Think so?
Maybe not. :rolleyes:
Exactly right !
Yankees suck
Diamondbacks suck
Wax Tulips
Monica sucks
nice tits…
yes again!
Shadow people
slurp slurp
:rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Though religion was most certainly around before the start of civilization, it never truly flourished until the ancients started settling down to farm instead of the nomadic hunting and gathering life they had previously led. Once the people had created the small farming communities, they needed religion even more than before. If this god did not receive the correct sacrifice, then the crops would not grow, if this other god or goddess became angered the river would flood and destroy the harvest, hence it was not until the creation of tribal city-states and small farming communities that religion was truly needed.
All religions, when first born, were polytheistic, as with early Mesopotamia, where each different city had it’s own god. The belief of these people was such that the gods depended on them for food and whatnot, therefore humans were needed by the gods and must fulfill their duty as servants to keep the universe from unraveling. The creation of the world, as believed by the early Mesopotamians, was by a god and goddess, Apsu the god of fresh water, and Tiamat the goddess of salt water. These chaos gods spawned the rest of the gods, which, according to the Mesopotamians, became too rowdy and angered the chaos gods. In a twist of fate the new gods overthrew and destroyed their elders. The sequence of the children killing their parents and ruling in their stead appears in many of the old religions. Due to being born of chaos, the early Mesopotamians believed that their every action must go towards keeping the gods of order happy and fit. The cities were built around this ideal and temples and religious ceremonies were of the utmost importance.
From early Mesopotamia, we turn to the old and middle kingdoms of the Egyptian Empire. Much like the Mesopotamian religion, the Egyptians were polytheistic and built their entire society around their religion. The Pharaoh was considered to be an avatar of the god Horus, and the son of the sun god Re (I have also seen it spelled as Ra, Rah, or Rha, but I am not sure which is the correct spelling so I shall use Re, as does Nagle). Many of the gods of Egypt were strange half animal and half man creatures. Gods such as Set, Osiris, Horus, Nekhbet, Wadjet, Hathor, and Anubis were part human and part animal composites, while other gods like Ptah, Min, Amen, and Atum were only shown as human. Much like Mesopotamia, the Egyptian temples were quite luxurious and were thought to house the god(dess) himself. Special clerics dressed, fed, and entertained the statue of the god or goddess three times a day. The priests were not what priests are today, they would not give advice on moral matters or assist people in their daily lives, they would only help the Pharaoh in keeping order in the universe, called ma’at. The Egyptians believed that when one died, they still retained a connection to the remains, called the ka. The tombs were filled with food and drink so that the ka could continue living on in undeath. The consciousness of the dead person was also maintained after death, as the ba. Personified as a bird, the ba required the ka in order to continue being, but could leave the tomb and fly around and defecate on newly washed chariots if it felt like it. The spirit of the dead person, the akh, lived in heaven and had no connection to the corpse. It is unclear on what the Egyptians thought the akh did in heaven, some thought that the souls joined the sun in the sky, while others believed that the afterlife was simply a repetition of the material world. This brings up an idea worth some contemplation, if the dead lived in a world just like ours, could we simply be dead from another plane exactly like this one? When we die and go to the next life exactly like the previous would the dead be conscious of their previous life, or are there just infinite planes of existence spiraling up into the universe, each holding the unaware dead from another?
Many of the religions in the ancient Near East exchanged and borrowed gods and ideas from one another. The Hittites took Hurrian ideas, who had stolen the Mesopotamian gods and ideas, such as the creation story and the idea that the gods needed man to continue on living. In Hittite religion, a lower god called Kumarbi castrated the Hittite sky god Anu. Kumarbi was then killed by his annoyed son Teshub, the god of storms. Teshub then took over his father’s position in the hierarchy of the gods. This sounds quite alike the Mesopotamian creation story with Apsu, Ea, Tiamat, and Marduk. The Egyptians were also susceptible to foreign influences. The gods of Egypt started to be identified with the gods of other cultures, The Egyptians gods Re and Seth started to become identified with Shamash and Baal, Akkadian and Canaanite gods respectively. The Egyptians also changed the gods as one came into favor and another left the spotlight. The Pharoah Amenhotep came to power and changed his name to Akhenaten in the sixth year of his reign and outlawed the worship of all gods except Aten, the manifestation of Re as the sun disk. Akhenaten ordered all writings of the other gods to be erased and all worship of the old gods to cease immediately. This revolution lasted a scant fifty years or so, until the next Pharaoh, Tutankhaten surrendered to the old regime and changed his name to Tutankhamen to symbolize the end of monotheism in Egypt. Unfortunately the changing of religion had also weakened the position of power the God-Emperor had in Egypt.
Monotheism did not develop in the Near East until sometime around the sixteenth century BCE. The descendants of Abraham in Egypt held a mass exodus during the rule of the God-King Rameses II, in which a tribe escaped into the Sinai desert and joined up with other nomadic tribes and assimilated them into themselves. Moses, worshipping Yahweh, most likely a local god of the region, started the worship of a single god among the tribe of Israelites. Here, in the desert wastes, the Israelites came together and started their covenant with Yahweh and began the first monotheistic religion.
The arrival of the Israelites and Moses in Canaan came in circa 1400 BCE. The Israelites slowly conquered Canaan in a period over several hundred years, first establishing control of uninhabited areas, then more slowly into developed regions. Israelites who had stayed behind from Egypt and other people who could associate with the new religion began to assimilate into the new tribe and by the eleventh century BCE the people of Israel had been born. Due to the attacks from the Philistines the tribe called Israel formed itself into a theocratical monarchy ruled by King Saul. Saul was missing a few screws, and was probably a little strange as a king, and eventually died in battle, and the next king, David, finished off the Philistines and brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.
The monotheistic religion of Yahwism finally entrenched itself completely into Israel with the Babylonian Exile. The Babylonians took Jerusalem in 587 BCE and started a mass passage of people to Babylon. It was not until the Persians conquered Babylon that the exiles were allowed to return to Israel. Upon returning the exiles reaffirmed the power of Yahweh and destroyed all paganism and pagan ceremonies that had been absorbed into the religion. The priests rewrote parts of the Bible so that Yahweh would be the one and supreme god for the Israelites, and the new passages would affirm his power instead of just speaking of it.
This new form of Yahwism took part in the formation of Apocalypticism. Apocalypticism is the focus on the end of days in the writings or sermons of a religion. The emergence of Apocalyptic ideas in the bible and other Yahwism texts created a look in the future for the religion and prophesized the coming of the Messiah, thus starting the context for Christianity and the end of power for polytheistic religions…
Another round!
Post count.
No duh!
mmmm beefy!
Ho Ho.
Word whore.
Bad Religion