Origin of Religion: A Hypothesis
I have this hypothesis that religion began as free medical care, including mental health care, by people wanting to create a nicer world. So you got free miracle cures IF and only if you behaved in accordance with the rules they set.
They didn't charge MONEY and asked people to tithe instead so they could deny care to awful people they didn't wish to extend the lives of. If you charge MONEY for medical care, then the worst, most awful people get the best care available and their many victims get steadily sicker and poorer because awful people tend to seek power and tend to try to make sure you have no choice but to put up with their shit while steadily warping the rules into being more and more advantageous to them that's already got.
And it was likely some weirdo like me who wanted to promote general productivity and general good behavior so they could have a nice life and live well even if their proverbial slice of the pie was relatively small because there was plenty to go around.
If the pie is big enough, the poorest of the poor can have decent lives because relative poverty stops being a case of absolute poverty.
In other words, if the world is rich enough, having relatively less materially than people around you doesn't necessarily mean a life of hardship and suffering.
Assuming the people in charge are NICE and ethical and enforce the rules about everyone being baseline respected in some sense and rich people having no right to be abusive to people who have less.
And that only really works if you defacto have some meaningful power to decide who lives and who dies.
Nice person with almost nothing materially: Gets free treatment.
Nasty person with BOATLOADS of money from piracy and overworked plebes: Sorry, nothing for you.
When push comes to shove, you probably need the right to execute people who are awful. It's probably not enough to just refuse to treat the awful people.
As my mother used to say: Selfish people tend to do well materially.
So if you don't have some assholes doing the necessary dirty work, then the most awful people will be rich, powerful, well cared for etc etc etc and making everyone around them desperately wish they would drop dead .... while they live on and on and on and on to a ripe old age, insidiously defacto sending many other people to an early grave due to completely unnecessary hardship created by the people in charge behaving extremely badly.