In the beginning, there were the Heavens and the Earth.
In the beginning, there were humans and the land.
Our ancestors learned, slowly, to speak, and to make art with their marvelous opposable thumbs. They coexisted intimately with the land they lived on, depending on it for food, for water, for every aspect of survival. They spent each day drenched in wind and sun, in rain, in the shade of trees or the shimmering mirages of heat rising from the ground.
There is no culture that did not develop religion during this time.
There is no culture that did not develop a symbolic way to speak to the land, to the forces of nature, to the dead.
There is no culture that did not commune with these entities outside themselves, with the personifications of abstract concepts and other things unseen by eyes and ears.
The neanderthals – a different species of human sharing a common ancestor with our own – buried their dead in graves, with flowers.
The first humans in every region of the world left the marks of their religion – in cave art, in monuments which serve no strictly survivalist purpose.
We have always been a race of dreamers.
Will our differing dreams bring us together, or push us apart?
Breaking the Cycle 