The Origins of Religion

[khol 2,051]

21 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Religion was the first government. 

yes... a method of controlling and manipulating the masses

 

[XenoFish 90,862]

It's easy to have rules and regulations when God "Said so".

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

1 hour ago, StarMountainKid said:

True religion is this inclusion and is not in opposition to the whole, in my view. 

 

 

 

 

Or...the religious lens prevents perception of the unfragmented wholeness of experience and existence.  Any attempt to name and categorize this wholeness distorts and fragments it. 

Edited January 10, 2017 by No Solid Ground

[back to earth 23,447]

5 hours ago, XenoFish said:

Just curious what are you trying to get at 8 bits? I just wanted to drop my 2 cents in on the subject, but I'm thinking there is something more going on.

You and b2e have been going back and forth a bit on the subject, so am I missing something?

I am wondering the same thing . If he spat it out I would have conversed.  

[docyabut2 4,153]

On ‎10‎/‎5‎/‎2015 at 0:05 PM, Anomalocaris said:

 

The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved

 

 

Religions  existed because man knew there was something bigger then himself.  They worship the creatures of the earth to people as gods. to a invisible gods. Man has to have something  to worship or he worships him self ,of which of a lot is going on today

[XenoFish 90,862]

3 minutes ago, docyabut2 said:

Religions  existed because man knew there was something bigger then himself.  They worship the creatures of the earth to people as gods. to a invisible gods. Man has to have something  to worship or he worships him self ,of which of a lot is going on today

Then science came long and turn the storm gods into an explanation for a natural phenomenon. This happened to all the gods except that annoying middle eastern one.

What's wrong with self-worship. If I pray unto my-self, do I not answer? If I ask of my-self, will I not do it. If I do not do it, I have no one to blame but my-self. For I am the center of my own microcosmos. 

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

9 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Then science came long and turn the storm gods into an explanation for a natural phenomenon.

Which is how ancient traditions understood the symbols of 'storm gods' until Christianity turned the symbols into supernatural religion.

Edited January 10, 2017 by No Solid Ground

[XenoFish 90,862]

Christianity turned everything it something demonic or shameful. It's seems that the abrahamic religious work through guilt. Something I find distasteful.

[docyabut2 4,153]

31 minutes ago, No Solid Ground said:

Which is how ancient traditions understood the symbols of 'storm gods' until Christianity turned the symbols into supernatural religion.

Until Jesus came a long and said we are all gods and a god of one.

 John 17. Jesus- I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me

what I`m trying  to say man does not  worship us as one. but one of him  self, just like the ancients did.

Edited January 10, 2017 by docyabut2

[XenoFish 90,862]

15 minutes ago, docyabut2 said:

Until Jesus came a long and said we are all gods and a god of one.

 John 17. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me

what I`m trying  to say man does not  worship us as one. but one of him  self, just like the ancients did.

Well then if we are gods then we don't need religions at all. Just believe in ourselves.

Woot woot! 

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

16 minutes ago, docyabut2 said:

what I`m trying  to say man does not  worship us as one. but one of him  self, just like the ancients did.

That's not my understanding of pre-Christian traditions and premodern/ancient cultures...which nearly all specifically emphasized the needs of the group over the individual and that the idea of a 'self' was a delusion. An attachment to a self-existing identity was considered to be a perceptual imbalance that was discouraged and rebalanced with personal practices that served to dissolve the centrality of 'self' so that a balanced perception of personal existence as an embedded element of the meta environments we exist in would rise to the foreground of consciousness.

[docyabut2 4,153]

3 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Well then if we are gods then we don't need religions at all. Just believe in ourselves.

Woot woot! 

 In science and religions , we are of one people. Its those that don't want to conform to that.  

[XenoFish 90,862]

1 minute ago, docyabut2 said:

Its those that don't want to conform to that.  

But all religion want is conformity. To the same beliefs of a long dead idiot. Whoever that idiot was. 

