A Facebook correspondent responds to this post:
Interesting that you tie this to religion as being an agricultural-based phenomena.
Well, I wouldn’t tie religion per se to the transition from foraging to farming; I’m not sure archaeologists would grant that religion starts with farming. Wikipedia claims the first signs of religion may, in fact, predate homo sapiens, as some of our predecessor species appear to have practiced funerary rituals indicative of a religious concept.
However, I’d be willing to believe, if told from a reliable source, that the use of religion as a force for shaping society through the use of psychological warfare, as it were, began with the creation of the farming society. After all, if you are the source of the energy used to make the farm work, there had better be some reason you’re staying in that position, and I don’t think prospects for advancement would be likely. I suspect either carrot or stick – God will punish you, or you get to enter Heaven – would be the thorns used to keep you in place, at least in homogenous societies.
In heterogenous societies – such a flavorless word, heterogenous – pure and simple force would be more likely as the myths and customs shared in homogenous societies would not have the same currency, the same binding power in those societies where slaves are brought in from the outside (sure wish I knew the anthropological term for that practice).
