Parsing Out Utopia: Adjusting Our Power of Imagination

 

Imagination is arguably humanity's most distinctive and powerful characteristic. It's what allows us to create things that don't exist in physical reality - from tools to art, from stories to systems of meaning.   Mass farming would not have happened with human imagination.  Great cities were built with our imagination.  We literally imagined civilization into being.  Imagination fuels human innovation, improvisation and group planning.

Perhaps its most profound expression has been our creation of gods, spirits, and religious frameworks to help us understand and relate to the world around us. We can actually trace how our capacity for religious imagination evolved by looking at the development of vital brain structures. The evidence leads to an inescapable conclusion already professed by so many: human beings created gods, what's sacred and the Divine, not the other way around.

Though these worked in concert with other brain regions, the key parts of the brain that let us imagine gods - the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction - didn't even exist in their present form until about 300,000 years ago (with the rest of our contemporary brain coming “online” by 200,000 years ago). These regions drive our "Theory of Mind" - the ability to imagine what other people (or gods) might be thinking and feeling. Without these two brain structures, we literally couldn't have imagined supernatural beings with personalities and intentions.

These two specific brain regions evolved for completely practical reasons - they helped our ancestors understand each other and work together in groups. But once we had this neural machinery for imagining other minds, for the first time, we started using it to imagine all kinds of things that did and did not physically exist. We projected consciousness onto natural forces, dreamed up spirits, and eventually created full-blown gods with personalities suspiciously similar to our own.

Even after we developed the brain capacity for complex imagination, we didn't immediately invent gods. The earliest spiritual practices we have evidence for were animistic and shamanic - directly experiencing and relating to nature, not worshiping supernatural beings who often looked and acted like humans. Those came much later.

Our imagination evolved while we all remained in Africa, eventually spreading throughout the world as human beings dispersed before the dawn of the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. As societies became more complex - first in smaller settlements and later in the first cities - our gods evolved too, conveniently developing attributes that matched our changing social needs.

This biological evidence is actually pretty damning to religion. You have to do some crazy mental gymnastics to justify most religious claims. If something Divine created us, why did the god or gods wait until we evolved the brain structures necessary to imagine them? Why not create with that capacity already? Why did the creator let us spend hundreds of thousands of years relating to nature directly through various practices before showing up? Even more damning, why do the god or deities always seem to want/value whatever the people who invented them wanted/valued to begin with? Gods justified how human beings already wanted to live without them.

Why did the gods take so long to grant humanity knowledge of them when, in reality, about 117 billion human beings have lived and died on this planet. This delay is the work of an absurd god, a crazy, wasteful god unappreciative of total human Being (Being that the unappreciative god supposedly created). And don't argue that all this was “forgiven” or “redeemed” by someone or some thing that came later on. It is wasteful for there to be countless lives of women and men who were in love and had families and none of them were even capable of conceiving of a god.

At least 30-35 billion of them died in total ignorance of the concept of god. Press pause. What kind of god would create humanity in their image but not give billions of our ancestors, who supposedly had souls, the very ability to conceive of its own divinity? How devaluing of early human lives! It does not take a great deal of compassion to understand we can improve upon that bizarre Divinity. No matter the supposed wisdom of their teachings, these gods are crazy to be so careless with the deaths of billions. Wrath of God? Power of God? Not a God of Love that I can accept.

To advance the argument that they were somehow later redeemed, which I have heard used many times in my life, is a ridiculous doctrine. That contention is after the fact, trying to address something no god thought of originally. And it is twisted logic in face of so much suffering and death without the ability to know any god at all. Jesus did not know about these billions who died. Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, Zoroaster, whoever, none of them knew that billions died before their god (or in some cases themselves as a god) was ever known or imagined. This is a staggering indictment on the genuine validity of any religion or folk creation story.

For most of the past 300,000 years, we humans have become spiritual but we had no gods. Our rituals and religions, to the extent we had them long ago, were godless and directed toward the immediate environment that was dangerous and necessary to survival. Billions of lives wasted! Obviously in the face of such imbecility, it makes far more sense and is far more likely that there never were any gods involved with any of their lives...or ours.

