Were there any major civilizations that never practiced religion and never invented the concept of God? I know some isolated savage tribes in the middle of buttfuck nowhere had something similar, but i'm talking about actual civilizations.
Or is religion basically a prerequisite for a civilization?
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That bug fucking broke me
Define "god" then.
Because these range from "Supermen who live up in the sky" (Greeks) to "All encompassing and omnipotent (Abrahamics)" and "Avatars of some cosmic force" (Chinese folk religions).
Because not all think the same way. Gods & Goddesses is pretty much a western way to view multitudes of religious thinking the world over. You could say the Folk Chinese were without God since their """"""""Gods"""""""" were personifications of a supreme source of all that i called "Tian." And before you can say "well, Tian is god then." Know that the concept pretty much means "State of the Absolute."
Gods by any other name are still gods
>Were there any major civilizations that never practiced religion and never invented the concept of God?
No, if you allow for polytheistic stuff, which you should.
Not really. God in the english world usually follows either Greco-Roman/Norse or Abrahamic lines.
>I know some isolated savage tribes in the middle of buttfuck nowhere had something similar
No, they didn't. There has never been a single tribe contacted that did not have a belief in the supernatural, and in invisible spirits or "gods" and "demons". It's a human universal, like language.
I don't think so.
Inuits don't have heaven or hell equivalents but they're not a major civilization.
>According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god,[8] and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made.[5] However, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people.[4](pp112,134–142) Everett reported one incident where the Pirahã said that “Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle.” Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirahã insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach.
Reminds me of pic related.
Nope.
Humans are intrinsically curious, and religion developed as a way for early peoples to attempt to explain the world around them without the knowledge we have today. This is something common to all societies. For example, while ancient civilizations didn't have the technology we have today necessary to estimate the age of the Earth, that doesn't mean no one ever wondered how old the world they inhabited was. Ancient peoples didn't understand why events like thunderstorms or droughts happened, and so saying that Zeus creates thunderstorms or that we had a drought because God is angry with us offers an explanation.
That said, there are plenty of cultures that never "invented the concept of God". Religions can function in many different ways, and some worshiped ancestors, animals, or other things rather than gods or a God.
I'm very wary about stories like this about isolated people, there's no way to corroborate any of this. It seems amazingly unlikely that this one people, alone in the whole of the known annals of humanity, should have no concept of the supernatural.
>a belief in the supernatural
Ok, but isn't that just another way of saying "wrong in some ways about the way the natural world works". Like, if there literally was some badger in the clouds that caused thunder, that would just be part of the natural world.
What's your point?
>no concept of the supernatural
>couldn't even read the entire greentext paragraph
They do have a concept of the supernatural, the thing I quoted literally says so, the deal is they have no concept of a supreme being.
Then they're not even relevant for OP.
This is extremely common, and was probably universal before civilisation.
>didn't even read the first sentence of the greentext
Stop posting.
>This is extremely common
Is it? Bearing in mind I'm counting stuff like the Titans in Hellenistic cultures as satisfying OP, I think what OP is trying to get at is literally no concept of 'a being that made the world' or similar. Don't think that's at all common but happy to be corrected.
>What's your point?
That the question is meaningless.
>Bearing in mind I'm counting stuff like the Titans in Hellenistic cultures as satisfying OP,
The Titans aren't supreme beings. There is no culture ever recorded that lacks a set of culturally recognised supernatural beings, call them "faerys" or "daemons" or "titans" or "gods".
> I think what OP is trying to get at is literally no concept of 'a being that made the world' or similar.
Very common, even among recorded religions, is the notion that the world has always existed. Creation stories tend to come later when people have settled down to an agricultural lifestyle, when time keeping suddenly becomes super important.
So because there is no "real" supernatural, it makes no sense to ask whether or not people believed in one? The only meaningless thing ITT is you.
You understand the question, right? Then how can it be meaningless? I understand the point you're making about the 'super'natural etc, but you do understand what the subject of the question is.
>The Titans aren't supreme beings.
My point is that one of them created the world (Chronos IIRC though I'm not arsed checking). Lots of cultures lack the concept of a Supreme Being in its technical sense. It's just that I don't think that's what OP was getting at.
It's meaningless because "supernatural" is meaningless outside of more specific contexts.
Creation myths are very common, but then we have very little information on ancestral beliefs. We know that cultures freely borrow one another's mythology, as the Hebrews did with the Babylonians, so our written records are not reliable.
Red China and the USSR attempted to have such civilizations, but failed. They replaced God with the State and banned religious acts.
They too were savages.
But you do understand what it's referring to, right? So how can it be meaningless?
>outside of more specific contexts.
Well gee Timmy, do you figure that just MAYBE, a thread asking about the religious beliefs of primitive peoples might be just such a "specific context"?
Fucking kek, how do you get this bug in Mount and Blade? That's hilarious.
>But you do understand what it's referring to, right? So how can it be meaningless?
Because he's taking a casual concept and asking a rigorous question. Like "what percentage of things are ugly?"