peace, Muhammad said that he was not founding a new religion, but restoring the original one. When he instituted it, then it “took” and spread far and wide, and was known as “Islam.” According to the Qur’ân, Abraham and his people were the first ones to be called by the name “Muslims.” The point about Adam is that the prophetic revelation that is central to Islam began with Adam. The Sufis have a saying:
The seed was planted in the time of Adam
It sprouted in the time of Noah
The roots grew in the time of Abraham
The stalk grew up in the time of Moses
The bud appeared in the time of Jesus
The rose fully bloomed in the time of Muhammad
The point being that Sufism is symbolized by the rose attar, the essence of the spiritual fragrance.
We’ve always done this. We were doing it when we occupied the Magdalenean caves at Altamira.
I gather from your sig that you consider yourself Christian. Maybe we could think of the different religions in much the same way that Christian theologians think of the four gospels: different texts rendering the same vision.
It is mainly only the charlatans and their myriad obfuscations that tend to differ between brand names.
One early religion was that of the bull. The bull temple was connected with the Library of Alexandria. Insane, fanatic Christians demanded that the local bishop burn it all down because it was “pagan,” so he did, and there went all kinds of interesting philosophy, humanities, and science books of the Greeks. It is a miracle there was anything left from other sources. (Sophocles or one of the other ancient playwrights -or more than one-wrote over a hundred plays of which only about five survive. That somewhere in the world at this very moment and at all moments some ancient Greek play is being staged, for instance, is a triumph over religiosity. If the bull religion had won out, we would have more knowledge, as the bull was not against learning. Unfortunately, his name has been given to that which is ignorant and untrue rather than to what is intelligent. For example, the Pope issues bulls, and people say that something is “bull” when they don’t believe it.
One wonders what the origin of this usage is. As for the oldest religion being the Venus of Willendorf, this is what the wicca believers believe so they can justify women somehow. These figurines aren’t obese, however, they merely have what the books call “exaggerated female characteristics,” such as large breasts and big hips. Or maybe they were meant to be obese and were insults to fat ladies, a la Al Bundy, made and brandished at women as a warning. I agree that nobody knows what they were supposed to mean, and it seems impertinent to have run them up into some big goddess religion.
My definition of organized religion is something like a church were people would meet and observe rituals.
Yes, AHunter3, I am a Christian. I suspect that the worship of God by Adam and Eve was the first religion, but I am interested in seeing what is recorded in history.
sassyKYredhead, are you Jewish? I don’t know of any Rabbis in my area. Do you have a link to any Jewish history websites?
jb_farley, do you have a link to aninimism or totemism sites? Colibri said:
Were can I read the writings of the Egyptians and Sumerians? (In English please. ;)) And you say there are even older religions? Cool! Do you have a link about any of the cave paintings?
As I said at the top of this post, my definition of an organized religion is one that’s observed by more than one person with a regular set of rituals, ceremonies, beliefs, etc. In other words, any religion that’s not kept to just one self.
BTW, does anyone have an official website for the Islmaic religion? I’m assuming Moslems have an official website like Catholics do.
Well, assuming that by religion you mean worship/veneration/belief/fear of some non-human entity, than religion probably goes back before the dawn of homo sapiens. If nothing else, you probably had homo erectus* thinking that that big storm the night before meant someone was pissed at them.
As Elijah once said, as recorded in the Bible, “How long halt ye between two opinions? If God be God, worship God; if Baal be God, worship Baal.” I think it is in I.Samuel.
He then proved it by telling the Baal priests to call on Baal to light the sacrifice, but he didn’t. Elijah then mocked these priests and told them to call louder, maybe Baal is on a journey and can’t hear you. He then called upon God to light the sacrifice and he did. Thus scientific proof of God! Elijah was making fun of those who believed in a god that was limited to one place for his effectiveness. If such a god went on a trip he was not effective where he had been. Elijah represents a group of religious opiners who were trying to promote a different and possibly new theology about God: that he was everywhere. The story goes that the God of these people and of Elijah burnt not only the bullock offering, but the water that had been cast on it and the wood altar and the rocks underneath it, thus showing that the God of Elijah was powerful indeed, or that he transcended anybody’s idea of God. Thus the whole thing was possibly symbolic, though based on theological schools of the time.