There is an obvious connection here between unique cultural needs and the nature of the Divine. Our gods are always like us, we worship them to fulfill desires we already possessed and project into the Divine. The Divine would not exist except for the various human needs that leveraged our powerful imagination to create it.

Divinity is not the same everywhere reflecting human diversity. It is whatever the people who imagine it to be. As for why all humanity imagined gods all over the world without knowing one another, it was a stage of human existence. We literally had nothing better to do with our imaginations. We didn't know anything. One of the things we invented was the Divine.

Every single one of this vast variety of expressions of Divinity claim that their version of Divinity is the True Divinity. The simpler, and more likely, explanation is that we humans created Divinity to suit our needs using our evolved capacity for imagination. We're really good at imagining things that don't exist - it's one of our defining features as a species. We love a good story. The more fantastic the better. And once we'd imagined gods into existence, we used them to help organize increasingly complex societies. They became sources of power for priests and monarchs and kept the first big cities organized and controlled.

The archaeological evidence for early human spirituality presents a fascinating contradiction to traditional religious narratives about human belief systems. The oldest human-made structures discovered thus far reveal sophisticated organization and symbolic thinking, but notably lack any evidence of deities or organized religion. This absence speaks volumes about the true nature of early human spiritual expression and the later emergence of gods and religious systems.

At Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, dating back approximately 12,000 years ago, we find remarkable circular structures with massive T-shaped stone pillars, some weighing up to 20 tons. The pillars feature intricate carvings of animals and abstract symbols, demonstrating clear evidence of symbolic thinking and organizational capability.

However, there is no evidence of gods, temples, or organized religious hierarchy. The site predates mass agriculture and urban settlements, suggesting that late-age hunter-gatherers came together to create these impressive structures for purposes we can only speculate about. It could have been spiritual in nature, or at least possessed a spiritual component, but, whatever that was, it clearly did not include worship of deities as we would later come to know them.

In South America, the site of Huaca Prieta on the northern coast of Peru, dating back 14,500 years, provides evidence of early ceremonial architecture. Similarly, Monte Verde in southern Chile, from approximately 14,800 years ago, shows sophisticated settlement patterns and resource management. At Nabta Playa in southern Egypt, dating from 12,000 to 7,000 years ago, we find evidence of astronomical observation and geometric understanding in stone circles and arrangements. Yet again, while these sites demonstrate human capability for complex organization and symbolic thinking, they show no evidence of gods or religious hierarchies.

Early human spirituality manifested itself through direct, experiential practices in nature rather than codified beliefs or hierarchical religious structures. The evidence suggests that our ancestors experienced the natural world as filled with spirits, and that their “rituals” included altered states of consciousness. They created art, buried their dead with care, and clearly engaged in symbolic thinking about life, death, and their place in the world. However, they did this without inventing divine beings or establishing any trace of religious power structures.

This lack of religious infrastructure persisted through hundreds of thousands of years of human development, during which our ancestors demonstrated considerable imaginative and organizational capabilities at the level of bands and tribes. The ability to create gods and religions existed in their neural architecture, but the need had not yet arisen. Humans saw themselves as part of nature, they did not perceive a need for gods. That need would emerge later, with the development of abstract language and urban centers with their special requirements for social control and resource management. Our immediate environment became mostly unnatural human societies in the world's first cities. This was alien terrain and probably strange to many in the beginning.

The temporal and geographical spread of these sites - from Turkey to Peru, Chile to Egypt - demonstrates that this pattern of god-free spirituality was not limited to any one region or culture. Worldwide, going back another 40,000 years, there are no gods in any ancient cave paintings. None. Early humans across the globe engaged in spiritual practices without inventing divine beings or religious hierarchies. This fact is underappreciated because it is completely clarifying how to look at religion and our natural need for it. But once the need (motivation, inspiration, whatever) arose much later, the diversification of gods and religious systems exploded, emerging alongside language sophistication, urbanization and its attendant social complexities.

