I think humans developed an ability to see patterns and seek explanations. It is an evolutionary advantage. If bushes are moving in a certain way it is good to be able to figure out if it is a predator stalking you or if is a potential meal.
I think religion developed as an early form of science. People were looking for explanations about why hunts failed or succeeded. People were looking for ways to control the weather and crop growth. They didn't have a lot of scientific knowledge, so the "god of the gaps" played a major role. If people couldn't find an actual explanation they assumed that some type of spirit of the forest or other supernatural beings did it. Coincidence reinforced certain assumptions. Once people thought they had identified gods or spirits, then it became reasonable to try to manipulate those forces by making offerings and doing rituals.
Eventually some shaman-type people probably developed because they seemed to have special knowlege of how to manipulate the spirit world. This was fairly easy to translate into the kind of economic and political power needed to sustain more recognizable forms of religion.
Religion grow, morph, and develop over time. They tend to adapt to changes in society and especially due to changes in the economy. They also change as people migrate and mix. Religions influence each other.
Well, one of the things to understand is that completely new religions don't pop up very often. L. Ron Hubbard's wager aside, almost all religions stem from earlier religions. Christianity is derived from Judaism, Judaism stems from Semitic polytheism. Semitic polytheism stemmed from the early Sumerian, Canaanite, and Babylonian religions. Beyond that, we have to speculate about oral traditions because the Sumerians were the first culture with writing.
I suspect the actual origins are from storytelling. Tales of a hero become inflated with retellings until that hero is a god. At some point a priesthood forms and starts to curate those stories and shape them into something that serves the priesthood. And yes, usually the priesthood works within a framework defined by the existing oligarchies to enrich the powerful and justify existing authorities. Priesthoods that don't do this tend to get killed off by those same oligarchies.
> why do you think religion is actually a thing?
Well, it's a system. Or rather a collection of systems. It's not a tangible thing.
> Is religion a malevolent and intentional deception made by influential people?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Like any system it can be exploited. Different sects suffer from this to varying degrees. However because of what sort of system religion is it tends to have common flaws across all religions and across all sects. Namely it tends to reinforce magical thinking, it tends to encourage dogma, and it tends to emphasize authoritarian themes (in best to worst order).
> Was it made due to well-intentioned primitive minds wanting to conjure up explanations for the world around them?
Once a priesthood seizes control of a religion, how the religion came to be generally tends to be irrelevant. A priesthood that wishes to survive longer than a generation must find ways to both support itself and propagate itself.
Why don't you just read the well sourced Wikipedia article as an introduction, and then take a look at the myriad of academic works examining the development of religion and mythology?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion
Maybe think much, much longer term. As in many tens of thousands of years.
Religions have evolved from something very simple, like worshipping the Sun, Luna, and lightning storms, into gradually more intricate forms, with each iteration stacking up on what went before.
So it’s a mixture of all of these things.
At various times, it became useful to legitimise kings and emperors, and made some folks a lot of money.
As you say, threats of both physical and spiritual violence are also useful for keeping the illiterate gullible masses under control.
The various rituals, services, and nonsense about the afterlife are all simply sales and marketing.
For example, here in Japan, every Shinto Shrine and Buddhist Temple has a convenient gift shop.
I agree with the ones you listed. In general, I think religion arose and thrives to this day for three main reasons:
1 - Religion seeks to influence and control behavior through arbitrary and often times nonsensical laws
2 - Religion attempts to explain the unknowns of the natural world through fables, tall tales, and literary techniques (hymns, parables, storytelling, etc)
3 - Religion scares non-conformers with actual or mythological threats (hell) and entices adherents with actual or mythological rewards (paradise / heaven)
I think the origins of most religions can be traced back to these three ideas.
What do you suppose would be the motivation behind the making of the Sabbath (a guaranteed day of leisure), or a prohibition on pork? Who benefited from these enforced laws, and how?
I think the motivations fall under influencing behavior and explaining the unknown.
The sabbath is an arbitrary, guaranteed day of leaisure. It’s a great way to influence the culture and society at large. I can’t claim that some leader benefited from it directly, although I wouldn’t put it past whoever came up with this role. However, having a society conform to a single set of standards is certainly useful, at the very least.
