Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V RACIAL BEGINNINGS IN RELIGION Not only is it difficult to find out just what the lower races do in the way of religion, and why they do it; it is difficult for us who are not anthropologists to understand the findings of anthropology. In the present chapter we must make an effort to reverse many of our customary notions of how men act, and think, and feel. Thus: 1. If you ask me in what sense I am religious, you throw me back upon myself as an individual. I say, "Whatever life may mean to others, to me it means so and so." If, now, we imagine that such personal realizations are the first things in religion, and that the earliest religious group or community is an aggregate of such in- ./ dividuals, we reverse the facts. The religious individual is a late and high development out of the religious group.1 How a group as such can be religious we can see, however, by recalling our own experiences as members of crowds — a college class, a political meeting, or an audience at a concert. Under such conditions it is perfectly natural for us to feel and act and even think in ways that are impossible to us in private. 1 Not until the national-religious consciousness of Israel had been battered down by other nations did the notion of a direct personal relation to Jahwe take firm root. Ezekiel, chap. 28, transfers the notion of guilt and innocence from nation or family lineage to the. individual. 4t- 2. The early group was not a merely impulsive mass, like a mob.1 It had definite, complicated, and rigidly enforced ways called customs. Custom is "the way we do." It is orally transmitted from one generation to another, largely in initiation ceremonies that induct adolescent boys into the life of mature men. Custom is enforced upon any possibly recalcitrant individual,...