" There is also a more cynical explanation for that proliferation. One way to reconcile poor people to their plight is to convince them that material pleasures aren’t fun anyway. Exhortations to forswear indulgence could be simply an instrument of social control, of oppression. So too with Jesus’ assurance that in the afterlife the “first shall be last and the last shall be first”—it sounds a bit like a way of recruiting low-status people to his growing army, a recruitment that may come at their own expense, as they cease to struggle for worldly success. Religion, in this view, has always been the opiate of the masses. "

― Robert Wright , The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology