Religion: A Hypothetical Origin

When I already have dared to associate the word innuendo with the word religion, let me take one step forward and start this blog by an article, in which I wish to present a hypothesis about the origin of the religion. 

When I look back and think out of the box, I always feel that the religion must have originated as an outcome of the efforts to retain the authority of leaders on the masses. Since when man has started living in groups and farming the fields, he always sought for a leader, in whose leadership people of the group can live peacefully, and can have a just reward of their tough physical work. Thus it can easily be understood that the leader must have enjoyed a special status. Now come back to the present and have a look at our political system. Each and every leader, howsoever tall he is, has to face anti-incumbency; so extrapolating this very fact, one can think of the factor of anti-incumbency in the ancient tribes. One more thing to be considered is the element of competition. Each and every leader, regardless of the time, is prone to the competition. Hence, it can easily be deduced that the leader always lives underneath the fear that someone might take away his leadership and he will have to live the rest of his life under the leadership of someone else. 

The first religious leader must have been a leader of a tribe, who in order to maintain his authority, might have devised stories of his super-natural powers. Tribes, on different geographic locations, must have followed their leaders and that's how different religions might have originated. The question here is how plausible this theory is. Let's talk about the origin of a particular religion. As the leader of the tribe, used to boast of his super-natural powers, some relatively reasonable persons must have questioned his powers. To counter those questions, the leaders might have spread the stories of miracles and avatars. With the passage of time, human life became easier than earlier, and people got time to observe the universe. They must have felt fascinated and astonished when they saw phenomena,viz the solar or a lunar eclipse. They might have asked their leaders, the answers of these questions; and the leaders according to their knowledge and wit must have answered those questions. As the human population increased, the tribes got converted into kingdoms and the kings replaced the tribal leaders. As we know, it is very difficult for alone a king to run a state, he might have decentralized his power and that's how his deputies came into existence. The spirituals or religious of early times must have been the deputies of the kings or queens. As the time passed, people's beliefs in the religion got strengthened and that's how religious leaders started enjoying the equal or even a superior status than the kings or queens. Kings had to woo them in order to control the masses. The religion thus became a rigid structure of rituals and beliefs. The state used it as a weapon to control and manipulate people as and when they needed to. 

To conclude, I personally believe that the religion and the state are not spouses. However, the religion is baby of the state...