this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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The Promised Land was originally God's idea.
Strangely, it was the idea of every God that every religion has ever conceived of.
God was originally the idea of bossy humans, though.
I think it's more likely that the idea of a god or gods originated with humans who consumed psychoactive plants, fungus, and/or ergot-infected grain. Hardly the bossy types.
Over time though, the idea caught on and got popular, until most people had heard of or generally believed in it. Then some tightwads came in and decided that people couldn't get high anymore, so those folks had to take their drugs to secret caves and such.
Meanwhile, the tightwads appropriated the proto-religious ideas and codified them into stricter religions in order to pacify the masses who over generations had come to believe in such things as gods, and thus religions were converted into instruments of social control.
There's another factor here. Pre-agricultural, shamanic religions tend to feature spirits rather than gods. The main difference being that spirits are not anthropomorphic, which really changes how you expect them to behave and how you interact with them. So for example a wind spirit is not a magic man who makes the wind, but is rather the wind itself. A respect for nature is implicit. It's only after farming and settling, when we really began to shape and control our environment, that we imagined the controlling forces of the universe as being essentially human: a projection of human kings, complete with the vice, cruelty and will to subjugate and consume everything that entails.
I mean even then, some people were like "Hey so there's this god of wine and orgies. Anyway, we're gonna go worship him in a cave, wanna come?"
The original nature religions and the like, sure.
Inherently authoritarian ones like Christianity and the other monotheistic ones, though? Definitely the invention of people who wanted to control other people.
There's presumably wasn't a lot of drugs that make you overly concerned with obedience and imposing your will on others available way back then.
That's what I meant by proto-religion.
Also, christianity wasn't authoritarian until it was subverted by Rome. For the first couple hundred years, they were rebels risking their lives