Anyone who studies ancient history of any kind runs into a phenomenon called an Age. Ages are slow – really slow. Depending on which field of history one is studying, for example Earth science, Ages can last as long as millions, even billions of years. For most human periods since the last Ice Age, an Age will require 2-5,000 years to live its time. If one clocks in at the earliest existence of economic/political times in human history, an Age averages about 1.5 to 2 thousand years and is growing shorter at the speed of a half-life algorithm [the next step is approximately half the value of the previous step].

Abstruse, he knows. Let’s do a few examples:

֎ The last ice age lasted a little over 20,000 years.
֎ Bronze Age lasted 1,300 years.
֎ Iron Age lasted 700 years.
֎ Classical Era lasted 1,000 years (historians call them Eras now).
֎ Medieval Era lasted 1,000 years.
֎ Early Modern Era lasted 300 years.
֎ Modern Era has lasted 2,000 years but has begun shifting rapidly since about 1900AD.
֎ On their own initiative, current humans created a new age for us: the Anthropocene Epoch which replaces the Holocene Epoch, beginning at the end of the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago.¹

This is a lot to explain in order to suggest that religion is subject to the Ages as well.

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Was ‘religion’ part of all the ages? Yes, actually. In purely Homo terms, religion is part of the human survival makeup as much as dogs and wolves have an innate understanding of their role in the pack. One of the earliest discoveries of a caveman family, back before the Ice Age, showed evidence of caring and sharing: a male had a destroyed leg in the prime of his life. He was cared for for many years, being fed, sharing family time and, eventually, buried carefully in his cave. No Popes needed, no choirs, no congregation, no architecture. In its physiological role, religion is feelings and caring and sharing with others. This behavior is key to survival.

Funny that Jesus spoke of the same primitive behavior 20,000 years later as the path to salvation. Mariner has never forgotten the documented event where a mother gave her baby to another person to avoid having the baby eaten by lions in the coliseum – the mother’s fate. Religion is innate feelings necessary for survival – even if Interstates, airplanes and smartphones have stretched the definition of ‘family’.

So, religion as we know it has been waylaid by the Greeks who needed administrative positions for their ‘gods’ and especially the Romans who worshiped grandeur. Western Europe didn’t help much either with excess social discipline. Then the Age of War (20th Century) distracted everyone from innate survival practices because Homo was and is in the midst of an ‘industrial toy’ age. New is better.

Welcome to the Industrial Age or maybe the new version, the Technological Age. So how much are church buildings selling for these days?

Ancient Mariner

¹ Wikipedia.