Religion

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What is Religion? What are the earliest forms of religion?​

To answer these questions, we have to travel back the earliest human settlements and look at the material artifacts that they left behind. Which we find starting in the Old stone age extending to the New stone age.

Timelines are 2 million BC the start of the New stone age that lasted to about 10 thousand BC. Then we pick up the Old stone age that lasted from about 10 thousand BC to around 4500 BC to 2000 BC. It is at this juncture generally accepted at 4500 BC that man crosses into the early Bronze age the creation of weapons and the strengthening religious beliefs.

The start of the journey revolves around ancient Mesopotamia down the Mediterranean coast into Egypt.

Early man had established an equilibrium with nature and the instinct to co-exist in a balance that produced desired results of surviving the harshness of the environments he found himself in.

Man created an equilibrium between himself and creation by providing shelter, fire, hunting and the gathering of food within his own kind. We find evidence of these events in the material objects left behind that we find in archeological digs.

Somewhere in time man used his intellect to ascend his beliefs into the heavenly realm to the creation of divine entities to provide another layer of symmetry to explain the transformation of external events that affected him on a daily basis.

It is at this point in time that we find indications of the earliest religious beliefs indicating this transformation found in material objects that have been left behind.

However, these finds and scholarly assumptions as to their religious beliefs on divine intervention relies only on theories. We cannot fully grasp the mentality of the people that left behind these artifacts and how these material objects are related to their understanding of creation and of religious belief they clothed themselves with.

To understand a culture and their religious beliefs is to understand how they viewed death. If they can think on an abstract level whether they think death is final or irreversible. Death reveals these markers how societies ability to think, feel, believe and act in life and in the afterlife.

The first indication of a complex burial comes from the Middle East around the lands of Israel dating back to about 100,000 years ago. Homo sapiens buried their dead in carefully placed fetal positions with grave goods and animal bones in the grave. Grave goods of grains, beads, jewelry, weapons with the body usually covered with red ochre. This reveals an abstract thinking of the afterlife and to how to take care of that person in their journey after death.

Revealing customs, beliefs and practices in how cultures at this time viewed death and the afterlife. How death was dealt with.

Religion in its singularity is the abstract thinking of imagination of the afterlife. Attempts to answer what happens to one when he or she dies. The customs and beliefs that preceded one in death and preceding one in the afterlife to maintain an equilibrium between themselves, others and the Laws of Nature.

Death was understood as a reality of life but when you had death occurring that you could not see, like the current Corvid virus. Religion over time morphed death into acts of divine retribution. When in fact this can be attributed to what man does when he violates the Laws of Nature.

Religion started out with abstract thinking of simple ceremonies, beliefs and customs that increasingly became more complex and political when the Stone age moved into the Bronze age, the advent of cities. Where religion became a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Death in its own right is a commodity to be bought and sold in modern times.
 
Nov 26, 2019
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An interesting read, one thing that comes to my mind is the concept of having three deities that represent the rule to say it in religions across the globe. Why Three and even with Christianity it has Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Later by Constantinople was changed to have three as one to claim monotheism. What is your view on this?
 
Good question. I will keep my answer as narrow as I can. I spent a decade researching the ancient Mesopotamian cultures dating back to 3500 BC.

To answer the question you pose, “Father Son and Holy Ghost. You need to travel back in the ancient lands of Mesopotamia to the Sumerian, Akkadian and the Babylon empires and how they ruled their cultures. You will find your answer. Look up the “Gala priests” and what they did.

Then ask yourself why the creator is always a man?

Religion makes it easy for a man to blame his bad decision and responsibilities on an imaginary deity. Religion is a control device to make people feel good about events they cannot explain.

I walked as a fundamentalist for 15 years of my life till one day I woke up and started walking back to the origin of religion the ancient lands of the Sumerians. Take a simple walk and reverse engineer the King James and follow the trail to Europe on to Rome across the Mediterranean to Alexandria Egypt then cross the deserts to the ancient cities of Babylon and Sumer.

I wrote a book once, “Progressive Christianity, Dead Mans Hand”.

Abstract thinking always tries to answer why events happen in our lives that cannot be explained. I am not an atheist or agnostic or fundamentalist. I believe in Creation i.e... a Neutron is neither positive nor negative, yet it has mass it is at rest attracting or repelling other particles. I am at rest now simple as that.
 
There is no trinity man is the only one that claims divinity. Religions always have an economic twist to them. They have destroyed more families than all the wars combined.
 
Jul 25, 2020
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Since this is a religious forum, I'll say that cosmos is the Greek word for age or world. The disciples of Jesus asked what is the sign of the end of the age? He gave various signs: earthquakes in divers places, famines, war, pestilences {Ebola, Zika, and others}.
 
Jul 25, 2020
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A Dictionary in the Greek language will show that kósmos refers to world, but the Greek word used in Matt: 24:3, is aeon (or similiar) reference to time. The Greek has several different words for various lengths of time. The word aeon is a geologic period of time comprising of two or more eras.

This is where the King James Bible got its translation wrong, but the NKJV corrected it. When study the Bible the things to keep in mind are language differences, as well as, differences, in region, time, customs, belief, and differences within any social group or language. What occured in 2,000 years ago can in no way be compared to todays world. One must look at it from eyes of the person relaying the information.
 
Jul 25, 2020
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Abstract

What is Religion? What are the earliest forms of religion?​


From your two questions above, I will offer my 2-cents worth of thought.

Bottom line: Religion is man made, but true faith is a divine call.

Early man reacted to what he couldn't explain or understand. They left offerings, appeasements, sacrifices, etc., to something they most likely revered or feared. As mankind became knowledgeable and travel widened, their ways of worship changed with integration into new societies until religion demonstrated in some manner it could could get them something in return from their sacrifices––something as simple as affection and reverence, to wealth and position.

Faith, in contrast, is a calling within each person. Whether it is from need, a desire, or some inner feeling from within that will not go away. The calling will be different for each individual dependent on their lives and my belief is the person walking in true faith will live a life of genuine good acts.

Great thinkers in History write of a belief in a supreme God, no matter the name in various languages. Darwin & Einstein were two. People claiming Darwin was atheistic misquote his work. Darwin wrote of God within his origion theory of Natrual Selection, I believe it was: "On the Origin of Species" Charles Darwin, Oxford Press, 1996 ISBN 0 - 19 - 283438 - X It may have been On the Origin of Man if that came first. It was in the late 1970's. In whichever book, Darwin states, "Man, like Ape, adapts and evolves to an ever changing environment" not mankind evolved from Ape. In the same writing he mentions, if I recall, his theory reinforced his belief in God.

My own studies into science, as well as my personal experiences leads my faith. Science, in so many ways point to a supreme maker which backs up my definitions: Religion is man made and True Faith comes from a divine calling that can be measured by the persons' life.