If you ask people why religion matters, you’ll get a range of answers: comfort, community, identity, meaning. But beneath those answers lies a deeper historical fact: religion, in its earliest forms, was not a system of rules designed to dominate people’s lives. It was a tool — the best early humans had to explain storms, death, and the mysteries of the sky; to set rules that helped groups survive; and to remember what had happened long before most people could read.

This argument might sound radical. It’s not a moral attack on faith. It’s a historical claim: when people were small bands living in a dangerous world, they needed explanations and rules. They made them up together — and those explanations and rules turned into story.

The Three Things Religion Did First

1. It explained nature.
   
   Before astronomy and meteorology, people watched the sun and stars, rivers and floods. They told stories to make sense of it. If your village was swept by a terrible river flood, the flood became a story: a warning, a moral. In the ancient Near East, we find many such accounts — Sumerian and Babylonian tales, and later the story of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. These aren’t just fanciful tales. They preserve a cultural memory of terrifying floods and the social consequences that followed.
   
   

2. It gave communities rules.
   
   Stories teach behavior. We don’t think of “don’t steal” as sacred just because a book says so — we learn it because social groups survive better when members trust one another. Religious stories put moral rules into memorable form. Adam and Eve’s story isn’t just about origins: it’s a way to explain why we should care about the resources of a community, about responsibility and consequence.
   
   

3. It preserved memory.
   
   Before archives, libraries, and scientific reports, story was how humans preserved what mattered. The Library of Alexandria and the Hanging Gardens became symbols of human achievement and loss; flood myths recorded catastrophes that shaped entire regions. These stories were cultural memory written in drama and metaphor.

Multiple Versions, Multiple Voices — The Dead Sea Scrolls

A concrete example shows how fluid and pluralistic religion once was. The Dead Sea Scrolls (texts produced between roughly the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE) contain multiple versions of the same material. Within a single community you can find variant laws, variant psalms, different ways to read prophecy. This isn’t evidence of confusion. It’s evidence of choice: people read, argued, interpreted, and followed different texts and traditions in the same place and time. Early religion allowed for individual and communal autonomy in belief. It was in many ways tolerant and adaptive.

How Stories Became Law: Rome’s Role in Freezing Metaphor into Doctrine

For centuries many religious ideas remained symbolic and flexible. Then politics changed the game. When Christianity was legalized (Edict of Milan, 313 CE) and later became the official religion of the Roman Empire, a process of codification began — councils, creeds, and canons that standardized belief. The Council of Nicaea (325 CE) is often identified as a turning point where symbolic language hardened into official doctrine. Simple, flexible symbols — “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” — were turned into legal orthodoxy.

What were these symbols originally? There’s a reading that sees them thus:

• Father = the cosmic order (the unseen laws that shape the world)

• Son = the moral exemplar (the human model who acts ethically)

• Holy Spirit = the felt energy of community, the “vibe” people experience together

These metaphors allowed people to make sense of the world, but when they were made literal and enforced by a state, they became rules that regulated life and limited the interpretive freedom earlier communities enjoyed.

Floods, Heroes, and Wonders — What Really Happened

Look at the flood stories again: Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and the Hebrew Bible all have versions. Why do so many cultures remember a great flood? Because great floods happened. Catastrophic riverine events in Mesopotamia left traces in archaeology and long-term memory. So the story of Noah is not a fantasy divorced from reality; it is a cultural and moralized record of catastrophe.

Likewise, the Homeric epics memorialize social upheavals and wars; they do so by weaving in mythic causes. The ancient wonders — the Hanging Gardens, the Library of Alexandria, the Colossus — were real in some sense, but their stories were amplified into symbols. In all cases humans created narratives that mixed fact, memory, symbolism, and moral teaching.

Race, Diversity, and the Whitewashing of History

Another important pattern: ancient societies often recognized diversity. Egyptian art shows Nubians and Egyptians in different tones; Greek authors refer to Ethiopians and Libyans with different features. But medieval and Renaissance European art recast many historical figures in European images. That later “whitewashing” ignores the more diverse world reflected in earlier sources. It’s another example of how later political, aesthetic, and cultural choices changed how we remember the past.

Genetics supports this too: humans emerged in Africa; darker skin is ancestral; lighter complexions evolved later as populations moved into lower-UV regions. So the “original race” claim — that humanity began in Africa — is correct in a geographic and genetic sense, but modern concepts of race are social constructions layered onto far older histories of human migration and mixing.

What This Means for Today

Religion once had a practical and creative function. But in many societies today, religion functions as an instrument of law and moral coercion in ways that are not historically inevitable. Consider everyday implications:

• Laws about reproductive rights in some countries draw directly on religious doctrine.

• Dress codes, legal restrictions on women, and curbs on civil liberties are sometimes justified by religious literalism.

• Some communities actively reject aspects of modern medicine, science, or education on religious grounds.

If religion had remained a flexible, pluralistic cultural system — like the variations preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls — it might not have acquired this coercive force. The problem is not storytelling or tradition itself. The problem is treating stories meant to explain and guide ancient communities as immutable laws for modern, complex societies.

A New Call to Action

From Worship of Rules to Universal Ethical Orientation

We do not have to throw away religion’s wisdom. But we should re-orient it. Here is a practical set of steps for individuals, educators, and policymakers:

1. Teach religious stories as cultural history. In schools, place religious narratives alongside archaeology, history, and science so students understand origins, functions, and the social contexts of belief.

2. Protect the separation of religious doctrine from civil law. Laws that restrict rights on purely religious grounds should be re-examined in light of universal human-rights principles and empirical knowledge.

3. Promote a universal ethical framework. Encourage moral systems based on shared values — justice, care, reciprocity, respect for evidence — rather than inherited ritual obedience.

4. Recognize religious unity of source. Emphasize that major religions emerged from shared human needs: explanation, memory, community. This reduces sectarian division and encourages cross-cultural empathy.

5. Celebrate spiritual experience without coercion. People will always have faith in something greater than themselves — a sense of cosmic order, purpose, or ethical commitment. A healthy public culture makes space for this while stopping short of granting religious texts legal supremacy.

The goal is not to erase religion, but to re-embed it where it belongs: in culture, ethics, and history — not as the basis for public law or the justification for restricting others’ lives.

Conclusion

Religion as Our First Draft

Religion was never meant to be "the last word." It was humanity’s first draft — an imaginative, social, and practical effort to cope with an uncertain world. Science, democratic governance, and expanded notions of human rights are later drafts that corrected many of the earliest misunderstandings. We can keep the beauty of the original draft (its narratives, its rites, its communal charities) while committing to improvements: basing law on shared evidence, defending individual freedoms, and steering our moral imagination toward universal flourishing.

If we can do that — if we can treat religion as cultural memory rather than literal law — we keep what is good and let go of what harms. That is the historical and ethical project this paper urges. It is not an anti-faith manifesto; it is a proposal for a healthier relationship between meaning and power.

Further Reading

• James Frazer, The Golden Bough – Project Gutenberg

• Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed – Journalist Blog Archive

• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained – Library Blog Archive

• Cann, Stoneking & Wilson (1987): "Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution" – National Institute of Health

• Epic of Gilgamesh – 1998 Translation

• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – Core Knowledge

• The Dead Sea Scrolls – Israel Museum - Jerusalem

Submission Roadmap