This evidence fundamentally challenges traditional religious narratives about human spiritual development. Rather than starting with gods and developing religious systems from Divine revelation, humans began with direct spiritual experiences, language and imagination. There were probably a multitude of spirits throughout nature but the gods emerged much later. The tremendous diversity of gods and religious systems that eventually developed across different cultures and regions (and still exists today) serves as further evidence of their human origins, reflecting the specific needs and circumstances of the societies that created them.

The very diversity and sheer variety of religious experiences and ideas of Divinity or sacredness is astonishing. Yes, human beings are spiritual beings. But we rarely agree on anything about it. This sizable universe of diversity itself refutes any of the multitude of claims for universal validity. Our religions disagree with one another and this has historically inflicted all manner of hardship upon us, particularly a vast amount of violence and oppression. There are religious wars on-going today. It has never stopped since it started many thousands of years ago.

There can be no power that applies to everything and everyone when it manifests itself in so many inconsistent, contradictory and competitive ways. Each religion is created out of human imagination, each insists it is the way.  Yet, no one has ever seen or touched anything Divine. It is an intangible mental and emotional marvel. Something you might point toward but you can't hold it. Some claim statues bleed or a person is reborn or the sick are miraculously healed. But usually this seems more like tricks than anything actually useful to our daily goodness and well-being.

Jesus Christ may have healed the sick and fed the hungry but he did not cure any disease nor did he lessen malnutrition. His miracles were tricks. Time was when competing religions would validate themselves by who could perform the greatest miracle. My religion's miracle is better than your religion's miracle (typical adolescent behavior, by the way). My god! How obviously antiquated can you get?!

Once so important, miracles as religious proof is a childish, nearly worthless occurrence. Miracles have never directly impacted humanity as a whole. Their spiritual value is greatly overestimated. A couple of fish and loaves of bread has fed no multitude since the story is first written down. If it ever happened, it doesn't any more. Why has the magic gone away, even for the believers?

Urbanization required new forms of social organization and control. Suddenly in the grand scheme of time, cities developed. Religious thinking shifted dramatically to serve these new needs. There was earthly power in the Divine. This transformation clearly exposes religion's human essence. It was always a way to keep the tribe in order, now it became a source of human power and control over large numbers of humans.

The changes were profound. Fluid spiritual experiences became codified doctrines. Direct encounters with natural forces became mediated through priestly classes. Local spirits and ancestors transformed into hierarchical pantheons of gods with human-like personalities and city-specific concerns. The divine conveniently evolved to mirror and support the players and rulers of urban power dynamics.

Look at Mesopotamia. Earlier spiritual practices didn't vanish - they were transformed. Local spirits became city patron deities with domains matching urban concerns. Shamanic practices evolved into formal priesthoods controlling resources. Sacred sites became temples doubling as administrative centers. The change wasn't subtle: religion adapted to serve urban needs.

Egypt shows the same pattern. Pre-existing spiritual concepts were reshaped into a system that turned pharaohs into living gods. Earlier ideas about death and rebirth became elaborate state religions justifying social hierarchies with new burial rites. Natural cycles transformed into Divine narratives supporting political power. Religion didn't just serve cities - it was fundamentally reshaped by them.

East Asia demonstrates this transformation differently. China's earlier spiritual practices were reorganized into a celestial bureaucracy mirroring imperial administration. Japan's nature spirits were integrated into a state religion supporting imperial power. Korea merged shamanic traditions with Buddhist institutional structures. In each case, pre-existing religious elements were transformed to serve urban power structures.

South Asia provides another example. Early spiritual practices evolved into complex urban religions that did not exist prior to the cities themselves. The Indus Valley's proto-Shiva figures suggest earlier beliefs being adapted to city life. Later Hindu pantheons grew increasingly complex alongside urban societies. Buddhist institutions accumulated urban wealth and power. The largest Buddhist temples were, suddenly, in cities. The pattern is consistent: urbanization transformed religious thinking.

