Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Is this how religions have evolved since man went moved from the hunter gatherer to the more agrarian urban?

If you look at the hunter gathers still in existance today--as well as archeological evidence of our early forebearers we find that universally the hunter gatherers were shamanistic in nature. As man moved from the hunter gather to an urban environ where having land and buildings bestowed wealth and power-religion of necessitity had to start moving from the naturistic shamanism (harmony with nature) to a religion that was stucture oriented. The shamanistic religion simply can't compete in the same marketplace with an organized religious structure. Once relgion became structure oriented of necessity that structure would have to be paid for and required things of value to keep it and it's attendent people maintained--this would have had to have come from the people (whether directly or indirectly from the ruler of the people raising geld as taxes) Thus--it would be in the best interest of the religion (so as to avoid loss of income) to develop a dogma that would deter the people from leaving the faith. Thus one would predict that dogma would be constructed by a religion as a carrot and stick arrangement--you do what we tell you--you get goodies (eternal life-alms to the poor etc)--if you question the faith your an apostate and not only will you be killed but you'll lose this eternal life. Thus from an social evolutionary standpoint isn't the dogma of most of the worlds major religions entirely predictable?

0 comments:

Post a Comment