even as little as a couple hundred years ago in every part of the world , and even for the affluent who lived in rather crude conditions by contemporary standards for whatever discomforts were eased by the servants they possessed and subject to every bacterial infection with little remedy , religion in this sense of vulnerability was as dire of a necessity as a shot of whiskey when experiencing a toothache ; and so the world was rife in gullible , superstitious entities equally ignorant as to how and why lives of suffering should exist as those of the present time , but much more likely to be suffering exponentially more , and more desperate for analgesic ideas of afterlife if not mystical succor and elixirs .