The Divine Succession

Religion was born in the newly self-aware human mind among environmental catastrophes affecting the Earth and the cosmos. It stems from the vital need to control and understand the world, one's fellow humans and oneself under ever precarious and perilous conditions and is at the origin of science as well as of politics. "Man's moral record in religion is largely unacceptable, whether to humans or to gods, if such exist. No anthropologist, philosopher, or theologian is pleased with it. It has been continuously expurgated and in parts expunged, to make it look better than it is. To little avail. It still appears as total theomachy: a struggle of man against god, god against man, man against man in the name in the name of gods, and man against his divine self." (Alfred de Grazia)