The Americas show similar transformations. Earlier spiritual practices were reshaped into state religions supporting urban elites. Maya city-states adapted local beliefs into patron deity cults. Aztec empire builders transformed older practices into imperial religions demanding sacrifice. Inca rulers reshaped sun worship into divine kingship. Religion kept changing to serve the emerging urban needs of of those who were players and rulers in the former tribes.

The integration of religious and political power wasn't coincidental - it was transformational. Tribal spiritual practices that had thrived for hundreds of thousands of years became systems of urban control, a completely alien environment for that time. Direct experiences from the grasslands or the jungle or the desert became mediated through institutions. Diverse beliefs were fused, often with domination by one or two, into fixed doctrines. Natural forces became anthropomorphized gods. In every case, religion transformed to serve human needs.

Every God that has ever existed came with either big cities or land, even, as with the Hebrews, if they were a enslaved people. This transformation of religion by urbanization exposes its human essence. The fact that religious thinking could be so dramatically reshaped by changing social conditions shows it was always a product of human imagination. Understanding this helps us see religious systems for what they really are - not divine manifestations, but human constructs that evolved alongside our societies.

After the cities came writing systems. This changed everything about religion, and I mean everything. Once humans could write things down, religion transformed from fluid, imaginative spiritual experiences into rigid systems of structure and control. Writing was a revolutionary force that completely reshaped how humans imagined and interacted with their gods, and solidified them from one generation to the next. Once something was written down, it became "sacred text." Now suddenly there was a "right" version that couldn't be changed. It was written down.

Who controlled writing? Well, initially it was merchants and people of commerce. As I have previously noted, the oldest evidence we have of writing is actually counting not what we would call writing. Generally speaking, rulers controlled it to the extent that they understood it, as accounting for commerce. But, soon enough, comparatively, that changed.

As soon as “story” became more important and powerful than accounting, almost all members of the priestly class learned to read and write. This gave them enormous power. Their writing preserved the Truth. In many early societies, they were, by far, the most educated. They claimed to be the only ones who could interpret the "Divine word." They controlled what got written down and what didn't. They decided which versions of stories became official and which were labeled heresy. This was a global phenomenon, across human cultures that never had any contact with one another. A stage in our cognitive behavior? I think so.

The spread of religious ideas completely changed too. Before writing, religious ideas spread slowly through oral transmission, changing as they moved from place to place. But written texts could travel far and fast while staying exactly the same. This helped religions expand beyond their local origins and impose standardized beliefs across vast numbers of tribes. Writing enabled religions to become imperial forces, spreading uniform doctrines across different cultures and peoples.

Training priests became a totally different game as well. Instead of learning through direct experience and oral tradition, priests now had to master written texts. (Except for texts like the Vedas which continue to be preserve in their complex oral tradition even today, despite all of it being written down many centuries ago.) For the first time in history, religious education became about memorizing and interpreting documents in addition to having spiritual experiences. This created religious bureaucracies - professional classes of priests whose authority came from either their mastery of texts rather or their spiritual insights. Increasingly, it became the former over the later. Knowledge of the texts themselves could distinguish a priest regardless of their actual spiritual maturity.

Look at the world today and you'll see a long-continuing explosion of religious diversity. Humanity expresses thousands of distinct religious traditions. Take Christianity alone: you've got Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and literally hundreds of Protestant denominations, each convinced they've got it right. Islam splits into Sunni, Shia, Sufism, and more. Judaism ranges from Orthodox to Reform. Buddhism spans from Theravada to Zen. Hinduism has hundreds of deities. And that's just scratching the surface.

This vast diversity makes me ask if there were actually a Divine source creating humans in its image, wouldn't we see more uniformity? Instead, what we see is exactly what you'd expect if humans were creating gods in their image. Desert cultures created gods obsessed with water and food. Agricultural societies came up with fertility gods. Warrior cultures invented wrathful deities. Trading cultures developed gods of commerce.

