I know it sounds like an odd question but I got to thinking about it after talking to a friend a while ago. During our conversation she said, “Adam and Eve were Jewish.” For some reason that just struck me as hilarious. How could they be “Jewish” if they were the only people on the planet? There was just them and god, right? So there was really no such thing as “religion” was there? Something else had to come along (besides a lot more people, but that’s a topic for another thread) for a difference to occur. Was there another god who created other people? Who were these people and what’s their story? And, just to complicate things further, how and why did so many other “religions” come about?
Sticking to the literal biblical account: there was no “religion” per se, just a few people who have occasional direct contact with God (Adam and Eve, Cain, Enoch, and Noah.) After Noah, as the number of people began to multiply after the Flood, the story of the Tower of Babel indicates that different languages (and hence different cultures) appeared, presumably including religions. In the ten generations from Noah to Abraham, lots of different religions sprang up. Abraham would be the first “Jew” although that term doesn’t arise until many (many!) generations later.
Didn’t Neaderthals have a ritual, involving a clay statue of a cave bear, that they would stab with spears?
Would that count?
It was Og. Og smash! Og scared of strange world! Og make up Sky Fairy to explain all!
Are you asking this question to Biblical literalists? There wasn’t actually an Adam and Eve, you know. If you’re asking how fundies explain other religiosn, I don’t thik there’s any canonical answer other than people are inherently bad and unfaithful and backslid into idolotry.
As to the actual, historical origins of religion, that’s lost in the mists of prehistory. The very oldest known religious practices included various forms of naturism – animal worship, storm gods, volcano gods and the like. My western religion prof said that the very first known religions were based on fear of storms, and the desire to placate storm gods. A lot of the early gods like Zeus, Odin, Indra, etc. (i.e. all gods who hurl lightning) were descended from the same original, Indo-European storm god.
I believe worship of animals like cave bears and lions were also very early.
Neanderthal graves have been found showing that the Neanderthals buried their dead along with their possessions which some anthropologists claim is very suggestive that they ahd a belif in an afterlife. I’m not so sure that’s the only explanation, though. Possessions of the dead could have been seen as taboo or bad luck, for example, and they might have been basically been disposing of them along with their owners, not burying them because they thought the owners would ever use them.
These different religions that appeared or sprang up. What made them different from the “original” so as to create a difference? Who was their creator? Who was their earthly leader? Did they have a name for themselves? Where was the big guy when all this was happening? Why didn’t he stop it?
JFTR - I’m not trying to be a smartass, I’m jist trying to understand why religion came about and why there are so many.
Religion came about because people were looking for ways to explain and control their environments. They both feared and revered things that were powerful and dangerous. They believed if they could placate these forces (with sacrifices, generally) that they would win favor and protection.
Posts #2 - #5, #7: Yeah, I’m right with you. I’m just trying to understand the other side. It appears to me that a lot of history has been ignored and giant gaps are left behind.
There was no “original,” by the way. well, there might have been a first, but religious ideas sprang up independently among many different cultures (virtually all of them). Some of them evolved into other religions or variations on older religions (ina process similar to how languages evolve). The specifics were largely dictated by physical environment.
It depends on what you mean by religion. There is some evidence of ritual burial going back over 200,000 years. The Venus Figurines might be up to 30-40,000 years old. Also in that age range are the first cave paintings. Neither are definitively religious, but it’s a good place to start.
I didn’t know this. I would have thought otherwise, in fact–that religious ideas can all be traced historically back to an original. But I also would have thought this question unanswerable for all intents and purposes–just like the question of the origin of the world’s languages.
What did you read, though, that showed otherwise?
Is that a joke, or a reference to Clan of the Cave Bear?
I’m not getting what the question is that the OP is asking. If you go by the Bibilican account, Abraham started Judaism. If you want a historical answer, **Diogenes **has covered it pretty well. The analogy to language is a good one, but I think we need to differentiate between spiritualism or belief in supernatural things and organized religion. Organized religions played an important role in the development of civilizations, and were useful to the hierarchy of the state.
It is largely theoretical, but the presence of starkly different religious practices and beliefs found in cultures which had no contact with each other suggest that religious ideas often arose independently, althugh there was a lot of “evolution” going on with them too.
Where did I read it? Christ, I don’t remember, multiple places in college (and college lectures).
Nitpick, it’s Thor in Norse mythology who hurls lightning not Odin. That’s why in English we have Thursday (Thor’s Day) while in the romance languages Thursday takes its name from Jupiter (or Jove). Odin, for some reason, was associated with Roman Mercury hence Woden’s (the Germanic/ English equivalent) Day becomes Wednesday while in the romance languages that day is named after Mercury.
Interestingly, the one day in English whose name is not based on an Anglo-Saxon god name but a Latin one, Satur(n)day, tends not to be called that in the romance languages.
In a sense, I think this is the answer right here. Not the Biblically literal answer, of course, but the concept that religion derives from direct personal experiences of “gods.” I personally subscribe–because it makes sense to me and explains various elements of psychology and history better than anything else I’ve heard–to the Jaynesian theory of the bicameral mind. Jaynes argued that the will of the gods, and our ancestors’ (and perhaps some of our contemporaries’) literal direct sight and hearing experience of them, are functions of the human brain.
And if you want evidence of an actual temple, the fist one that anyone know about is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It was built in 10,000 BC.
I don’t know if it’s correct to say that religions “sprang up”. I suspect most of them evolved from some earlier version, although there are probably some that were invented (as can be seen in historical times). Still, it’s likely that religion (ie, belief in supernatural things), like language, had a single origin*. It likely developed organically, over time, and probably predates the emergence of our species.
Small, hunter gatherer groups don’t necessarily have what we call religion-- ie, organized religion. They may have beliefs in spirits and an afterlife and perhaps god(s). But you don’t “belong” to a religion. You have a set of beliefs, and those are just part of what everyone in the group accepts as being how things are.
*“origin” is not really right, since it’s not like there was a single moment when it came into existence.
Right on.
Put yourself in (a) primitive man’s shoes, if he had any. The world (just your corner of it, that is, but what do you know?) is a mysterious, threatening, dangerous place. It’s hard to survive without a MacDonalds on the corner and a sabre-tooth tiger waiting to put you on his menu if you blink.
Science didn’t exist. The only body of knowledge was sketchy, uncertain and the Internet connection speeds, .001 bits/sec. So you asked the wisest man you knew.
The shaman in the other cave. Who made up shit. Lots of it.
And some of it seemed to make sense, since you had no knowledge of 100 logical fallacies. It grew. More shit was made up. Some of it got written down. The biggest bullshitter of them all used it to get more power and pussy, and…
You see where I’m going with this?
Quoth Diogenes:
Except it wouldn’t exactly be backsliding, if Adam and Eve who knew the One True God were first. Forwardsliding, maybe, or sidesliding.
Quoth Bosda:
Is that religion, necessarily? It sounds to me like it could just as well have been training. If I’m going to try to stick a spear into a live cave bear, I’m going to want to practice on a clay one first to make sure I’m stabbing it in the right place. No mystical mumbo-jumbo about that.
I don’t know where he got that tidbit (maybe it was in Clan of the Cave Bear), but it is not reflected in the fossil record.