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

1 minute ago, XenoFish said:

To the same beliefs of a long dead idiot. Whoever that idiot was. 

Assuming this 'idiot' actually ever existed.

[XenoFish 90,862]

Just now, No Solid Ground said:

Assuming this 'idiot' actually ever existed.

That would an idiot in stealth mode.

[back to earth 23,447]

1 hour ago, XenoFish said:

But all religion want is conformity. To the same beliefs of a long dead idiot. Whoever that idiot was. 

"  In science and religions , we are of one people. Its those that don't want to conform to that.    " 

 You can actually understand that   ^   syntax ?  !    

10 / 10  !  

We have a job for you !  

https://www.tisnational.gov.au/

[Blood_Sacrifice 96]

Basically, as our brains expanded (and the neocortex got more developed), we could ask abstract questions like "Why are we here? What is the purpose of this life?", which is the starting point of any religion. That, coupled with our fear and the curiosity of what lies beyond death, is what gave birth to the first spiritual beliefs. Tribal religions also had some evolutionary advantages - it enforced moral codes upon members of the tribes that led to better survival/reproductive rate.

[Mr Walker 5,487]

On 07/01/2017 at 11:09 AM, No Solid Ground said:

It's an interesting question (the origin of 'religion') but this article's explanations fail largely because they depend on a common (though largely unconscious) view that ancient people were unable to perceive, mediate, and explain reality rationally ... even though the human species managed to survive and thrive for a couple hundred thousand years before the supposed birth of rational thought. The arrogant 'savage childlike stupid irrational' view of ancient people. 


Another reason these explanations fail is because they offer no challenge to the (also largely unconscious) assumption that 'religion' is ancient ... a culturally conditioned distorted perception of ancient people's sophisticated oral traditions,  records, and rites. The concept of 'religion', as it is now commonly understood, is a very modern invention that dates only to the 13th century and can be attributed to Thomas Aquinas. In his writings, he frequently included a term that originated in the 13th century, used to describe something that was believed to exist separate from nature and above it: supernaturalis, the supernatural.  He also distorted the meaning and common usage of the Latin term religio, defining it within a supernatural context, with the result that the idea, emotional states, and practice of ‘religion’ were invented. Prior to his claiming and reinventing the term, religio had a variety of common meanings, none corresponding to the modern concept of religion, nor making a distinction between religious and secular. The original meaning included nuances such as rite, protocol, decorum, sense of reserve, scruples, rules, and law - none of which are inherently ‘religious’. Several modern scholars favor the derivation re (again) and ligo from (connect), but this shouldn’t be assumed to mean connecting with anything supernatural; it should be understood as a reestablishment of a connection with social order, consistent with the established and common usage of the term previous to that time (and as I’ll make clear further along, a means of being consciously engaged with the patterns and processes of the natural world, and with the celestial mechanics that rule the natural world and that results in a perennial threat to social order and the human community.   

Aquinas’s new supernaturalized definition of religio was then used by Christian scholars to translate the Hebrew terms huqqah and dan, (now understood to have simply meant statute, custom, or enactment); the Greek term threskeia (now understood to have meant simply rite or duty); and the Arabic term dīn, from which the Hebrew term dan derives (now understood to have meant simply custom, social transaction, social order, and law). As a result, these terms came to be newly regarded as carrying religious / supernatural meaning also. However, there is no comparable term for 'religion' in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the common ancestor of Indo-European languages. Classical Greek has no term that functions as ‘religion’. In an article in the Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, Patrice Brodeur writes of Arabic dīn: “Prior to the twentieth century, the English word ‘religion’ had no direct equivalent in Arabic nor had the Arabic word dīn in English. They became partially synonymous only in the course of the twentieth century as a result of increased English-Arabic encounters and the need for consistency in translation” (Brodeur 2013). And the well-known Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman Malik has suggested that dīn is best considered simply as “the way-to-be-followed” (Malik 1979). And, as in Classical Greek, there is also a notable lack of any word in premodern Chinese that signifies ‘religion’ or ‘supernatural,’ or anything that corresponds to those terms. The modern Chinese term zongjiao was first employed to mean ‘religion’ in the late nineteenth century. 

