Sociologically...

britannica.com/topic/Greek-religion
>Greek religion, religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Hellenes. Greek religion is not the same as Greek mythology, which is concerned with traditional tales, though the two are closely interlinked.
>Requirements for the Greeks were to believe that the gods existed and to perform ritual and sacrifice, through which the gods received their due.
>But if a Greek went through the motions of piety, he risked little, since no attempt was made to enforce orthodoxy
>The early Greeks personalized every aspect of their world, natural and cultural, and their experiences in it. The earth, the sea, the mountains, the rivers, custom-law (themis), and one’s share in society and its goods were all seen in personal as well as naturalistic terms.
> Eros and Aphrodite (god and goddess of sexual desire) and Ares (god of war). These latter are personalized and anthropomorphized, but their worshippers may be “filled” with them.
Greek mythology was very flexible and for the most part distinct from worship.I would draw an analogy to current animistic religions like Chinese folk religion.

No. Polytheism is an attempt to invent, agree on, and understand abstract concepts.
Once your culture actually manages to do that, you no longer need the pantheon.

Monotheism is a product of shriveled up polytheism. It doesn't happen on its own.

Oh. Misread the question.
...guess that still answers it?

Neat, thanks user.

This. It slightly baffles me that this is a question. Japan, China, and India. I guess you could say that Japan and China don't count because they don't care about their religions anymore, but that could of course be said about all of us. If you were to argue that they only got that stuff from monotheistic cultures, then I would point out that they're still civilised and polytheistic, whether or not they got outside inspiration. Maybe it's arguable that you can't self-develop to that extent without becoming monotheistic as a result, but it's hard to prove or disprove. I would say no. In Egypt, for example, monotheism was actively rejected even though they had the easiest imaginable lives for their time, where the Jews became monotheistic even though they didn't develop anything or live well for thousands of years.

Just to point it out, Judaic monotheism developed in and out of Mesopotamia, at the time one of the most advanced civilizations at the time. While of course it didn't really serve them all that well, they did emerge victorious out of the cultural and religious wars of that region in hindsight.

Also I'd argue that monotheistic religion definitely gave an advantage to the nations that practiced it. I mean I doubt if the nations of Europe would have been nearly as cooperative with each other without a shared underlying culture of monotheistic belief. That shared belief, even if it was tentative, gave them common ground one rarely saw from polytheistic cultures which tended to be split into tonnes of factions.

Just as another aside, Egypt was actually not as advanced in many areas as believed, they were quite ignorant and lacking in many areas of knowledge including technological knowledge that other groups had at that time. Even in Egypt's hayday they were somewhat backwards as compared to less prosperous cultures and empires. Though I doubt if if that really had anything to do with their polytheistic death cult, probably had more to do with just bruteforcing everything with slaves.

>nations of Europe
>cooperative
You're not much into history are you?
The only thing that can be classed as "cooperation" of any kind are the crusades, and i'd hardly count those as a good thing, seeing how they were barely disguised murdering, raping and pillaging sprees dressed up with religious overtones.

Not cooperative in the sense that they got along or their interests were aligned, but there was strong cultural and technological flows, as well as migration among the christian nations that I do not think would have been as common or as likely if they did not share a culture underpinned by the same religious beliefs.

>Egyptians bruteforced everything with slaves.

...

Religions tend to develop towards monotheism.

Well the Egyptian priests didn't want to lose their jobs

Yes.
Just keep in mind that in polytheistic faiths, unlike monotheistic or dualistic faiths, the gods are NOT the supreme force of the universe, they are just the powerful entities who can favor you if you petition them.

The supreme force of the universe just happens to be completely uncaring towards mortals, and even gods. For the greek and norse faiths alike, this was "fate".
Because the supreme force of the universe is like this, it sidesteps many conundrums of monotheistic faith such as "if God is purely good, why does evil exist".

Today the most popular religions believe that this supreme force is a man-like God. The belief that it would be an uncaring mechanism instead, isn't particularly less believable at all.
These same people who believe in this God, also believe in angels, demons, spirits and saints. Believing in the polytheistic gods isn't particularly less believable than those either.

