Fight the Hydra - The Search for Meaning
Religion as the first system of power
Religion emerged as the first system of power as a practical response to a basic human problem: how groups of violent, self-interested humans could live together without destroying themselves. In early human societies, internal predation, revenge cycles, and unchecked violence posed existential threats. Morality arose as a survival mechanism, and religion provided the framework that made those rules durable. Shared myths and rituals created common meaning, reinforced group identity, and aligned individual behavior with group survival. In early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and tribal societies, belief functioned as a means of aligning behavior rather than control, internalizing restraint and reducing the need for constant coercion. At this stage, religion acted as a genuine social good, limiting violence, building trust, and enabling cooperation beyond direct kinship.
As populations expanded and societies persisted across generations, these informal moral systems proved insufficient. Disputes over behavior, property, and authority increased, and oral traditions could not keep up; religions started to formalize into institutions to impose consistency and continuity. Priesthoods emerged in Sumer, Egypt, and later Israel; doctrine was codified; moral rules were embedded into law and ritual.
These institutions stabilized large populations and preserved belief across centuries, but they also shifted authority away from individuals and local communities. Moral interpretation increasingly flowed from centralized figures claiming divine mandate. While this promoted consistency of messaging, flexibility declined. Authority consolidated not through conspiracy, but through natural evolution: someone had to define orthodoxy, resolve disputes, and enforce compliance. This marked the transition from religion serving people to people serving religious institutions.
Over time, institutional incentives changed. As religious authorities accumulated wealth, land, and political influence, preservation of their status overtook moral restraint. Dissent became dangerous because it threatened the legitimacy of the religious institutions, and therefore of their leaders. Punishment replaced persuasion. In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church formalized heresy and apostasy as crimes, enforced through excommunication, inquisitions, imprisonment, and execution.
The Medieval Church accumulated vast wealth through tithes, land ownership, and the sale of indulgences, while senior clergy lived in luxury and held political office. Popes crowned kings, sanctioned wars, and used religious authority to extract obedience and wealth. The Church increasingly served institutional power rather than delivering moral guidance.
This pattern has been repeated throughout history. Baal worship in Canaan institutionalized fear through ritualized child sacrifice, burning children alive to appease priests and rulers who claimed divine authority over fertility and survival. Only a few hundred years ago, the Aztec religion organized large-scale human sacrifice, cutting the hearts from tens of thousands of captives to maintain cosmic order and reinforce imperial dominance. These were not fringe practices but central religious rituals enforced by the state.
Islam followed a similar path where belief merged with state power. After Muhammad’s death, Islamic expansion under the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates spread through military conquest. Submission was enforced through law, taxation, and violence. Non-Muslims were subjugated under dhimmi status, forced to pay the jizya tax, convert, flee, or die. Apostasy was (and is still) punishable by death, and blasphemy by severe corporal punishment. Islam was not pluralistic; it was expansionary. Belief functioned as total authority over law, politics, and behavior, enforced by the sword where persuasion failed.
The fracture between belief and behavior eventually became impossible to ignore in the West. Institutions that preached humility practiced indulgence, coercion, and corruption. This produced backlash and reform, most notably the Protestant Reformation, which arose directly from systemic corruption within the medieval Catholic Church, including the sale of indulgences, moral decay among clergy, political entanglement with secular rulers, and the use of ecclesiastical authority to extract wealth and enforce obedience rather than uphold doctrine. The reform temporarily restored moral alignment, but the underlying dynamic persisted wherever belief remained centralized and enforced.
Viewed systemically, religions follow a consistent trajectory. They begin as a mechanism to reduce violence, create social cohesion and/or provide explanations for events in the world. They stabilize societies through institutional structure and provide moral guidance. However, as religions accumulate social and political power, this power can become a tool for domination, enforcing obedience through fear, punishment, and bloodshed.
This pattern is not unique to any single culture or faith. It reflects how human institutions behave once meaning hardens into authority and authority becomes dependent on control of the message. Understanding this evolution is necessary not to reject belief itself, but to recognize how systems intended to guide human behavior can evolve into systems that exist to govern it.
This is an abstract of the discussion I will be going into in more detail when I finalize this into a book. In the next installment, I will be covering in more detail the state of the primary religious systems of power in the world today and their conflicts.