Dark Powers
In the previous chapter we referred to 'lesser non-human powers' and the materialist will say there is no such thing. In contrast the common human experience throughout all of history is of what we may call the numinous: that there really are forces we cannot comprehend; we had better keep on the right side of them, or else we will suffer sickness, our crops will fail, there will be no rainfall, or too much of it, and so on. Thus the vast multitude of religions has developed and we can chart their similarities and their differences.
Within these religions there have arisen priests and shamans to exploit the possibilities of human fear of these powers for their own benefit. Idols are worshiped in temples, and the priests and monks who run the temples gain all their sustenance and wealth from the devotees. It is easy to dismiss all this in the 21st century, and especially all the exploitative priestcraft nearest to home of medieval Europe.
However to say that all this 'religion' is pure fiction may be a step too far.
Consider this comment by Paul:
Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world's rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. [Ephesians 6:12]
Paul had met with forces of evil in many guises, and the Ephesians he was writing to lived where there was a massive cult of the Roman Emperor who demanded worship as a god. What Paul would have said would have been a denial that the Roman Emperor was worthy of worship, but he would also have recognized a real power behind the cult, real 'spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places'.
It is quite reasonable that this would have been his comment on all the older gods of the Graeco-Roman world, Jupiter and Mars and suchlike. That these were the false gods in whose names the 'spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places' were seeking to divert men and women away from the true 'I AM' into paths of dark idolatry.
We meet the 'spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places' in Genesis too: in the tempter, in the 'sons of God' who came down to take on physical form and mate with the 'daughters of men', in the false gods encountered by the patriarchs.
So the many 'gods' of the religions of the world over the whole span of human history we may easily, in our scientific age, regard as so much nonsense to be quickly rejected now. Religion, with its exploitative priestcraft, is a very easy target for exposing as so much tomfoolery. But it would be wrong to suppose that there was no disguised reality behind it; such religions may well have been the façade, the visible expression, for a type of spiritual warfare against the source of all truth. Lies, yes, but told by whom?