Creation Myth or How Our Culture Began

Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, in his book “Nonviolent Communication”, tells us, “Our way of thinking started, as best some people I’ve read believe, started about 8,000 years ago when a myth started over the planet about how the world began. This myth held that a very virtuous male god crushed to smithereens an evil female goddess, and out of this crushing of
the evil force with the good force, that energy created the planet and the people on it.  This started a rather tragic image, that human beings are basically created out of nasty energy. Therefore, we need to have some superior people control us. Some theologians and anthropologists, that I have studied, seem to think that this is how this all got started with this idea that we are basically made out of evil energy.  Therefore, we need to find those people
who are closest to the gods and these people are our superiors and have a right to control us. This is where we started with the idea of blame and criticism and punishment.”  About 5,000 years ago, we started thinking that since human beings are created out of nasty energy, we must be innately evil. We needed a way to deal with blame, criticism and punishment, so penitence became our corrective process. We thought, when people are behaving badly, we must make them hate themselves for what they did. So, for political and theological reasons, we developed a language that cuts us off from the community and makes it quite easy to be violent.

(Wink, Walter, “The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium”,
Galilee Doubleday, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland
and others.