How did the first religion start?

>why are we here
>how did the world begin
>why is the world the way it is
>what happens after we die
these are fundamental questions that face all humans, since early man lacked any scientific way to approach them he engaged in magical thinking.

yeah those fucking idiots don't even believe the sky man can talk to them, wow

>"Hey booga, give nooga some meat"
"Fuck you nooga"
>"SKYFIRE WILL HIT YOU IF YOU DON'T"
"OK OK booga give meat"

Why are there so many meme answers about cavemen talking to eath other. Fear/Wonder/Curiosity got people to associate nature with a divine presence.

Few ancient Gods said things like "don't kill someone or u go 2 hell lol"

They said shit like "if you annoy me and aren't nice to me your crops will fail."

This means early gods were an attempt to control the environment.

Ancestor worship combined with this and spawned new gods of human made things and gave a physical appearance to elemental gods.

The same way any culture starts. Two guys become great friends, they hunt together and eat their dead animals together, then they have kids and bring these kids hunting and these kids develop a sense of community that is embraced in the hunt, eventually the original guys die and their kids continue the tradition and reminisce about their parents and tell stories, they start trying to honor their memory and add it into the tradition, eventually you have this tradition of ancestor veneration and folk tales so long back that they become myth and exaggerated like a game of telephone. The best stories survive and and have object lessons about practical skills that have accumulated over generations. Over time names get muddled, stories get combined and different people are merged in the ancestral narrative. The great men in these stories start to seem like demi-gods, so that a story which teaches skills such as fishing through the story of a great man becomes a story about a man who invented fishing and speaks to fish, and is actually part fish. This is how you get paganism.

This is pedophilia right there.

Isn't that old person a woman? Why else would they have their chest covered when so much else is uncovered?

>60 year old man is recently married to a 10 year old girl and he bangs her - it's bad and it's pedophilia
>80 year old man is recently married to a 30 year old woman and he bangs her - it's good.
I don't understand society...Both of these should be considered bad.

Agricultural Revolution enabled humans the time to contemplate phenomena.

>how do we convince the lion not to lay in wait for us when we go poop?
>oh I know, lets make really fucking loud yells and pray to God

It's probably acceptable or not morally wrong in their society.

they were brought upon by angels descended from the heavens to the first man

anyone who disagree is cuck

You mean put into practice phenomena they contemplated. You can have people who sit all day making pottery and tending to a furnace, these people can then start to add pictures to the pottery which mean different things, like what the pot contains, then they might be asked to make clay tablets purely for these symbols, thus writing emerges.

Animism is the oldest religion.
The belief everything has a spirit.

My guess* on how it got started is:

Some guy was like: "Hey... What makes those things move and grow but not rocks and dirt? Oh! ANIMals must have something special that ANIMates them!"

Later some other guy was probably like: "Wait! plants grow too... They must be alive! They also must have this something special!"

Even later some other guy was probably like: "Hell, if plants can have this something special why not rivers? why not rocks? why not everything? "

And then they called this special thing "spirits".

*obviously no one knows

That Nooga, i swear...

Probably along the lines of
>finally achieve sentience
>first generation has children and is generally scared shitless of everything
>hunting accident. No one has been aware of human death before
>flip shit but some natural phenomenon calms the situation
>form the idea someone caused that situation to happen
>never find them, no one else around but good things start happening
>someone attributes it to the dead man, they all have no other explanation
>a few generations later they now developed the idea of spirits and an afterlife
>develope rituals to please the deceased ancestors
>good things continue to happen
>boom, religion

Spot the obvious theist.

Non-redditor detected.

God, if you theists are pretty much only interested in deluded shitposting rather than contribution to actual discussion why are you here? I can only assume you're a Christian since their shitposting is becoming a real problem on this board. Your feelings are not being put on a pedestal and you need to suck it up, not everybody who conforms to inane concepts of spiritually isn't from Reddit. It looks like you took the "this is a Christian" board gag too seriously.

It's not exactly an obscure fact that religion is used to keep the poor in check, it was used by ancient societies to keep everybody in check before they had real, actual laws.

>all these guesses about "controlling the environment"

Do you seriously think all of humanity would have just randomly started believing in a means to control nature that clearly doesn't work, and continued believing in it for thousands of years despite it being utterly useless?

>and continued believing in it for thousands of years despite it being utterly useless?

you'd be amazed

This is actually partially correct, but still mostly wrong.

No. Like anything this universal and long-lasting, religion exists because it serves a real tangible purpose (or used to).

