You think it is appropriate to act with each other in the same way that you believe God acts with you.
You also think that when you create crisis, violence, killing, and war, you are doing so in order to meet God’s requirements.
You think that you are helping God meet His needs.
Many of you believe that God wants crisis, violence, killing, and war, if that is what it takes for you to fulfill His requirements.
In this context, you believe wanton killing to be God’s Will.
Neale: Human beings believe that? I don’t know of any human beings who believe that.
You may not know them personally, but I can assure you they exist, and have existed on your planet for a very long time.
From the very earliest days you have described the worst human experiences and disasters—even man-made acts of terror—as “the Will of God.”
In fact, your effort to understand the bad things that happen to you is how you came to believe in the existence of a God in the first place—and to believe in a God who does bad things.
Neale: Please explain that.
In your most primitive times, what you would call the caveman era and before, humans did not comprehend the simplest aspects of life around them. All they knew was that there was life around them.
That is, there was something other than them.
This other thing that existed demonstrated itself all around them. It showed up as wind and rain, sun and moon and clouds, plants and trees and tiny living things that you now call insects and large living things that you now call animals, and as spectacular effects such as fires that started spontaneously in the forest, thunder and lightning from the sky, huge waves on the ocean, and, sometimes, a frightening shaking of the very ground itself.
Now, Homo sapiens did not know what to make of all these things.
They did not know why people died, why hurricanes or tornadoes or droughts came along and destroyed everything, or why anything happened at all.
In order to make some sense of these things, early humans concluded that there must be some power greater than theirs that made these things occur. They imagined “spirits” that caused good and evil to manifest itself in their lives in many ways.
As they watched day turn into night and night into day, grass grow and flowers bloom, and trees lose their leaves and get them back again, they began to deify nature. They imagined “rain gods” and “the sun god” and many other gods that did things according to mood and whim. What had to be done, they reasoned, was to somehow affect this mood and to please the gods, and then the gods would do as they asked.
All manner of rites and rituals were created to “call forth” the spirit of whatever gods might be needed or desired at the moment, to placate them and to honor them and to get them to do what humans earnestly requested. There were rites of fertility and rites of passage and rituals of every kind and intention. These developed through the centuries into what became what some of you now call pagan customs.
Myths grew up around how sacred powers directly influenced life on earth, and about how life on earth can directly influence sacred powers. These myths became oft-told stories, which turned into beliefs. That is, they became true for people.
When myth turns into truth, it becomes organized religion.