Kind of dumb to say this considering we only have ONE example of this happening, involving the spread of abrahamic beliefs.

If the same thing had happened in complete isolation from the center from which all of these spread, like America or Australia maybe you could say that, but it didn't.

And why the hell it should be impossible? You yourself posted Shinto and Hinduism imaginery, two religions that are still practiced nowdays. It doesn't matter if they are sidetracked or neglected - they still exist, still have worshippers and so on.

What kind of question is this, really? The fact we have monoteistic religion emerge at certain point was literally a coincidence and then almost all following monotheisms emerged from that root.

Should Zoroaster never be born or became a prophet or his religion never gained support or following, you would NEVER had any monoteism on this planet. Ever.
Go rather ponder on that.

This statement is so retarded it's just soul-crushing stupid.

It's the exact opposite, you idiot. There is currently ONE 100% proof monotheism. It's Sikhism, which was quite literally engineered to be a true and unbreakable monotheism. Everything else is "monotheism, but..." kind of deal.

>Zoroastrianism and its sects
There is Good God and Evil God, in perpetual dualism
>All versions of Judaism
There is One God... and devils, angels, supernatural beings, false gods and one day God's Messiah is going to come...
>All versions of Christianity
There is One God In Three Persons... and saints... and angels... and there is also Devil and devils... and a whole bunch of supporting characters
>All versions of Islam
There is One God and Mohammad is his Prophet... and then depending on denomination, entire slew of supporting characters, angels, reitterations, reinterpretations and rewritten commentary and whatever you can make with a religion without centralised institution of church.

You were saying something about monotheism?

>man-like God.
While that's the popular culture conception, when you get into theology and expounded theologian thinking the Abrahamic God (at least in more modern christian thinkers, as well as more esoteric Judaic thought) is much less "man-like" than what the average person thinks of and far more eldritch and numinous.

I'd actually say he's sort of right. Not about monotheism being the logical linear conclusion of religiosity, but that it does seem to generally develop as society develops in complexity.

Just pulling an argument out of my ass I'd guess that it's probably more like a curve, where more complex societal organizations lead to more complex religious organization, culminating in monotheist type thought, which then sort of degrades as complexity in society further increases and secular knowledge begins to eat into religious world descriptions, eventually degrading back to more simple forms of religious thought like animism or in vague notions of a soul. I'd argue that's what we are more or less seeing in modern christian nations where while full christian belief is faltering there are still people who see themselves as "spiritual"

Can you please define what you mean by monotheism? Because from the definition I know most of those would fit.

True, but something that can have feelings, plans and designs is still much more man-like than somthing like "fate" or "cause and effect"

Monotheism doesn't mean "only one supernatural entity exists"

There are no atheists in a foxhole.

Only theists fuck foxes?

Fedora tippers like to assume all aliens will be atheists, because obviously any society more advanced than ours would have discarded any kind of spirituality and embraced pure science and reason. This reinforces the fedora tippers' sense of superiority ("Superior aliens would think like me, therefore *I* am also superior!").

>Assumes that aliens would believe in God/gods/religion simply because humans do
>Probably so he can justify his belief that God is some sort of universal despite there being alien life
*Tips Zucchetto*

Yeah, but humans are stupid (except me, I'm smart). We're talking about aliens here. Aliens that are smart. Smart like me.

It's stupid to assume either way. I just don't discount the possibility that aliens might have spiritual beliefs.

But how would you justify fucking a fox goddess? Would you have to convert her to catholocism first? Can a pagan goddess even worship another deity?

Chances are pretty good that if spiritual beliefs are common to sapient species who become technologically advanced, it is only for a relatively limited amount of time until evolution (either directed or natural) does away with the unrefined neurological mechanisms which give rise to religious belief.

>egyptians
>slaves
Holy fucking shit. Your entire post can be disregarded as bullshit garbage, because the JEWS NEVER WERE IN EGYPT.