Well obviously the weather controlling religions need some other component to keep people's interest, but it's very easy to get ideas to stick in a society when they're associated with other ideas everyone is already predisposed to believe. also, people are fucking stupid and don't require evidence a lot of the time

Why and how would every single society on Earth develop the same utterly useless idea? And where would people's "predispositions" come from?

No, attempts at weather control are just an occasional offshoot of religion's true and central purpose.

Sorry to break it to you, but among the countless religions that have come before yours, you probably don't have it right. The god you worship is most likely born of authority.

There are in effect only two kinds of religions and gods. Pagan ones, and Christianity, which is a deconstruction of the former.

People were too dumb to understand aliens and their technology so they assumed it was magic.

>10 year old child
>30 year old woman
Obv bait i hope...

>has never taken drugs
Most religions are trip reports..

>oh, shiny things in the sky!
>oh, something came down fromt he heavens and lit the tree on fire!
>oh, fucking floods fucking my shit up!
>How does this hsit even happen? It must be the works of someone/something exttremely powerful. I know, there must be all powerful beings controlling nature and us!

>Hehehe silly goyim, there really are gods, but they're just like I tell you they are, and they all live and act by the rules I say. Follow me and they'll love you eheheh

That's her grandma giving her goodbye hug, ya dumb ho.

Hallucinogenic shrooms.

>caveman
>eat shroom
>see shiny ghosts and monsters and shit
>wake up
>tell the others
>the ghosts asked for nothing, nor did they say a thing
>but their existence gets acknowledged

thats all it took

Human brains love and need patterns.

Anything happens retard human doesn't know the reason so he fills the gap with something he makes up now he feels like he understands it.

Religions still do it today, WELL WHAT WAS THE REASON FOR THE BIG BANG?

YOU DON'T KNOW ???? MUUUUH LETS FILL THE GAP WITH MY SKYDADDY.

It takes strength and honesty to say I don't know and filling bullshit into gaps should no longer be needed but the religions are way to stron to get rid of them and some people are to afraid of reality so they still exist.

>Muuuh I already have a life to live on this wonderful planet but I want another superlife when I die.

Personification of natural phenomena combined with a teleological mindset.

The camp fire stories and myths are already (proto-)religion

nooga please.

Answers to the unanswerable. Religion was also made to make a social and moral construct through humanity to try to strengthen local relations with other members of that group/ethnicity/tribe.
I recommend looking at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe too

> at some turning point in history some fuckface recognized that knowledge tends to democratize cultures and societies. so the only thing to do was monopolize and confine it to priests, clerics, and Elites,;the rest resigned to serve, because if the rabble knew the truth theyd organize against the powered and privilege d wealth hoardered for the few and no one else did it occur to you that it's exactly the same todaaaaaaaaaay

I don't think religion was ever about morality but about our purpose

It's evolutionarily advantageous to assume agency:
>Hear noise in bushes at night
>It's probably nothing
>Eaten by saber-toothed tiger

Vs

>Hear noise in bushes at night
>Oh fuck it's probably a saber-toothed tiger!
>Grab spear and buddy
>Go kill it

Even if the noise isn't a predator coming to kill you it's safer to assume it is.

Now apply this logic to a species comprised of millions over the course of millennia, and combine language and later the ability to actively record words.

Religion is the only outcome. Atheism is an evolutionary novelty.

wew

Probably when people first started asking questions about themselves and the world they occupied.

When they couldn't come up with a rational answer to these questions they made up irrational answers, since people in general prefer bad explanations over having NO explanations at all.

Our purpose includes society, which is dependent on morality. No society can function by tolerating murder, yet most sustain themselves by killing in war. We outsource our individual problems into collective mob justice inflicted on perceived enemies, instead of killing your wife we finance celebrity sacrifice or invade foreign countries.

Psilocybin probably.

Physicalisation of the tribal identity

So most answers are
>da elites tried to control society THROUGH FEAR, so they made lies to profit of the sheeple;
>ancient man didnt have SCIENCE(TM) figured out, so they resorted to "muh skyfairies"
>people were afraid of everything, so we invented gods as a scapegoat;

Of course, you also have serious ideas, like but in general, you people have the cringiest, meme-tier answers to more serious questions.

All those answers are shit including the ones you called "serious".

Adam and Eve walked with God in the Garden of Eden.

the "it was a socio-philosphical framework" ones are still closer to the general idea than the fedora tipping crap.

nice try PC, go back to sleep

the faculty of the Infinite

I don't know who's baiting who anymore...

You say "general idea" as if you have the answer.

So please, Socrates, tell us your definitive, non-"fedora", psychologically philosophical answer?