Sorry I don’t have time at the moment to search for links, but Colin Wilkinson earlier on this thread provided a couple for Sumerian and prehistoric religions.
The creation myth in the Bible is clearly based on much earlier Sumerian myths. In fact, the story in Genesis seems to be an amalgamation of two separate and not closely related earlier tales. (See Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2, which tell quite different creation stories. Both have predecessors in earlier cultures in the area.) And after all Abraham, being from Ur, was from the land of Sumer.
The article cited by Colin on prehistoric religions doesn’t go into many specifics. However, I recall some cave paintings (at Lascaux? Altamira? I forget exactly which ones) depicting what seem to be shamanic figures: a man apparently in a ritual dance wearing a bearskin and one wearing a bird mask. Also there is evidence that clay models of game animals found in caves were “killed” with spears, possibly representing sympathetic magic. There is also evidence of widespread worship of cave bears or their spirits. Such cave sites would qualify as your primitive “church,” and the shaman as a primitive priest. Interpretation of the “Venus” figurines mentioned by others remains controversial, and they could represent either primitive religion or primitive porno (highly ironic, if you ask me, that at this distance in time we can’t tell the difference!) Don’t cite me on the ages, but I believe the cave paintings are well over 10,000 years BP and I believe much older.
As someone previously mentioned, a Neadertal burial at Shanidar cave in Iran was found that contained abundant flower pollen. This has been interpreted to mean that Neadertals buried their dead with flowers and hence (a bit of a leap here) believed in an afterlife. This interpretation is possible but has recently been disputed.
I would assume any standard encyclopedia, especially the Britannica, would provide some discussion of the religion of the ancient Egyptians, as it was intimately tied into the construction of the pyramids and almost all other aspects of their culture. And I do believe the Egyptian Book of the Dead must be available in English translation - check a library or Amazon.com.
I’ve read that the Australian Aborigonal religion (Dreamtime) was pretty much unchanged for something like 20-40 thousand years. Then Europeans came along…
I suppose that you could call cave paintings and the like ‘written evidence’ if they were still in use (ie, an elder takes the young ones out to the ancient paintings and explains what they mean spiritually). Some of the elders in Australia today can explain some of the oldest paintings that are known. (some 40+ thousand years old).
However, I don’t know if you’d consider it to be an organised religion, as it was more their entire way of life - spiritual, cultural, social etc.
Thanks for sending people up the links at the top of the page Calibri.
My tired fingers now give you this nice link for nice pictures of Paleolithic art.
I completely agree that we don’t know what the Venus statues were used for. My point was that at Catal Hoyuk there are similar uh, chunky female statues (however, they are now seated as the chair had meanwhile been invented) which are definitely cult objects. Wall murals at Catal Hoyuk are stylistically similar to the very much earlier European cave paintings (there is a picture of a bull that is indistinguishable from the cave paintings) so I am making the leap that the Catal Hoyukians were the cultural inheritors of the Aurignacians (its not that big of a leap).
Maybe the big females evolved from porno to cult object or maybe they always were cult objects.
Dan, I don’t think that Mother Goddess worship ever died out. In Europe, it sublimated/evolved into Saint(ess) and Virgin Mary veneration. While the Virgin Mary veneration is completely contained in within Christianity, some female saints are very obviously derived from goddesses.
Freyer, the indigenous Anatolian matriarchal religions were successively hammered by Indo-European Hittites, Phrygians, Cimmerians, Persian, Greek, and Roman invaders so it will be tough to trace the evolution of the Goddess. Indigenous Anatolians survived in the interior and in Caria (the southwest corner of Anatolia). That is where I will look.
Cybele is the direct ancestor of Venus (the “real” one, not the statues). Venus/Aphrodite definitely came from Anatolia/Near East as did Diana. It is a bit of a jump from obese female Goddesses to babe Goddesses. However, the female Goddesses are very often described as “XXXXX with the attributes of ( }” Athena often gets this treatment. The ancient Mother Goddess just got a makeover to be more appealing to the Hellenic culture.