What existed BEFORE the first religion?

[skakos]

What existed BEFORE the first religion?
If before religion, the first people were… atheists, does that mean that atheists created the first religion?

Any ideas? Where does the need for a religion stem from? If the only way for a religion to exist is to grow into the mind of an atheist, does that mean anything about the truth inside the notion of religion in general?

[thedoc]

I would suggest that humans and Religion/Mythology evolved together. So there probably were no prereligion Humans.

[chasw]

If you trace the evolution of animals belonging to the genus Homo over the last 4 million years, it appears religious behavior (and by implication beliefs) began fairly late in the game. I explore this in more detail in my onhumanaffairs blog, but here's the short version. Homo sapiens were burying their dead with grave goods by about 25,000 years ago. Its possible that religious beliefs and practices began much earlier, driven largely by evolution of larger brains, language and culture. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens were living in Africa by about 200,000 years ago. Homo erectus was making fire by about 800k years ago, possibly earlier.

Before hominid minds developed sufficiently, however, these clever animals were exclusively concerned with the most mundane aspects of life, not yet ready to speculate about philosophical matters and commune with spirits. The Creator of the universe and its spiritual dimension were already there, I believe, waiting for the crown of creation to arrive. The object of religion was present, but without worshipers, there was no religion on earth. - CW

[skakos]

I believe that burying the dead with some kind of religious ceremony existed for as long as humans existed. As far as I see it, religion existed for as long we exist on Earth. And this is a good indication that something fundamentally important lies withing religion...

[thedoc]

It would be possible to define a Human Being as a Hominid that buries it's dead especially with artifacts that could be seen as useful in an afterlife. Other traits could be useful in determining when these early Hominids became Human beings to see if there is a correlation between traits and burial practices. Otherwise you are just defining Human Beings as Hominids that bury with artifacts and it becomes self defining, and of little value in determining if that is a defining trait of humanity.

[Skip]

I believe that burying the dead with some kind of religious ceremony existed for as long as humans existed. As far as I see it, religion existed for as long we exist on Earth. And this is a good indication that something fundamentally important lies withing religion...

Buried remains are the best source of our information about early humans. That doesn't mean that many people in the same period, or even the same people in different circumstances, didn't dispose of bodies by different means, such that most of the bodies are not available for us study. In fact, that must be so, given the relative scarcity of prehistoric human remains. (The ones inside vulcanos and tigers are hardest to reconstruct.) Nor does burial, even burial with possessions, necessarily denote appeal to a supernatural: it could be done out of simple respect or affection for that person, just as even atheists still bury many of their dead.

Signs of ritual murder are highly suggestive of religious intent, though not all ritual murder is necessarily superstitious: one could posit execution for a crime, personal vengeance, tribal hatred or deterrent to territorial rivals. There would have to a substantial number of bodies, killed in the same way, to tell us very much about the intent - and even then, there is room for speculation; no conclusion could be drawn without corroborative evidence.

Of course, in order to classify any kind of ritual, or indications of what may have been ritual, as religious, you would first need to define what constitutes a religion. What are the criteria?

Odds are, people made up stories about the world around them, guessed and conjectured about the causation of things, extrapolated from observation, discerned patterns from which to make predictions and eventually tried to affect the behaviour of the elements through the re-enactment of patterns that they associated with favourable outcomes.
Which was all in good fun, until some meddlesome priest wrote his interpretation on a stone wall.

[jackles]

yeah it means what jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within every observer past present or future.religion is just a group way of relating to that.

[chasw]

snip...the kingdom of heaven is within every observer past present or future...snip

Amen, jackles. As I stated before, our conscience, should we choose to use it, is our connection to this larger dimension of spirit. - CW

[HexHammer]

What existed BEFORE the first religion?
If before religion, the first people were… atheists, does that mean that atheists created the first religion?

Any ideas? Where does the need for a religion stem from? If the only way for a religion to exist is to grow into the mind of an atheist, does that mean anything about the truth inside the notion of religion in general?

Before you search for that, you should know that the ancient jews actually believed in god having a wife.

[Immanuel Can]

Eh?

[HexHammer]

Answer ver 0.5.

[Immanuel Can]

Double "eh"?

[HexHammer]

Let's say that "what came before chistianity", normal people would answer that believe in spirts, power of animals, natural disasters, etc, but imo that is looking at it too roughly when there are minute steps in between.

[Immanuel Can]

You're making absolutely no sense at all.

Are you claiming there were "Jews" before Abraham? Jewish people don't think that's true, and conventional history agrees with them. They maintain that their progenitor came out of polytheistic peoples living at Ur of the Chaldees, and so Abram, their forefounder would have been originally a "Chaldean." There were no such "ancient jews" as you call them.

Not only that, but Abraham's descendants weren't initially called "Jews," at all, but rather "Hebrews." Later the whole nation was "Israel," and then finally, much later, the word "Jews" appears, but only after the splitting of the Davidic Kingdom into two distinct regions, labeled "Israel" and "Judah," (the latter being where the word "Jew" was derived).

So...what the heck are you talking about?

[Skip]

Not only that ^^, but the Abrahamic stories date from only about 5-6 centuries BC. Sophisticated organized religions had already existed in Egypt, India, Greece, China, and Africa, as well as Mesopotamia, for 1-4000 years before that.

And all of these are late-comers in the history of human belief systems, which have been around in many forms, for at least 30,000 years. Christians (and their detractors) tend to be a bit short-sighted on this subject. Religion is far, far bigger that we're generally aware of in modern North America.