question for history buffs..

candidlynuts

last night my honey and i watched the program about pharoah on discovery channel.. they did facial reconstruction of pharoah and his sons heads...

anyway..in it they discussed how monotheism began with the egyptians.. that led to my honey and i talking about how people worshipped "god" in isolated areas thruout history before christianity or any other religions came to them.

what we know of history people would have rain gods, sun gods, earth gods , fertility gods etc.

they would give thanks , present sacrifices, leave gifts.. etc.

so.. without any kind of bible guidance, or clergy guidance they felt there was someone to thank, someone to pray for , someone to present sacrifices for.

where does this need for worship come from if there isnt someone we're supposed to worship?

do you know what i'm saying? seems like its ingrained into our make up somehow that we should give thanks and worship " someone"

Satanus

It's a good question. I tried to find the earliest traces of worship and its reason. I wasn't successful.

S

Forscher

There is one geneticist who argues that the need is genetically built into us. He is getting some flack over his theories since some of his colleagues suspect that it might be a back-handed way to prove creationism. For me, it is of interest since some of my college work was in Anthropology.

Leolaia

That program was an embarrassment. Very disappointing. As for Akhenaten, btw, he was not monotheistic (and neither was Moses as potrayed in the Pentateuch) but rather henotheistic, as he did not deny the existence of other gods but only claimed that one god should be worshipped.

The prehistory of religion is extremely murky. There are many reasons tho that could explain the prevelance of religious ideas in early human culture. Experience with the natural world has shown humans that forces exist greater than themselves. With the onset agriculture, it has become much more important to control or appease these natural forces to have a stable production of food. Similarly, in non-agarian societies, when one doesn't know where one's next meal is coming from, showing respect to the animals and the earth could have been thought to be advantageous. In an agricultural society, one becomes more aware of lunar and solar cycles and thus could view the sun and moon as controlling the seasons and the production of food. Also, in the formation of city-states, the ritual and cult of specific gods plays a very important role in governing, control, and local prestige. The king is the representative of a god, or a god himself. And through recursivity, relations between humans and gods are reflections of human relations. Thus the act of worship and the giving of offerings follows from human practices of reciprocity and sharing, with the god giving fertility, rain, protection, or what not in return. The need to worship gods is an extension of the human need for social interaction and affiliation, except here the desire for affiliation and personal relationship is with the forces of nature and unseen powers. These are some idle thoughts....I'm sure you can find some rather developed discussions of this in the anthropological literature....

czarofmischief

There was an article in Newsweek or Time recently that drew the connection between a certain gene and the need for worship. It also provided a link between certain states of mind and the religious euphoria that many experience. Brain activity in a certain area = a religious experience; but I don't know what it proves.

Of course, anything that physically proves a need for a God gets assaulted both from the ardent materialists - who want to believe that spirituality is a disease, and the fervent spiritualists, who want to believe that certain areas of human life are completely devoid from interaction with the body.

CZAR

Edited to add: Here is the link http://www.geocities.com/islampencereleri3/religion_and_the_brain.htm

Narkissos

Perhaps another possible source for ancient and "primitive" ritualistic (rather than "religious", which is perhaps too narrow) behaviour is to be found in ancestor "worship", often connected with some practice of "necromancy" (communicating with the dead). There are many traces of it in the Bible although it is condemned by the later and dominant Deuteronomistic redaction.

garybuss

I am not aware of any culture that had made up gods like the Jews, that did not have at least one element of that society with access to those gods. People who believe in deities must put blind faith in other people who claim to have access to those deities. The result is those who claim access to deities have control over people who believe in deities.

The issue for me is not "Is the deity real?". To my knowledge no deity has ever been proven to be real. I think ignorant antique people thought what was taught. They didn't understand anything. They didn't understand the concept of the earth being a planet or that the moon and the sun were also planets. They didn't know why it rained, or even why it got dark. Thought evolved just everything else seems to.

Now we try not to teach children what is. We try to teach them what might be. This is the thinking of an advanced society. The thinking of primitive societies included boundaries. Those societies enforced conformity and much of that conformity was necessary due to religious superstitions.

Ignorance breeds superstition. Education reduces or eliminates superstition.

Satanus

A few books that i read claimed that shamanism is the primordial spiritual phenomanon. They claimed that it springs up spontaneously in a tribal environment. This type of social environment is a stage that would preexist the larger type civilisations, like the city state or nation state such as egypt, babylon or sumer. It also would come before the priesthood system, as priesthood is generally part of a larger civilisation.

S

Satanus

Shamanism doesn't necesarily involve worshipping. It's an alteration of mind by chanting, drum beat, smoking tobacco, drinking alchahol or imbibing in another drug in order to travel in the spirit world. In this state, they acquire knowledge, or do things that can have an affect in this world. Many shamans get helpers in that dimension, whom they command of that work along w them.

S

seedy3

Pretty much , my own feeling about the question, and from the studying I have done on religious history. But the reason I would say is to answer the questions that are not able to be answered in ancient terms and science (i.e. How did we get here, what or who made the stars ect ect). The only answer the ancients could really give was "GOD" or at least a supernatural being.

Religion has been a part of life for humans since unwritten times. As pointed out most religions have had many gods for different purposes, a rain god, a god of war, a god for women, a god of crops, even a god of death or afgter life was very common. Akenaten (spelling?) is the most ancient person to have instituted a monotheistic religion, even some of his writtings made it into the bible, if I remember correctly one of them is Psalms 117 or 119, I'd have to look it up again.

The Hebrews didn't have a monotheistic beleifs system until sometime in the 1st millenium bc, prior to that they were as pagan as any of the rest of the known world. Baal and Yah (Yahway) were gods of the caananites they were 2 of the sons of El the almighty, and they were very bitter twords each other even in the Cannanite beleifs, Which shows why there is so much animosity twords Baal in the bible. Eventually the likenss of El evoloved into the Yahwah, we know today in the bible.

Most of the current OT was not written or at least added to the Hebrew holy writtings until sometime in the 6-7th century BC. However some of the writtings are older, such as the Akenaten verse mentioned above, but were adopted by the hebrews and claimed as their own.

Seedy

question for history buffs..

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