Humans are special because we control our own evolution. This idea is written into the bible as the first sin as having the knowledge of Good and Evil. The first evolutions of humankind was the inventions of clothing, farming, families, and weapons. We only invented these things after gaining our "godlike" consciousness. This consciousness is the "ego", the intellect, the esteem, the ideals, the imagination, the creative instinct. Different branches of the same tree.
The idea of having "eternal life" suggests you have innate importance. Otherwise, you'd obviously be content with just dying. Thus the idea of eternal life comes from your ego, this is how you are able to recognize the problem of dying. But what are "you"?
You are a creation. And that is a creation of environmental pressures + random chance + your ancestry.
The environmental pressure is things like climate. Maybe you have black skin, that's because your climate was very sunny. Maybe you have blue eyes, that's because your environment was covered in forests and dark eyes made it harder to see prey. Maybe you are a high IQ and civil person, because your environment demanded you to participate in strict families and to honor your parents, or go to jail.
The random chance are things like deaths, ancestries, forced pregnancies, arranged marriages, romantic encounters. These are what fuel the natural evolution of every species.
The ancestry component is what has given us control over our evolution. It's the component that facilitates eternal life, hence bloodline is extremely important to have "eternal life", and in Christian texts (the bible) this is made very clear. The first chapter of Matthew is a Genealogy. Chapters of Genesis and Exodus are filled with Genealogies. The Law emphasizes the importance of bloodline and ancestry.
Humans are obsessed with their ancestry. Every year we spend billions of dollars to research where our DNA comes from. Some of you fly foreign flags, learn foreign languages, all in an attempt to connect with what you think is your ancestry.
This is because DNA is eternal, you are a replication of people who died thousands of years ago. DNA gets damaged as individual ages, but the reproduction process is specifically designed to repair all of the damage (ideally) by combining two individuals DNA - the less related they are, the higher the chance for them to make a genetically perfect (free from age-related damage) baby.
But the problem is that we want ourselves to live on forever. Hence we prefer people of our own race. (Just a fact).
Eternal life is in making wise decisions. Priests create rules, which turn into religions, to help their nations DNA (a true nation shares common ancestors) perpetuate itself into eternity.
The last component is evolution. We have it within our power to control our evolution, but first we have to protect ourselves from unnecessary egotism with religion.
Religion will never go away, as it's simply a belief set held by a culture. Today that religion is generalities like "Love is love", nevertheless, a religion.
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