought those commons to the table and said, ‘lets talk’.).

It’s well known that migration was often spurred by population pressure, droughts and famine. I think it was Heinlein pointed out, the Mongul Hoards were due to dying pasturelands. His example was written as an assignment to a cadet classman by a professor, and no proofs were given, but the thought intrigued me enough that I did some research and sure enough, there was a MAJOR drought in Mongolia around that time, that was preceded by a mad population boom. Ghengiis Khan just happened to be born at the right time for his infamy. (and not all that you were taught about GK are facts either. He had a very liberal system of command and his hardcore rules were really quite simple. His ruthlessness, as we see it now, was commonplace of that time. And his successes were envied by others at that time. Envy can color opinion, and those colors bleed through and wash out the image over time: especially when written word was so rare a thing.(but growing rapidly,,)

Let me turn the page for a moment, because I know someone is going to say “if we never developed governments, we would never have grown out of aggrarian society, or even left the trees for that matter’. Not true. Innovation is accidental, not contrived. The best discoveries are never found with “EUREKA!!! It worked!!!’, they are found by ‘hmmm, that’s interesting’ and further exploration. Knowledge is always accumulative once a species acquires language: being able to express abstract ideas beyond the immediate needs is why the human species exploded as the primary species on this planet,,,, IMO,, (and probably shared by others, just sayin’.). I have said it, others of higher standing than me have said it: We have EXACTLY the same resources available to us today, that the caveman did when he was banging rocks together. The real difference is KNOWLEDGE of how to use them. (go ahead, try to tell me they didn’t have petroleum products. I can think of three ways they DID and even utilized them, and you know of at least one off the top of your head, you just hadn’t made the connection: Le Brea Tar pits. ). Its quite simple. EARTH is a closed system (for the most part. Helium being one element that ‘leaks’ away from the system). But all the carbon that is ‘creating issues’ (Cough hack, spit) in our world today is the SAME CARBON THAT WAS HERE WHEN OOG WAS BANGING ROCKS TOGETHER. its been transferred about a few times, by growing trees or fish or other small creatures that died, fell to an ocean floor and were covered up to become coal/oil/natgas/etc. I turn stored sunlight (defined as carbon) into immediate heat everyday when it gets cold out, same as Oog did in his time: by burning wood. We burn stored sunlight from millions of years ago in our fuels to get about now. The difference is KNOWLEDGE of how to use the resource. (and all the handwringing of peak oil and what not: sorry, not buying it anymore, this is a closed system we live on. Maybe we will ‘run out’ of oil or coal, at some point, but the accumulated knowledge, and DRIVE of innovation WILL eventually find an alternative, and do so seamlessly, unlike the current trend of shuttering production to FORCE the alternative before its ready. The best example of that is in our food production. We supply food for 8 billion people, but on one-third the arable land that was used to raise food for 1 billion people 300 years ago. Innovation made that possible.)

The knowledge accumulates. Written word keeps it available. We stand on the shoulders of Giants in thinking. And knowledge becomes exponential in growth. Its why we went from agrarians societies to industrial ones in such a short span of time. And the growth from industrial to digital is even shorter. YET, what makes us digital? Silicon? All of the processors, memory chips, etc, are made from silicon wafers. What did Oog use? Silicon? Yup, those rocks he was banging together were silica based with super fine crystal structures that broke cleanly and formed VERY sharp edges.

But how much of that did Government ‘create’? Oh there are examples of government driven RESEARCH, but you will not find one instance of government driven DISCOVERY. (funded, maybe, but never ‘driven’; true discovery is always accidental.) But given the Research side, I would say, that until the last few centuries, there was ZERO government research of any sort, and only exploitation of it by government. Better armor was not developed by kings, it was developed by interaction between the guy wearing it, and his blacksmith. You take a much higher interest in your OWN safety than that of those you intend to put into battle (just ask our current Generals in Mordor on the Potomac. They will pay lip-service to ‘protecting the troops’ but one can sense its more ‘protect the tools as much as you can until they cant be used,,,’)

but let me turn this back to the opening argument: what if we had not ‘progressed’ from multiple deity religions? I don’t recall which religion built Stonehenge, Druids? Definitely some pagan sect, lost in time due to lack of written word,,, But they were using astronomical observation in fine detail (considering the empirical nature of eyesight observation) and would eventually have grown past that if they had developed maths (I am sure they had some sort of calculation method, but not ‘numbers’, and likely NOT zero, the hinge that modern math swings on.) What if, they had not died out (and there is argument that they did not, but instead were driven out and ended up immigrating to ancient Greece and continuing on their astronomical research. Look at the AntiKythera device and tell me they didn’t understand the sky’s, or geometry and mechanical engineering (crude physics) of some sort. Maybe not modern processes, but that would happen in time,,,,) and the Greek were very much a non-Prime deity society. Its been shown they even had (believed in) house/home gods, that only dealt with ONE abode,,,,

Think about it. What if, we never grew to believe in an ALL POWERFUL, ALL KNOWING, benefactor? Even with the kings of that time: they were NOT Omnipotent, though they sure tried to give that impression,,, The people knew their limits and it usually extended about as far as logistics could carry them (Alexander for example, he was a logistics master, but even he extended beyond his means,,,) I wonder how the world would look today, if “GOD” had never come into our thinking,,,

NOW, I know there are holes in this that you could toss a pissed-off Wildcat through. It’s nowhere near a perfect ‘theory’ (are any of them?) but its these kinds of things that get me going on cold winter nights where I am watching the fire because I am not burning lights or batteries on the laptop. Toss in a good shot of bourbon and things can get even wilder, even WOo-Woo levels sometimes. (that whole quantum cloud thing as I illustrated in some other stories, look at my pages below the header for more). AND, this is why I want a partner; You need anchors when your mind starts to wander off the beaten path of ‘weird’ into ‘ rilly-wyrd’.

or sometimes, just that someone to smack ya upside the head and say “Dood, bring it back to reality for minute!”

(and I am sure that some writer capable of better than me is going to read this and curse me till they are blue in the face “like I didn’t have ENOUGH worlds running rampant in my head!!!”)