Many people in modern society have been taught to think that the concept and emotional experience of ‘religion’ and an imagined ‘supernatural’ extends back to the origins of civilization, and even that it is somehow intrinsic to human evolution. However, scholars are increasingly contesting the idea that the concept of religion is ancient. The concepts of religion and the supernatural, the habits of thought, the emotional states, and the way of seeing that are conditioned and provoked by them (religiosity), and the redefining of ancient oral traditions, seasonal festivals, and mnemonic rites as worship are carefully manufactured products of the late Middle Ages. This exploitive, science-erasing dogma was then imposed on the cultural astronomy, oral traditions, written records, symbols, rites, geoconstructions, and social codes of non-Christian and non-Western cultures, and persuasively impressed upon the leaders of these cultures, often with economic promises tied to military threats. These cultures then gradually came to accept this conceptual imposition so that their oral traditions, social codes, and mnemonic rites, now religionized and supernaturalized, will be regarded on the same level as Christianity, and to protect themselves from Christian Europe’s aggressive and frequently cruel persuasion tactics. This process meant that the (pre-religious) Old Story which was rooted in an acute awareness of the natural world and celestial mechanics, around the globe, was forced underground, where it was nearly entirely forgotten and replaced with the newly invented abstractions of religion and the supernatural imposed on traditions. 

This concept of ‘religion’ is entirely a modern Eurocentric subjective construct that func­tions as a comparison to Christianity, while applying classifica­tion and definition when used outside of Christianity. Defining and classifying the traditions of ancient cultures as supernatural religion, and defining their associated rites and codes as religiosity, is tantamount to colonization and erasure. Recontextualization is erasure. Whoever controls the story, language, images, and rites controls how the mind thinks. It is as aggressive and destructive as Christianity's burning of libraries, destruction of standing stone circles, and the imprisoning, torturing, and murdering of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. The ancient traditions mirrored and reflected the natural world and celestial mechanics. This mirroring was tied to social codes and practices that kept society and individuals in balance with the patterns and processes of Earth and sky. It was science preserved in a complex technical language and a corresponding social order rooted in the reality of the place we exist embedded in. It wasn’t an interiorized pursuit of, or reverence for, a supernatural abstraction designed to provoke irrational emotionality. Quite the opposite: the ancient story was a way to preserve scientific data and a corresponding social code that kept humanity from becoming self-absorbed and collectively mad. It emphasized the integration of body and mind, and integration with each other, the ecosystem, and celestial mechanics for very practical purposes: physical and mental wellbeing, social order, contentment, happiness, and the survival of the species in a constantly changing, often life-threatening Earth and sky. It was a story of integration and balance, not separation and alienation. 



The simultaneous birth in the thirteenth century of Christian-dominated high scholasticism and the invention of the ‘supernatural’; the melding of high scholasticism and supernaturalism with Aristotelianism; the co-opting and redefining of the Latin term religio and using it to define nonreligious terms in the oral tradition and rites of non-Christian and non-Western cultures, and the very unholy marriage of the church and the merchant class (to control and exploit the masses) — these signaled the beginning of the end of a sophisticated, multilayered technical language preserved in stories, rites, geoconstructions, and symbols around the globe … an enduring framework of existence that had informed, sustained, and protected humanity for countless tens of thousands of years. The ancient oral traditions, rituals, and symbols that told the story of the sky and its relationship with Earth, and humanity’s embedded place in them, have been mythified and mystified … religionized and supernaturalized. This modern invention - 'religion' - severed Earth and sky, and severed humans from the earth and sky ... rendering humanity pathologically alienated and given to religious delusions and destructive behaviors. These delusions and behaviors are tools in the hands of the ruling class…  

Thats a very limited definition of religion. We know that, at one temple in turkey, people were worshipping about 10000 years ago. The gods and form of religion changed over time as the people's needs changed,  but it remained a religious centre for a long time 

In a more traditional definition, religion is any codified form of belief ie where a belief is explained and backgrounded, with reasons and logical explanations for the belief, and has rituals, liturgies, songs or dance, theatre or other forms of expression ONE person can create and maintain a religious form.

