Origins- What is Religion

What is religion?

The word “religion” can be defined in many ways but usually it involves one or more of the following three things”

1.       The worship of a god or gods

2.       Guidelines about how to behave

3.       Answers to life’s biggest questions

Since science also seeks to provide answers to life’s biggest questions, it’s sometimes comes into conflict with religion. Therefore, some people believe that we must choose between the two. However, others believe that science and religion can both be useful (since science tends to answer the question HOW and religion tends to answer question WHY) what is your opinion about this?

Early religion

The earliest kind of religion to develop was animism. It developed while humans were living as hunter-gatherers and is still found among indigenous people today. Animists believe that humans and animals (and sometimes even plants and rocks) have a soul or spirit. The word animism, animal and animation all come from the same root – all are related to the idea of a force that makes something move or “come alive”. Sprits were assumed to be responsible for things that happened in nature (such as the weather)

Over time, many things in nature became more and more personified until they were eventually thought as being gods and given specific names. Animism therefore became polytheism(belief in many gods). The first human civilizations followed different types of polytheism – such as the Egyptians along the Nile or the Babylonians along the Euphrates & Tigris

However, another group of ancient polytheists would become more important in the history of religion – the indo- Europeans. From their original home near the Caspian Sea, they split into several groups – some setting in Europe and others in Iran and India. The groups in India integrated with the people already living there and played a role in the development of Hinduism. One of the groups that settled in Europe became the ancient Greeks. We can therefore see certain similarities between Greek and Hindu gods.  In ancient polytheism, there was always a sky father and an earth mother. According to the indo- Europeans, the name of the sky father was dyaus. This word eventually evolved into “Zeus” (the main god of the ancient Greeks) and can still be seen in words “ Dieu” ( the French word for God)

Although Hinduism  today still seems like polythesism, it is actually close to something called panthesism

Religion in the west

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, the ancient Jewish people started following monotheism (belief in only one god). The part of the Christian bible known as Old Testament tells the story of the Jewish people and their beliefs. Some famous old testament tells the story of the Jewish people and their beliefs. Some famous old testament characters include Adam (the first man), Noah(who built a boat and saved  the animals during a flood), Abraham ( the father of the Jewish people), Moses (who led them out of Egypt), and David ( the famous king who defeated the giant goliath). Many English names today are based on bible characters like these.

At the same time as the Jews were developing their monotheism, many Greek thinkers were moving away from belief in god’s altogether and developing philosophy and science instead. This lasted paved the way for agnosticism (uncertainly about god or gods) and atheism (belief in no gods)

Then, about 2,000 years ago, a Jewish teacher named Jesus died and some of his followers claimed that he rose from the dead. These followers eventually became known as Christians. However, because the culture of that time was dominated by Greek thinking, Christianity( and most of western thought in general developed out of a combination of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy.

In about 600 AD, and Arab named Mohammad claimed to have received words directly from god and wrote them down in the Qur’an. He conceived the Arabic people to accept monotheism (like Jews and Christians) and eventually this gave rise to Islam.

In summary, we can see that all major world religions share common roots:

Abrahamic (western):	Indian ( eastern):
monotheistic	Non- monotheistic
Focused more on hearing( hold books are therefore very important)	Focused more on seeing ( visual symbolism is therefore very important)
See life as linear ( one life)	See life as cyclical (rebirth

How the religion began

·         Location of majority of followers, number of followers

·         Important people

·         Holy book

·         Central beliefs

·         Sacred places

·         Important feast days

·         Different ways to practice this religion (sects)