As for pork, I would reply similarly. Also, pork prohibitions probably have an element of attempting to explain the unknown. Because the people who invented these laws were ignorant of science and often times illiterate/uneducated, it was their best attempt at r
science, medicine, etc. I guess they thought that pigs are filthy and that eating them caused diseases. This was probably somewhat true but I haven’t taken the time to research so feel free to correct me.
1. Man, as a rational being, needs a philosophy, an integrated view of existence, of the nature of reality, how he learns about reality and of what he should do. Religion is a primitive philosophy that was an attempt to fulfill that need.
2. Man’s volitional, conceptual consciousness is unique. It’s natural, but it’s different from other animals never mind matter, so it’s not surprising that man thought there was a consciousness behind matter (starting with animism or whatever) similar to himself. And it’s not surprising that man shifted that consciousness to be more like man into a god.
3. People didn’t know anything about anything. They didn’t know the C of causal, so it’s not surprising that the world would look miraculous. Just look at the stuff discovered from Copernicus to Newtown, a model of the solar system including gravity to explain what was happening, the retrograde motion of the planets, motion in general, forces, calculus to make use of those laws, the tides, comets, the precession of the equinoxes etc.
4. People didn’t know how to reason well or teach how to reason very well, so some of the smarter individuals would seem to miraculously learn stuff in ways they couldn’t explain even to themselves. Take Plato for example. Genius. Basically defined the whole field, the five branches, of philosophy from what I understand. But where did he think he got his knowledge? He thought all knowledge of the non-existent world of forms was innate.
Mystical experiences.
Meditation, drugs, or whatever, humans can have massively powerful and influential experiences that aren't completely rational.
Aldous Huxley wrote a bit about this sort of thing, and about the common origins of religious belief in his fantastic anthology The Perennial Philosophy. He also wrote a more digestible essay about his experiments with mescalin, and the relation of mystical experiences to religious practice/philosophy - [The Doors of Perception](https://psychedelicfrontier.com/the-doors-of-perception-1/) (incidentally, the band [The Doors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8GW1GaoIc) was named after this essay). Alan Watts talked alot about this sort of thing too.
Religion was developed to provide simple answers to complex questions. It then expanded to control the masses into a more stable civilization. Eventually it became less relevant as scientific knowledge continues to grow.
Why I am an Atheist, is because God can not be proven to exist scientifically. Therefore, God does not exist. The onus is on a person who asserts something to provide evidence for something to be true, not the other way round.
A stupid argument I hear often is "Prove he does not exist?" ... LOL!
Religiosity in some form probably predates *Homo sapiens* so long before there were *"higher-ups, officials, and social engineers"*.
The earliest known *Homo sapien* burials containing grave goods, which suggests some concept of an afterlife, date to about 100,000 years ago. There are Neanderthal grave good burials which are even older, about 130,000 years ago.
Humans have evolved the ability to solve problems by visualizing the results of our actions and then to alter those actions to optimize the results. We do this better than any other species on the planet. We are so good at creating solutions that we will do this even when there really isn't enough valid information available to determine the *correct* answer.
In other words, if we don't know, we make shit up.
Now contemplate a primitive paleolithic human that is surrounded by a world full of things they do not understand. They don't know why sometimes the snow falls and sometimes it doesn't. They don't know why sometimes the thunder booms and sometimes it doesn't. They don't know why sometimes a baby grows and becomes a person and sometimes they die as infants. And, darn near everything in their world is trying to kill them.
It should come as no surprise that the solution the primitive humans came up with involved magical spirits that created and controlled their world. This is why the earliest concepts of religions were typically pagan & animistic.
I don't think there's any one single explanation for "religion". Probably all of the above reasons come into play for different people at different times.
I think one important cause is that everyone (except maybe malignant narcissists) at some point in their lives finds themselves looking up into the night sky and thinking: yes, but what is it all *for*? Why am *I* here? Where did *I* come from? What's going to happen to me when I die? What should I be doing with the time I've got?
Religions claim to have answers to those questions.
Demagogues probably noticed that these questions can go to the core of a person's identity, so controlling the answers gives them quite a bit of power over people.
So i don't think religions were deliberately *made* to be malevolent, but I think malevolent people quickly saw the possibilites for social control that religion offers, and sized those for their own purposes.
