Religion is holding a blind belief in the word of another. It matters not what flavour is believed. Someone outside of self knows something I (the all seeing eye) does not.
It invokes an illusion of duality and polarity (goodness and darkness) within the reality that is the singularity (me, you, spirit, soul...whatever you know/think/decide/assume your self to be).
It frames the mind and thought into judging everything be it thought or action within the confines of the illusory polarising duality aka the words of another crafted.
It limits the potential for experience to be enjoyed by framing things as per its illusion. It interrupts pattern recognition by overlaying is polarising duality limit.
It invokes feelings of fear, doubt, certainty, persecution, righteousness, superiority that have no basis in reality inside the mind of the believer.
If its not this it must be that becomes the measure and "what if" is relegated into oblivion. A waking death in a way as "what if" creates motion and without motion there is no life. Life is demonstrably motion.
The equilibrium of religion is absence of motion.
The entirety of what we see as "society" today sits within the illusion of religions polarising duality. Every control mechanism is structured to maintain the illusion...at whatever cost.
Why?
Fear of lack is best I can tell the fundamental base of human life. Perhaps this is where the illusion of polarising duality manifests inside. Without life there is death. Perhaps this illusion gives comfort, meaning, satisfaction where none is warranted so we inculcate religion before we come to know the word itself. We prime ourselves to the point we are believers long before we come to see ourselves as believing.
Religion is a pyramid shaped hierarchy. The capstone is without exception something without life. Which is rather ironic as the only demonstrable thing without life is death. Every layer of the hierarchy beneath the "something" is a human.
Humans who are believed by others to be capable of hearing, reading, understanding the words of the "something" because the "something" has an unknown way of choosing them for their position. None of the humans in the other layers gain the "blessing" of direct communication even those in the layer from which the "something" chooses.
The chosen human is then the dissemination of the "somethings" words by the interpretation of written words, actions and commentary on actions. When the chosen human dies another is chosen by the "something" from the topmost layer of the human hierarchy.
The "something" is also able to communicate subtly with or influence some humans outside of the hierarchy of belief and induce them to join the hierarchy.
This demonstration of motion flies in the face of the illusion's polarising duality of equilibrium and its mirrored precisely throughout the historical "record" of the written word and yet believers are blind to recognising reality.
That there is a historical record is beyond doubt. There are words, stories numbers, calendars, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, processes, methods, infrastructure, buildings, artifacts that are all evidence of the historical record.
There are copious interpretations, opinions, guesses, reconstructions that obfuscate the evidence. Add in deliberate obfuscation to save face or reputation, bare faced lies, accidental misreading, forgotten or missing interpretations and it becomes a morass.
Within this morass sits academia which is structured exactly the same as religion with "the established narrative" taking on the role of the "something". The established narrative cannot be challenged from within the academic hierarchy, cannot be changed, altered or otherwise interfered with. It only differs in regards to the promotion of the academic humans sits within the gift of their peers not in divine communication with the "something" as it does in religion. (Appears to do in religion is more accurate to my mind).
It is reasonable to realise that the motion we call life leads to the actual lived experience of every human goes unrecorded in any way shape or form. It is also reasonable to assume any record made of any of it is going to be limited and selective. Records come after the fact not during or before.
Processes and methods are not set. They are in motion as humans are not robotic in their actions. Changes and nuances abound across individual humans, human life time and generations.
Some endure longer than others, some may be immutable, others fall away whilst others come into being.
Most are passed from hand to hand, mouth to mouth and no documentary record is required so none is ever made. Humans learn by experience of what is, what has been done before, what is available now to achieve what they themselves need or want.
Any use of documents, drawings, calculations in establishing a new way of doing something is not of any use once the way has been established and tested or the thing has been built, created, crafted and found to work. If a journal of any kind is kept during the process it inevitably goes out of use when its author changes direction or dies. Some endure through time but the durability of ink, pencil and paper through time is not known. A lack of documentary evidence is the norm for these reasons.
Academic history is bound by the ability of man to make records in a medium that can endure across generation. Today that medium is paper made from plants which can be marked with letters, numbers, drawings with a medium made from charcoal, pigments, liquids.
The academic narrative holds that prior to the invention and creation of paper wood, clay and stone were the medium of record.
Whatever the truth might be all of these mediums have a finite life in terms of legibility.
If the marks made upon the medium degrade the meanings contained within them disappear. The information put down as record of something is lost to the generations coming alive after the author created the record.
If records of records are made then human error, deliberate obfuscation, outright fakery could all be in play and without a method of establishing veracity no reader would be any the wiser.
In truth a large gap in the historical record is being created right now with digital record replacing paper. Magnetic tapes, discs of mere decades ago are unreadable as the devices which could read them have all but gone out of use. With their replacements the hard drives also going out of use and with solid state drives that are severely limited in use cycles replacing them the computer "information age" is going to be a void that will be 'discovered' by those not yet born.
This recorded information cycle could well be the way things go across many human generations. We might be unable to recognise past documentary records for what they are. There might be huge voids where no records were kept or they were not required and today we think we are looking at things inexplicable to us but in reality we might simply have lost the ability to see or understand what the builders, creators, users of the things from the past could.
We might be incapable of uncovering what they knew and feel ourselves lacking. Back to the fear of lack being the base of religion...
That the human is a recogniser of pattern is beyond doubt. We demonstrate it to ourselves every waking moment however we demonstrate an ability to suspend this reality and allow belief to replace it.
If we could suspend belief and put pattern recognition in its proper place then look at the historical record we likely would be better at recognising fiction for what it is. On all scales from individual names of people up to the doings of countries, nations, races, populations pattern I feel holds the most promise.
An obvious pattern, (obvious once I realised it!) is the claims made for "the romans" and "the normans". Its coloured by the claims about "what the romans did for us" but laying them aside the pattern that appears show one is a retelling of the other. Further investigation could well reveal further iterations in the historical record.
Looking at individual names and the claims attributed to them reveals a pattern where men working in the same disciplines have very similar life stories. Same goes for a lot of heroic figures in the historical record.
These patterns point to a lot of historical record names never existing in the flesh and being invented to support the academic narrative or obfuscate something which would cast doubt on it.
Another pattern is the career changes in an awful lot of names in the historical record. They study subject A and become good at it. They then go on to "make a name for themselves" doing something they never studied.
A lot of "unknowns" or "counters to the narrative" are obfuscated by attribution to "names". Yet another pattern...
