The Necessity of Religion

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(from Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekanand)

 

Of all the forces that have worked and are still working to mould the

destinies of the human race, none, certainly, is more potent than

that, the manifestation of which we call religion. All social

organisations have as a background, somewhere, the workings of that

peculiar force, and the greatest cohesive impulse ever brought into

play amongst human units has been derived from this power. It is

obvious to all of us that in very many cases the bonds religion have

proved stronger than the bonds of race, or climate, or even of

descent. It is a well-known fact that persons worshipping the same

God, believing in the same religion, have stood by each other, with

much greater strength and constancy, than people of merely the same

descent, or even brothers. Various attempts have been made to trace

the beginnings of religion. In all the ancient religions which have

come down to us at the present day, we find one claim made--that they

are all supernatural, that their genesis is not, as it were, in the

human brain, but that they have originated somewhere outside of it.

 

Two theories have gained some acceptance amongst modern scholars. One

is the spirit theory of religion, the other the evolution of the idea

of the Infinite. One party maintains that ancestor worship is the

beginning of religious ideas; the other, that religion originates in

the personification of the power of nature. Man wants to keep up the

memory of his dead relatives and thinks they are living even when the

body is dissolved, and he wants to place food for them and, in a

certain sense, to worship them. Out of that came the growth we call

religion.

 

Studying the ancient religions of the Egyptians, Babylonians,

Chinese, and many other races in America and elsewhere, we find very

clear traces of this ancestor worship being the beginning of

religion. With the ancient Egyptians, the first idea of the soul was

that of a double. Every human body contained in it another being very

similar to it; and when a man died, this double went out of the body

and yet lived on. But the life of the double lasted only so long as

the dead body remained intact, and that is why we find among the

Egyptians so much solicitude to keep the body uninjured. And that is

why they built those huge pyramids in which they preserved the

bodies. For, if any portion of the external body was hurt, the double

would be correspondingly injured. This is clearly ancestor worship.

With the ancient Babylonians we find the same idea of the double, but

with a variation. The double lost all sense of love; it frightened

the living to give it food and drink, and to help it in various ways.

It even lost all affection for its own children and its own wife.

Among the ancient Hindus also, we find traces of this ancestor

worship. Among the Chinese, the basis of their religion may also be

said to be ancestor worship, and it still permeates the length and

breadth of that vast country. In fact, the only religion that can

really be said to flourish in China is that of ancestor worship. Thus

it seems, on the one hand, a very good position is made out for those

who hold the theory of ancestor worship as the beginning of religion.

 

.... to be continued