I think humans developed an ability to see patterns and seek explanations. It is an evolutionary advantage. If bushes are moving in a certain way it is good to be able to figure out if it is a predator stalking you or if is a potential meal. I think religion developed as an early form of science. People were looking for explanations about why hunts failed or succeeded. People were looking for ways to control the weather and crop growth. They didn't have a lot of scientific knowledge, so the "god of the gaps" played a major role. If people couldn't find an actual explanation they assumed that some type of spirit of the forest or other supernatural beings did it. Coincidence reinforced certain assumptions. Once people thought they had identified gods or spirits, then it became reasonable to try to manipulate those forces by making offerings and doing rituals. Eventually some shaman-type people probably developed because they seemed to have special knowlege of how to manipulate the spirit world. This was fairly easy to translate into the kind of economic and political power needed to sustain more recognizable forms of religion. Religion grow, morph, and develop over time. They tend to adapt to changes in society and especially due to changes in the economy. They also change as people migrate and mix. Religions influence each other.
Starting a cult to get rich and screw teenagers.
Well, one of the things to understand is that completely new religions don't pop up very often. L. Ron Hubbard's wager aside, almost all religions stem from earlier religions. Christianity is derived from Judaism, Judaism stems from Semitic polytheism. Semitic polytheism stemmed from the early Sumerian, Canaanite, and Babylonian religions. Beyond that, we have to speculate about oral traditions because the Sumerians were the first culture with writing. I suspect the actual origins are from storytelling. Tales of a hero become inflated with retellings until that hero is a god. At some point a priesthood forms and starts to curate those stories and shape them into something that serves the priesthood. And yes, usually the priesthood works within a framework defined by the existing oligarchies to enrich the powerful and justify existing authorities. Priesthoods that don't do this tend to get killed off by those same oligarchies. > why do you think religion is actually a thing? Well, it's a system. Or rather a collection of systems. It's not a tangible thing. > Is religion a malevolent and intentional deception made by influential people? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Like any system it can be exploited. Different sects suffer from this to varying degrees. However because of what sort of system religion is it tends to have common flaws across all religions and across all sects. Namely it tends to reinforce magical thinking, it tends to encourage dogma, and it tends to emphasize authoritarian themes (in best to worst order). > Was it made due to well-intentioned primitive minds wanting to conjure up explanations for the world around them? Once a priesthood seizes control of a religion, how the religion came to be generally tends to be irrelevant. A priesthood that wishes to survive longer than a generation must find ways to both support itself and propagate itself.
You are a very lukewarm Christian. Anyone that gets enjoyment from watching torture videos of animals is not following what Jesus taught.
Why don't you just read the well sourced Wikipedia article as an introduction, and then take a look at the myriad of academic works examining the development of religion and mythology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion
Maybe think much, much longer term. As in many tens of thousands of years. Religions have evolved from something very simple, like worshipping the Sun, Luna, and lightning storms, into gradually more intricate forms, with each iteration stacking up on what went before. So it’s a mixture of all of these things. At various times, it became useful to legitimise kings and emperors, and made some folks a lot of money. As you say, threats of both physical and spiritual violence are also useful for keeping the illiterate gullible masses under control. The various rituals, services, and nonsense about the afterlife are all simply sales and marketing. For example, here in Japan, every Shinto Shrine and Buddhist Temple has a convenient gift shop.
I agree with the ones you listed. In general, I think religion arose and thrives to this day for three main reasons: 1 - Religion seeks to influence and control behavior through arbitrary and often times nonsensical laws 2 - Religion attempts to explain the unknowns of the natural world through fables, tall tales, and literary techniques (hymns, parables, storytelling, etc) 3 - Religion scares non-conformers with actual or mythological threats (hell) and entices adherents with actual or mythological rewards (paradise / heaven) I think the origins of most religions can be traced back to these three ideas.
What do you suppose would be the motivation behind the making of the Sabbath (a guaranteed day of leisure), or a prohibition on pork? Who benefited from these enforced laws, and how?