Pagan shaman, from as far back as cro magnon times,  performed religious ceremonies   . ARe you arguing that ancient greek, roman, and chinese, writers philosophers etc., never constructed the idea/ concept of religion/religiosity,  and  never argued for and against them? 

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

17 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Thats a very limited definition of religion. We know that, at one temple in turkey, people were worshipping about 10000 years ago. The gods and form of religion changed over time as the people's needs changed,  but it remained a religious centre for a long time 

In a more traditional definition, religion is any codified form of belief ie where a belief is explained and backgrounded, with reasons and logical explanations for the belief, and has rituals, liturgies, songs or dance, theatre or other forms of expression ONE person can create and maintain a religious form.

Pagan shaman, from as far back as cro magnon times,  performed religious ceremonies   . ARe you arguing that ancient greek, roman, and chinese, writers philosophers etc., never constructed the idea/ concept of religion/religiosity,  and  never argued for and against them? 

I'll respond this weekend ... 

[back to earth 23,447]

19 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Thats a very limited definition of religion. We know that, at one temple in turkey, people were worshipping about 10000 years ago. The gods and form of religion changed over time as the people's needs changed,  but it remained a religious centre for a long time 

In a more traditional definition, religion is any codified form of belief ie where a belief is explained and backgrounded, with reasons and logical explanations for the belief, and has rituals, liturgies, songs or dance, theatre or other forms of expression ONE person can create and maintain a religious form.

Pagan shaman, from as far back as cro magnon times,  performed religious ceremonies   . ARe you arguing that ancient greek, roman, and chinese, writers philosophers etc., never constructed the idea/ concept of religion/religiosity,  and  never argued for and against them? 

 

Walker  ,   have you read page 1 of this thread ? 

It might give you some background on   what was already written . 

[Mr Walker 5,487]

2 hours ago, back to earth said:

 

Walker  ,   have you read page 1 of this thread ? 

It might give you some background on   what was already written . 

Yes I am also very familiar with the concepts. They are the same as I have argued for years as to how and why human children construct god concepts ie the y recognise agents of change and then attribute self willed agencies to all change .  

I was responding to the particular post( which argued that religion didn't actually evolve until the middle ages.)

  Religion Is basically a codified and formalised form of human spiritual belief. The codification consists of; a coherent body of beliefs, ritual behaviour( possibly to propitiate gods or spirits, or to gain their help /assistance) ,  and often song dance etc .   It can be a religion of one person, or a religion of millions

And certainly religion and religious forms have existed for at LEAST 10,000 years and probably back into the neolithic era, or even paleolithic.  The first pagans certainly practised a form of religion. 

Edited May 12, 2017 by Mr Walker

[Mr Walker 5,487]

On 11/01/2017 at 8:55 AM, No Solid Ground said:

Which is how ancient traditions understood the symbols of 'storm gods' until Christianity turned the symbols into supernatural religion.

To ancient people storms were not simply  natural, as we would think of natural,  they were the embodiment and personification of very real and powerful elemental beings.

The sumerians wrote of the actual living essence of the sun and the moon, They also believed that all living things had, not just a material existence, but a living spiritual one. Without the right ceremonies, they believed mud bricks would fail, and beer would sour  We know this because they produced some of the earliest written records on such things.  .Their instructions for making bricks and beer included not just the physical recipes/instructions  but the ceremonies words etc etc required, to ensure the items cooperated in their making. 