Hey, look, it's one of the fedora tippers that was talking about.

Which is why we see religious belief declining as society grows more advanced, right? Oh wait, we don't.
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-with-no-religion-are-projected-to-decline-as-a-share-of-the-worlds-population/

We see this happening in Europe and North America, where the population in general is declining and heavy import of more religious communities is required to keep the population stable. What this effectively means is that religious and spiritual beliefs will only become more common, as modern societies effectively select for them (in the sense that a lack of religious belief makes one demographically less fit for reproduction). I can promise you that Europe will become more religious in the next decades, I just don't know whether it'll be more Christian or more Muslim than it is today.

Of course we'd have no idea how this would work with aliens, but looking at the knowlegde we do have of earth we can clearly see that evolution is not doing away with the neurological mechanisms which give rise to religious belief. In fact, your belief falls into the progressivist trap that a few decades of social development can override millions of years of evolution (which gives rise to such blatantly unviable ideas as gender equality).

The Habiru tribes were enslaved in Egypt though. True, the Habiru tribes were a much more loose confederation than the Hebrews (in that they barely had a unified language and culture), but according to the Encyclopedia Britannica "Many scholars feel that among the Hapiru were the original Hebrews, of whom the later Israelites were only one branch or confederation." (britannica.com/place/Canaan-historical-region-Middle-East).

Not saying this proves Exodus happened, just saying that guys post can't instantly be disregarded as bullshit as proto-Hebrews were in fact slaves in Egypt.

>REEEE JEEEWWWWWWWS
Fuck off /pol/ you retarded cunts. I never said a single fucking thing about the jews.

>where more complex societal organizations lead to more complex religious organization, culminating in monotheist type thought
I don't think that's true, though, since the Abrahamic faith is pretty damn old and came out of a tribe that was constantly buttfucked by its neighbors (a lot of Hebrew myth is basically "Yeah well, my god can beat up your god") and many very complex societies outside of the Abrahamic sphere of influence didn't show any signs of tending towards monotheism, neither the Chinese, nor the Japanese, nor any of the Mesoamerican civilizations.

One thing I will agree with, though, is that the more a society learns about the world, the more abstract and complex their religions become. When the priest says "Our god lives on that mountain over there" and you go and check and find nothing, he'll go "Well, not that particular mountain, but an abstract kind of mountain that you can't really get to." I guess that could eventually lead to an amalgamation of gods into one, but there's no evidence anywhere in history that it ever happened that way.

Man, the fedora fad was the best thing to ever happen to religious people online, wasn't it? Who needs actual arguments when you can make fun of a dorky hat?

>Which is why we see religious belief declining as society grows more advanced, right
>we can clearly see that evolution is not doing away with the neurological mechanisms which give rise to religious belief.
Right, because large scale evolution involving mental abilities takes place over the course of a few centuries.

>social development can override millions of years of evolution
Again, you missed the point entirely, this is not about social development but the ongoing selection of refinement of neurological processes.

The fact is that like intelligence, it is likely that the neurological mechanisms which give rise to religiosity are relatively newly developed and unrefined. The parts of our brains which give the impression of agency to the inanimate, find patterns in meaningless data and such are like that because while they are strongly adaptive, they are newly developed and have yet to be refined to not make such errors the same way those "millions of years of evolution" have refined our other faculties. If our society continues on a path of increasing complexity and increasingly requires humans to take on more and more mentally taxing tasks the likelihood is that there will be selection pressures against those rough cognitive solutions.

That Muslims are in Europe having kids makes little difference since at this point in time the vast majority of the population (if not the entirety of the human population) still has the brain mechanisms which cause religiosity.

So again IF aliens who are technologically advanced also tend towards religion as we do, it is likely the same sort of adaptation that would only exist for a short period of time in their history. Again this says nothing about other forms of alien civilization, there may be alien theocracies who's people evolve to be superreligious, but that would involve evolution advancing their cognitive processes away from the sort of thought that is required for an "advanced" civilization.

