My read of religions is that they follow a general trend of development which is common to them all.
The original founders or sages or prophets in all cases seem to have been moved primarily by the need for socio-economic justice; though their advocacy of these values had an underpinning of theological support.
But as soon as the founder passed away, three things seemed to happen viz; the emphasis increasingly started to shift from humanitarian motivation of the religion to stress on the theological; the original dynamism of the movement progressively fell prey to ossification and orthodoxy; and the priesthood succeeded in giving religion a corporate form.
This shift from humanity to theology took place because the priest needed to step into the shoes of the departed prophet and to monopolize religious power. For this he needed to draw his legitimacy from somewhere. And this he could only do by interpreting the commandments of the deity in his favour. For this he needed to fall back on theology. The moment he did this, the theological aspect of the religion began to transcend its humanitarian impulse.
Secondly it did him little good if he kept emphasizing the humanitarian obligations of the belief system. These were so basic and easy to understand that even a lay person needed no scholarship to comprehend them. And if a lay person understood them the priest was not needed. Thus, for the priest to justify his position, he needed to create space where he could deploy his superior knowledge. This he could only do in the world of the arcane, the mysterious, and the abstruse. This space lay in the realm of theology. And the more the emphasis shifted from the humanitarian aspect of religion to the theological, emphasis also shifted from righteous action to correctness of belief i.e from orthopraxy to orthodoxy, from the practical to the theoretical. We started propitiating God who needs nothing from us, and ignoring fellow human beings who need much from us. Eventually religion became a tool of power for both the priest and the king, who worked in partnership, and humanity lay forlorn and forgotten. And ever thicker walls of orthodoxy were thrown up to make the position of the priest unassailable.
As this happened, religion changed from a blessing for humanity, to a curse. When this point was reached, religion also became an alibi for every manner of sin which it specifically forbade. Its practitioners subconsciously started to believe that having performed acts of worship they had done their duty on to God, and that they were thereafter free to deal with humanity as they deemed fit. Without this subconscious thinking it was impossible to reconcile worship and prayers with theft, plunder, cheating and double dealing by the very “pious” in society. This is partly the reason people in the west are different, and at a human level, more moral. Their theological beliefs are a private matter for them, and are of little concern to their neighbours. Thus, a westerner cannot make a career or reputation out of “piety”. To be in the good graces of others he must live by a code which lays stress on his civic duties as a member of the community, and it is on this basis that he is judged. He gets few marks for attending church on Sundays.
This shift of emphasis from the humanitarian to the theological with power being progressively accumulated by the priesthood is easily seen in the history of religions. And the shift itself is protected by orthodoxy, so that any challenger of it would have to suffer the charge of heresy with good chances of winding up at the stake.
In Islam you can see it very early on when caliphs became kings. This being totally contrary to the spirit of Islam, the kings needed support of the religious establishment. Thus we see the rise to power of the “court” scholars and prayer leaders, and they virtually take the place of priesthood, despite the fact that the concept of priesthood is absent in Islam. It is the view of some that the emergence and the initial motivation of the fuqaha, who founded Islamic jurisprudence, was to limit the power of the Caliph/ kings and restrict them within the ambit of the law. However, very soon the fruit of their labours itself became a part of the orthodoxy.
Various sufi orders were the next to warn the rulers against their transgressions. And by the time sufi orders were tamed and hounded out, human welfare went to the bottom of the priorities for the rulers, and all intellectual energy was sucked out of the study of sciences and diverted to the vapid pursuit of determining how a true Muslim ought to believe, not act or live. This was quite the opportune time for the Mongols to strike, and but for the injection of new blood in the shape of the Ottomans, the curtain would have fallen on the Islamic civilization much earlier than it eventually did.
Christianity too lived by the humanitarian message of Christ only for the time that this was a persecuted sect. However as soon as Constantine decided that he needed a new religion to unify his empire, and he empowered the priesthood, orthodoxy started to gain strength at the cost of the humanitarian teachings of Christ. And by the time of the Inquisition and the crusades, humanitarian concerns lost out utterly to theological orthodoxy.
You see the same drift in Judaism. Even when the Old Testament was completed, the priesthood was strong enough to declare that the oral law, of which they were the sole custodians, overrode the Torah which was open to the lay persons to read. And as various biblical prophets railed against the many transgressions of the priests, against both God and His people, many of them were run out of their homes or killed. And during the time of the Babylonian captivity, we see the emergence of the early beginnings of the Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism. One of the first edicts of the Rabbis was to declare that there will be no more prophets, those problem creators for the old priesthood. And then the Rabbis declared that a Jew who was disobedient to the command of a rabbi, could be sentenced to death. This was orthodoxy turned into lethality.
As far as Hinduism is concerned, its beginnings lie so deep in the past that they cannot be uncovered to even a pretense of accuracy. However, it may be true to say that the part its priesthood has played in moulding it into what it is today, is more thorough going than that played by the priesthood of any other religion. This can be seen in how the caste system [[which once must have been a purely societal construct having nothing to do with the sacred] has been elevated to an inextricable part of Hinduism, so as to totally mangle the religion and to invest it with one of the great crimes against humanity. By justifying it through the agency of Karma, the untouchables, a very significant part of the population, have been put in a hermetically sealed box, from which they can find no escape except through rebirth [i.e Karma]. But they must die before they are reborn. So, the only real relief from the harshness of their condition may be found in death alone.
Their children cannot escape from it either. This makes inequality a foundation of the Hinduism in which it has come down to us. This is beyond reform, because emancipating these miserable millions would be to deny reincarnation. And this being a central pillar of Hinduism, such denial would be tantamount to bringing down Hinduism itself. The aim of the Brahmins, by fixing the position of the untouchables at the very bottom of society and making it immovable, was to make their own position at the very top, impregnable. It is because of this that no rebellion against Brahmanism–not Buddhism, not Jainism, not the Bhagtia movement, nor Sikhism, has been able to succeed. And Mahatma Gandhi could not succeed because he just could not allow himself to go the whole hog. He could advise Hindus to treat the untouchables kindly. He also gave them the name of Harijans. But he could not advocate abolishing the caste system. Doing so would have led to the dismantling of Hinduism itself. And the best he could do was to go only halfway in that direction. And for this he had to be shot by a Brahmin! There can be no more eloquent commentary on the viciousness of the caste system; not of its strength, nor of its impregnability.
But this drift seems to be common in all religions– of the priesthood monopolizing and elevating theology at the expense of emphasizing the humanitarian aspects of religion, thus hollowing out its spirit, and making it a doctrine which will looks askance at the one who does not believe “correctly”, as well as the outsider. This is how the ” I believe religions” ceased being a blessing for mankind. They removed universal brotherhood and tolerance from their teachings which was the very kernel of this blessing.