For a long time I've thought religion was essentially a tool to retain social order without having to spend as much money on police and guards and such. If you convince everyone in your kingdom that basically there's a cop watching you every second of every day, so you better behave, otherwise you'll burn in hell for eternity? That's a means to save a LOT of treasure you'd have otherwise needed to spend for security forces to keep order. So that's always been pretty obvious to me.

More recently (I'm kinda embarrassed to say) it finally dawned on me what powerful tool the "eternal life" storyline is when it comes to motivating the citizenry to go to WAR (esp. in an offensive war, as opposed to defensive) for you, as a king or whatnot. If you convince them that their life on earth is just temporary anyway, and you never "really die", then it's much less scary to face the enemy and the possibility of death on the battlefield.

Add in the common storyline that says the King is a divine extension of Gawd, and that therefore He "favors" everyone on the King's side, and the battle is "Holy" and therefore everyone who dies in the "cause" is "heaven bound" and all that rot? This creates ideal conditions to get people to risk being hacked to death, trampled by horses, and run through by arrows, right? Get on out there and fight, you've got nothing to LOSE cause you'll go to heaven when you die!

That's one of those fairly obvious things I can't believe I never really thought about before I was pushing 60 lol.

So in order to survive in a "group" setting (with "safety in numbers" ), some type of "moral" code of behavior began to evolve through the designation of some "higher authority". That could be a "God" or "Goddess" (or many of them) and/or some group of "elders", who would take on that role.

The monarchs and priests evolved to be "stand-ins", by having some purported "direct connection" with or serving as a conduit to that authority.

Wolves, lions, and pretty much all primates have "societies" set up, with alphas and betas, and individuals with societal roles, etc. Ants and bees are another example. The bedrocks involved here are all inherited, not newly evolved.

Once animals developed enough intelligence to conceive of a process by which there might be "eternal life for individuals" (which, of course, didn't happen until ourselves), we began doing so by imagining a mechanism by which it could happen. Every one of our animal ancestors must've had a strong desire to survive, else none of us would be here. I think "Heaven" is a natural extension of our innate, powerful instinct to "survive", and "God" is an extension of our instinct to designate "alphas" in our community.

Also, this "no natural predators" thing is a pretty recent development. People were getting killed and eaten by bears and lions and tigers and wolves and sharks and piranhas and even anacondas and pythons not THAT long ago

It's the "hierarchy" that evolved further as we moved to become Homo sapiens sapiens.

And although we had certain critters that could subdue us, the evolution of tools helped in that regard. I.e., we are pretty much at the top of the food chain by becoming both hunters and gatherers.

What the hell is that about?

Everyone in the military is addressed by rank.

Also, we dealt with investigators from Army C.I.D. They didn't usually wear rank insignia, and we called them "Mister" (never saw a female investigator, dunno if they existed in the mid '60's)

So, not all were addressed by rank.

All the nurses and med techs were addressed by rank.

I haven't seen many Chaplains since this happened., but I'll darn sure be looking now.

Traditionally Chaplains are addressed as "Chaplain", no matter their rank, but in correspondence it's Chaplain (Major) Smith, or Chaplain (Lieutenant Colonel) Jones, for example.

I think it's probably not a good time to be a Muslim or Buddhist chaplain in the military, or for that matter to be Muslim or Buddhist serving in the military in any capacity.

Wrong 'tone', skin tone...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Green_Jr._(chaplain)

This is analysis.

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