How will it be determined whether a person has met the Requirement or not? And what will happen to those who have not?

 

Your answer to these questions produced the invention of Judgment.

 

Someone, you reasoned, must be the final arbiter. Since the Creator was the one who established the Requirement, it seemed only logical that the Creator would also be the one to decide who had met the Requirement and who had not.

 

For a very long time your species has held the thought that there was something you had to do in order to please God— and that failure to please God produced dire consequences.

 

That you came to such a conclusion was understandable. Looking around you, you saw that some people’s lives went well, and some did not. Primitive mind asked, Why? And primitive mind came up with a primitive answer:

 

Fortune smiled upon those who were in favor with the gods. It was the gods who had to be satisfied, and then the gods would judge.

 

Sacrifices and rituals of all kinds grew up around this belief, all designed to mollify difficult deities.

 

In these earliest days, your sense of Insufficiency was so strong that you even imagined the gods to be in competition with each other. There were many gods to please, and it was often not easy to keep track of what had to be done to keep everybody happy.

 

Each new earthly disaster, each hailstorm, each hurricane, each drought, or famine, or personal misfortune was seen as evidence that one of the gods had not been satisfied—or, sometimes, that they had been warring with each other.

 

How else to explain what was going on?

 

Now, these beliefs arose in ancient times, and through the millennia they have been refined and clarified. Most humans today do not believe that there is a long list of ill-tempered gods who have to be mollified. Today most people believe that there is only one ill-tempered God who has to be mollified.

 

And although it may seem as if your species long ago evolved out of the primitive constructions that created an “I’m-going-to-get-you” kind of God, these ideas continue to dominate your planet’s theologies.

 

This God As Avenger model of Diety has never lost favor in your societies. You’ve used both personal and planetary disasters as evidence of its validity. Even in very recent times, such as when your AIDS epidemic hit, there were many people—including some religious leaders—who proclaimed life’s misfortunes to be God’s punishments for the individual or collective misbehaviors of the human race.