Binding Beliefs

In Europe in the 1500s people were being staked and burned alive if convicted of Protestantism or Catholicism, depending on which city was involved. Atheism might get you burned in any city. Religion mattered. 

Scholars who had picked up doubts by reading the ancient Greeks were burned alive. So were shepherds, who had developed doubts about virgin birth while watching sheep and so on. My own forebears kept their mouths shut and eyes down. Otherwise I wouldn't be here to write this brief history. 

Religion was the original belief system with the power to bind together gigantic groups of strangers and inspire these strangers to live together in peace or to ransack and murder outsiders. In time we would add some new, effective, binding belief systems (like nationalism, racism and corporate capitalism).