Here is an interesting relection on religion in an extract from a science fiction book by Sheri S. Tepper called Raising the Stones ...

Early on, of course, it was assumed there were lots of gods who caused various things, and one needed access to them to propitiate them or ask them to undo what some other god had done or, in rarer cases, to say thank you. Since there were lots of them, one always had a god to go to if some other one was acting up. Not a bad state of affairs, really, very much the system Phansure has today. Of course, it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because some of the priests that rose up around the man-gods got carried away with their own greed or need for power.

"So, some of them became prophets, each of them claiming his particular god - or some new one he'd thought up - was the biggest or the best or the only.

Sometimes they said God was all good or all-powerful or all-something-or-other or even, God knows, all everything, which inevitably created dualism, because if God was all-everything, why did these contrary things keep happening? This required that man postulate some other force responsible for con trariness, either a sub-god or a bad angel or man himself, just being sinful, and that placed man squarely in the middle of this comic hartlefield, always being told it was his fault when things went

And as long as man was in the middle, nothing could happen but wrong a kind of tug-of-war. Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like her oism and gallantry and honour, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized, and later on just before the Dispersion he was still doing it, making war like crazy, while praying for peace the whole time, of course.

'Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy's god to fight some other guy's god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between differ ent people's ideas of God, depending on who'd won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle.

This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let's kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, weren't any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.