>If our society continues on a path of increasing complexity and increasingly requires humans to take on more and more mentally taxing tasks the likelihood is that there will be selection pressures against those rough cognitive solutions.
I don't see how this selection would take place. What kind of circumstances would need to arise in which the neurological mechanisms that lead to religiosity decrease your chances of reproduction/increase your chances of death? What shape would this selective pressure take on, especially when throughout evolution these mechanisms have proven so succesful (in reproductive terms) that they've become practically universal? Because, if I'm not mistaken in my understanding of evolution, for certain traits to be filtered out of the genepool the ones possessing those traits either need to die or not reproduce (in significant enough numbers).

I could see a world in which these tendencies are 'directed' in a different direction by human (or alien) design, but not one where they are selected out of the genepool without direct intelligent intervention. Unless you can elaborate on what this selective pressure would look like.

what is india?

Societal selective pressures do exist you know. In our current society those who are successful in society to mate more than those who are unsuccessful (inb4 someone pretends Idiocy was a documentary movie and not satire). As it stands currently society s looking increasingly secular and based around doing mental labor for which there is some selection (and I believe increasing selection going forward) for people who are "smarter" which could very well lead to incremental refinement of human congestive processes away from instinctive religious beliefs.

There's also the whole looming human germ line engineering which is undoubtedly going to be used to alter human intelligence with likely side effects on cognition, which could eventually lead to refined tinkering in the brain to produce people more or less prone to religiosity.

I'll admit of course this relies on the idea that humans will continue to exist for a great period of time. That we will continue to exist in the same sort of social environment, and not say turn into a world wide caliphate or do some bullshit like the singularity, is by no means assured. However if we ever do become one of those "advanced civilizations" that you see in fiction, that is the main path I see as putting us there, and the likely evolutionary trends which will have shaped that civilizations peoples.

>India
>Advanced civilization

>In our current society those who are successful in society to mate more than those who are unsuccessful
Our current society? Not really. Maybe in some libertarian or classical liberal ideal society where government intervention is minimal. As it stands right now, our average IQs are decreasing (sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607000463) due to various practices that can be described as dysgenic (including but not limited to the welfare state). If there even is any selection, it seems to favor welfare recipients rather than welfare providers. In other words, we'd have to return to the status quo of Europe prior to the welfare state. I will admit the hypothetical possibility of such a society leading to refinement of cognitive processes that would eventually eliminate some currently existing neurological mechanism.

>There's also the whole looming human germ line engineering
Though that's direct human intervention geared towards a specific goal. Reminds me of that experiment with magnets that made people less religious and less likely to see refugees as a threat (independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/brain-magnets-decrease-faith-in-god-religion-immigrants-a6695291.html). That's not evolution, that's direct human intervention. If enforced on a larger scale (whether through magnets, gene engineering or whatever method you prefer) that's simply the powers that be selecting what they deem favorable.

>Our current society? Not really
OK, perhaps not in the world at large, nor our society right now, but there seems (at least to me) that that is how the near future will look. Increasingly menial jobs are going away with technological labor saving, automation is looking to slash into a lot of simple jobs that don't require significant amounts of thought. The welfare system is already stretched thin, and as more and more menial and redundant types are unable to find work, I doubt that they will have enough money to have children. Those that will have resources going forward are the types who can do mental labor, who are better at thinking than the rest.

Of course admittedly that is just a guess, but I don't see a future where "dysgenic" breeding practices are going to continue if we just take into account the probable future economic situation for such types. Baring the possibility of the welfare system expanding dramatically, that is.

>Though that's direct human intervention geared towards a specific goal.
Eh, I would consider it to be directed evolution, but I suppose it's fair too see it as otherwise. Still I don't think the intervention would be directly targeted at religious thought, but probably at generally increasing intelligence which I believe may have side effects on the neurological basis of religiosity. Of course that too is just a guess until it starts to happen there is no telling which way the wind will blow. Who knows maybe generally increasing intelligence will make people more likely to have religious tendencies.