All  humans once thought like this, and would never do anything, even cut down a tree or kill an animal   without some form of ceremony to propitiate or appease the spirits and the gods of nature who shared their world  with them, and who could be both dangerous and helpful.  Storm gods weren't symbolic or metaphorical to ancient people.  They were terrifying realities who could not be resisted, only appeased. They held the power of life and death, but because they were intelligent, they could be bargained with.

This came from that magical thinking which gave many elements of nature intent and purpose, as active agents.  

Edited May 12, 2017 by Mr Walker

[Dhurfjooydig 687]

On 5/11/2017 at 7:40 PM, No Solid Ground said:

1. We know that, at one temple in turkey, people were worshipping about 10000 years ago.

2. ARe you arguing that ancient greek, roman, and chinese, writers philosophers etc., never constructed the idea/ concept of religion/religiosity,  and  never argued for and against them? 

1. There is no evidence that people in what is now called Turkey were "worshipping" 10,000 years ago ... "worship" is a modern term ladened with modern 'religious' meaning, that derives from Old English 'weorthscipe' ... which can be understood simply as respect for something of worth (not including or limited to modern religion). 

2. Yes. See my post here:

... here: 
 

... here:

... which summarize my opinion that:

1. 'religion' is a very modern concept ... 

 2. that is dependent on an equally modern concept of 'supernaturalis' (above and beyond the laws of nature) that dates no earlier than the 13th century ... around the same time that the concept of 'religion' was being manufactured ...

3. these two modern concepts were then used to recontextualize the oral / written traditions, symbols, and rites of non Christian and non Western cultures ...

4. this recontextualization was purposeful and strategically implemented to erase from the collective memory something that (pre-Christian ascendency) oral traditions / written texts, symbols, and rites reflected and that was considered to be  of value / importance ... requiring mnemonic 'weorthscipe'. There's nothing inherently 'religious' about mnemonic rites and weorthscipe didn't have a sense of valuing something 'supernatural' or 'divine' until the 1300 century, at the same time that the term 'supernatural was first used and the concept of 'religion' was being manufactured.

Edited May 15, 2017 by No Solid Ground

[back to earth 23,447]

On 5/12/2017 at 5:06 PM, Mr Walker said:

Yes I am also very familiar with the concepts. They are the same as I have argued for years as to how and why human children construct god concepts ie the y recognise agents of change and then attribute self willed agencies to all change .  

I was responding to the particular post( which argued that religion didn't actually evolve until the middle ages.)

  Religion Is basically a codified and formalised form of human spiritual belief. The codification consists of; a coherent body of beliefs, ritual behaviour( possibly to propitiate gods or spirits, or to gain their help /assistance) ,  and often song dance etc .   It can be a religion of one person, or a religion of millions

And certainly religion and religious forms have existed for at LEAST 10,000 years and probably back into the neolithic era, or even paleolithic.  The first pagans certainly practised a form of religion. 

Oh ... I see you have not read and understood it then . 

[back to earth 23,447]

On 5/12/2017 at 5:19 PM, Mr Walker said:

To ancient people storms were not simply  natural, as we would think of natural,  they were the embodiment and personification of very real and powerful elemental beings.

The sumerians wrote of the actual living essence of the sun and the moon, They also believed that all living things had, not just a material existence, but a living spiritual one. Without the right ceremonies, they believed mud bricks would fail, and beer would sour  We know this because they produced some of the earliest written records on such things.  .Their instructions for making bricks and beer included not just the physical recipes/instructions  but the ceremonies words etc etc required, to ensure the items cooperated in their making. 

All  humans once thought like this, and would never do anything, even cut down a tree or kill an animal   without some form of ceremony to propitiate or appease the spirits and the gods of nature who shared their world  with them, and who could be both dangerous and helpful.  Storm gods weren't symbolic or metaphorical to ancient people.  They were terrifying realities who could not be resisted, only appeased. They held the power of life and death, but because they were intelligent, they could be bargained with.

This came from that magical thinking which gave many elements of nature intent and purpose, as active agents.  

 

You can write that and still not understand what   NSG means ?