It cannot be emphasized enough that each society's gods conveniently valued exactly what that society valued before the god was created. The power of the values was derived from the imagined god and that granted imaginative power to the values. This is especially true of the societies that eventually emerged believing their one God was the only God, a very arrogant story. The power of human values comes through imagined gods that reflect our pre-existing values.  

As an aside:  It is important to note that power was not the original intent or reason religions developed.  That goes deeper into our brains and these early belief systems helped us deal with feeling safer in the dangerous world, addressing our fear of death, uncertainty, with numerous instinctual and emotional needs met.  Religion is fundamentally an intimate haven of reassurance and refuge.  The specifics vary from culture to culture.  But the power structure aspect of religion came later, with more complex language, abstract thought and urbanization transforming it, as I have said, into something quite different from its traditional direct experience basis.

Religion became the Swiss Army knife of social justification and personal redemption, and that's because we designed it that way.  Look at how religious traditions continue to adapt today to serve contemporary needs, how they conveniently evolve to justify whatever their adherents want to believe. Crudely, divorce is a sin, or not. Abortion is a sin, or not. Pre-martial sex is a sin, or not.  The gods have always been remarkably flexible, happy to support whatever humans need them to support at any given time. 

The correlation with social needs is so obvious it's actually embarrassing we don't talk about it more. Whenever societies needed to justify hierarchies - boom, suddenly the gods demanded kings and priests. When they needed to control resources - the gods favored those who built temples and made offerings to them and their priests. When they needed to unite large populations - well, what do you know, the gods insisted everyone follow the same rules and beliefs. Do not steal from each other. Do not kill each other.

Throughout history, as our power structures change, our gods mysteriously change too. Its not the other way around. As our morals evolve, the gods' commands conveniently update. As our scientific understanding grows, religious interpretations magically shift to accommodate new knowledge...or condemn it entirely. It took decades but the Catholic Church finally accepted evolution as a valid theory, for example.

The way religious systems mirror human power structures is almost comical in its transparency. Every time humans create complex hierarchies, their gods suddenly develop similar hierarchies. Every time humans establish new forms of authority, their gods coincidentally demand respect for those exact same authorities. The gods of empire builders justify conquest. The gods of slave owners support slavery. The gods of the powerful demand obedience from the powerless. The gods of the servants elevate the meek and promise retribution.

This is important. Once we understand this, we can potentially redirect that immense power of imagination in new ways. Instead of unconsciously projecting our power onto imagined deities, we could consciously wield it ourselves. Instead of being shaped by religious frameworks we forgot we created, we could intentionally create new frameworks for meaning and organization, new impacts upon human society and this Earth.

The fact that humans across time and cultures have imagined such diverse and powerful divine systems proves we have vast creative potential and the power of belief is to be feared and respected. Religions is still one of the most powerful forces in the world. It does not require our individual imagination to exist, of course. It is already other there, we are thrown into a world with religion as a force, fading or not. But, we could see it for the imaginary thing that it truly is in our minds and reinvest that imagination in novel ways.

That requires effort, of course. Most people prefer convenience to effort. Nevertheless, it's all sitting there in our collective unconscious, waiting to be redirected in new ways. Once we accept that we're the creators rather than the created, who knows what we might imagine next? Those of us who can imagine a different world are creating it while those who can't are freaking out and resisting the obviously transitory nature of human reality. Look at all these millennia of change. Look at the the change since Mohammad died. Everything changes. Everything. It's time to grow out of this adolescent fad.

The yawning abyss that is a godless world has existed throughout most of our humanity. It is the normal state of affairs. The ability to apply Expansive Omni-Directionalism in this manner is helpful. It is important to see our ancestors whose brains could not yet conceive of god are equal to our lives today. EOD makes meaningful connections that way, requiring a more expanded mind.

Nietzsche, also provides context. This proclaimed dead God is not reason for despair. This is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. It is reason for affirmation, rising to our completely human superpower to imagine anything, create anything. This is not a likely occurrence anytime soon, as Nietzsche knew full well. That is why he critiqued “the herd” with a certain frustration while elevating “the philosophers of the future,” the few who existed “beyond good and evil.”

