The Origin of Religion

Summary

Much of the writing by secular scholar Joseph McCabe was devoted to the de-mystifying of organized religion. In this trenchant essay, McCabe seeks to disprove the assumption that the religious instinct in humanity was evident from the earliest days of civilization, and that the search for spiritual revelation was one of the primary activities of primitive societies. From an examination of the history of several ‘undeveloped’ races which had survived into the twentieth century, McCabe came to the conclusion that the concepts of God and deification have only been developed in advanced civilizations, and that ‘primitive man’ had no interest in religious speculation.