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For a long time I've thought religion was essentially a tool to retain social order without having to spend as much money on police and guards and such. If you convince everyone in your kingdom that basically there's a cop watching you every second of every day, so you better behave, otherwise you'll burn in hell for eternity? That's a means to save a LOT of treasure you'd have otherwise needed to spend for security forces to keep order. So that's always been pretty obvious to me.

More recently (I'm kinda embarrassed to say) it finally dawned on me what powerful tool the "eternal life" storyline is when it comes to motivating the citizenry to go to WAR (esp. in an offensive war, as opposed to defensive) for you, as a king or whatnot. If you convince them that their life on earth is just temporary anyway, and you never "really die", then it's much less scary to face the enemy and the possibility of death on the battlefield.

Add in the common storyline that says the King is a divine extension of Gawd, and that therefore He "favors" everyone on the King's side, and the battle is "Holy" and therefore everyone who dies in the "cause" is "heaven bound" and all that rot? This creates ideal conditions to get people to risk being hacked to death, trampled by horses, and run through by arrows, right? Get on out there and fight, you've got nothing to LOSE cause you'll go to heaven when you die!

That's one of those fairly obvious things I can't believe I never really thought about before I was pushing 60 lol.