Every temple, church, mosque, and cathedral started as an idea in someone's head. Every religious text began as someone's imaginative story. Every god that millions have worshiped was first conceived in a human mind. Every religious war and religious “relief” of personal suffering is the power of the human imagination at work.

Once we (Nietzsche's elite) understand that all of this power came from us, not from some external source, it changes everything. We've been wielding this incredible force of imagination (Nietzsche would say “necessary fictions”) while pretending it came from somewhere else. We've been attributing our own creative power to gods that we ourselves imagined into existence.

Our future potential is so much more than we currently see. This simple shift in perspective can achieve large-scale benefits. There are far better uses of the human imagination than to perpetuate any religion. Don't pray to God, paint a canvas or garden your space or start an enterprise. Cultivate yourself and create new ways of living on this Earth. Set your imagination free of the enormous weight of this religious fad we've had for past three or four thousand years in the face of godless eons far vaster than that short amount of time.

(Ironically, it takes more work for a “free” imagination than one committed to religion because, as I said, religion is already out there in the cultural human imagination, the realm of Jung's collective unconscious, and does not require individual belief to be valid. As soon as you “free” your imagination, what you in fact do is assume a new responsibility that used to be the void religion filled. That responsibility requires imaginative engagement in which most people don't presently engage. Instead, they direct it toward their careers or families or hobbies or religions or choose not be imaginative at all. Freeing your imagination means summoning enough of it and directing it. It is the imagination of manifestation and it requires you to manifest. To that extent, it is a drive within us, a Nietzschean drive to power.

Every goal that religion serves, every human need it addresses, we can approach directly through our own conscious use of imagination. We don't need to pretend this power comes from somewhere else anymore. We can pursue meaning, build communities, establish ethics, and create beauty while fully owning the fact that these are human endeavors powered by human imagination. In this way we finally accept our actual responsibility and direct it consciously rather than attributing it to external miraculous forces. Once we do that, we can start writing the next chapter of human history with full awareness that we are its authors.

This is a moment of profound revaluation, precisely what Nietzsche was pointing toward with his concept of revaluation (Umwertung). When he declared "God is dead," he wasn't simply making an atheistic statement - he was recognizing a pivotal moment in human consciousness where we could finally see our own role in creating the Divine. “The few” have been ready for this since before the philosopher's death.

We can now see the full historical arc: from early human imagination creating animistic spirituality, to the emergence of gods with urbanization, to organized religions codifying these imagined constructs into large-scale abstract power structures. We understand the biological foundations - the evolution of brain regions enabling Theory of Mind and complex imagination - that made this all possible. We can recognize how human diversity in religious experience reveals the human origin of divine concepts. Most importantly, we can now consciously understand our own creative power - the same power that once unconsciously created gods and religions.

This revaluation suggests a radical reframing of human creative potential. If we created such powerful constructs unconsciously, what might we create consciously? The challenge, as Nietzsche saw, is create new values - not to simply reject religion but to consciously direct our imaginative power toward new forms of meaning and organization. That is not nihilism, it is anti-nihilism. There is clearly something for us to do. Create new values. This is indeed a profound moment of potential transformation in human consciousness and creativity. We need to re-summon and adjust our imagination.

Key Takeaways:

1) The brain had to evolve to conceive of any god. 

2) Human spirituality was godless for tens of thousands of years.

3) The lack of religious infrastructure in early humanity suggests it was imagined into being by our brain.

4) Our gods are always like us, they represent our highest values suggesting we created to meet emotional needs.

5) This had the side-effect of giving cultural power to our values.

5) The magnitude of diversity in such expressed cultural power suggests that humans use religion to promote their pre-existing values.

6) Religious traditions have historically changed to suit changing human needs and values.  They are not as "transcendent" as many would claim.

7) Persisting religious diversity suggests there is little uniformity to the Divine because global human needs don't align. 

(Written with assistance from Claude.  Illustration by ChatGPT.)