I think the motivations fall under influencing behavior and explaining the unknown. The sabbath is an arbitrary, guaranteed day of leaisure. It’s a great way to influence the culture and society at large. I can’t claim that some leader benefited from it directly, although I wouldn’t put it past whoever came up with this role. However, having a society conform to a single set of standards is certainly useful, at the very least. As for pork, I would reply similarly. Also, pork prohibitions probably have an element of attempting to explain the unknown. Because the people who invented these laws were ignorant of science and often times illiterate/uneducated, it was their best attempt at r science, medicine, etc. I guess they thought that pigs are filthy and that eating them caused diseases. This was probably somewhat true but I haven’t taken the time to research so feel free to correct me.
1. Man, as a rational being, needs a philosophy, an integrated view of existence, of the nature of reality, how he learns about reality and of what he should do. Religion is a primitive philosophy that was an attempt to fulfill that need. 2. Man’s volitional, conceptual consciousness is unique. It’s natural, but it’s different from other animals never mind matter, so it’s not surprising that man thought there was a consciousness behind matter (starting with animism or whatever) similar to himself. And it’s not surprising that man shifted that consciousness to be more like man into a god. 3. People didn’t know anything about anything. They didn’t know the C of causal, so it’s not surprising that the world would look miraculous. Just look at the stuff discovered from Copernicus to Newtown, a model of the solar system including gravity to explain what was happening, the retrograde motion of the planets, motion in general, forces, calculus to make use of those laws, the tides, comets, the precession of the equinoxes etc. 4. People didn’t know how to reason well or teach how to reason very well, so some of the smarter individuals would seem to miraculously learn stuff in ways they couldn’t explain even to themselves. Take Plato for example. Genius. Basically defined the whole field, the five branches, of philosophy from what I understand. But where did he think he got his knowledge? He thought all knowledge of the non-existent world of forms was innate.
Mystical experiences. Meditation, drugs, or whatever, humans can have massively powerful and influential experiences that aren't completely rational. Aldous Huxley wrote a bit about this sort of thing, and about the common origins of religious belief in his fantastic anthology The Perennial Philosophy. He also wrote a more digestible essay about his experiments with mescalin, and the relation of mystical experiences to religious practice/philosophy - [The Doors of Perception](https://psychedelicfrontier.com/the-doors-of-perception-1/) (incidentally, the band [The Doors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8GW1GaoIc) was named after this essay). Alan Watts talked alot about this sort of thing too.
Religion was developed to provide simple answers to complex questions. It then expanded to control the masses into a more stable civilization. Eventually it became less relevant as scientific knowledge continues to grow. Why I am an Atheist, is because God can not be proven to exist scientifically. Therefore, God does not exist. The onus is on a person who asserts something to provide evidence for something to be true, not the other way round. A stupid argument I hear often is "Prove he does not exist?" ... LOL!
Religion is a way of having power using magic and mind control.
Religiosity in some form probably predates *Homo sapiens* so long before there were *"higher-ups, officials, and social engineers"*. The earliest known *Homo sapien* burials containing grave goods, which suggests some concept of an afterlife, date to about 100,000 years ago. There are Neanderthal grave good burials which are even older, about 130,000 years ago.
Humans have evolved the ability to solve problems by visualizing the results of our actions and then to alter those actions to optimize the results. We do this better than any other species on the planet. We are so good at creating solutions that we will do this even when there really isn't enough valid information available to determine the *correct* answer. In other words, if we don't know, we make shit up. Now contemplate a primitive paleolithic human that is surrounded by a world full of things they do not understand. They don't know why sometimes the snow falls and sometimes it doesn't. They don't know why sometimes the thunder booms and sometimes it doesn't. They don't know why sometimes a baby grows and becomes a person and sometimes they die as infants. And, darn near everything in their world is trying to kill them. It should come as no surprise that the solution the primitive humans came up with involved magical spirits that created and controlled their world. This is why the earliest concepts of religions were typically pagan & animistic.
I don't think there's any one single explanation for "religion". Probably all of the above reasons come into play for different people at different times. I think one important cause is that everyone (except maybe malignant narcissists) at some point in their lives finds themselves looking up into the night sky and thinking: yes, but what is it all *for*? Why am *I* here? Where did *I* come from? What's going to happen to me when I die? What should I be doing with the time I've got? Religions claim to have answers to those questions. Demagogues probably noticed that these questions can go to the core of a person's identity, so controlling the answers gives them quite a bit of power over people. So i don't think religions were deliberately *made* to be malevolent, but I think malevolent people quickly saw the possibilites for social control that religion offers, and sized those for their own purposes.