Why do religions develop?

Note that for this thread, I am assuming it's all a load of bunk. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in any god. I find it interesting how religions develop is all.


In my opinion, people tend to look for things with "meaning". One reason that religion is on the fall in 1st-world countries is that attempt to find meaning in religious belief is often replaced by materialism.

It follows that in 3rd-world countries, religion is much bigger. They don't have "toys", so they believe in God. It is sort of strange that someone in a third-world country who is starving and poor is more likely to believe in a benevolent God who will reward them for belief than someone in a first-world country.

How do religions get started? In my opinion, it's a combination of insanity and charlatanery (if that's a word).

Insanity: Nowadays, if somebody walks around telling people God is talking to them, what is the reaction? I have read that in the past, there were a lot more people who thought that God was talking to them, because malnutrition often causes mental problems. This may explain why people in third world countries can believe such stupid shit.

Of course, it isn't confined to poor countries with poor nutrition. Look at Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. The man was a FUCKING NUT. He believed that he had been given magical gold tablets or something by an angel, but refused to show them to others, instead reading them by putting a magic rock in his hat and putting the hat over his head. Does that sound sane?

Charlatanery: Being the leader of a religion can get you chicks, money, whatever you want. Look at televangelism. Remember all the scandals in the 80s, where various televangelists were involved in variations of sleeping with secretaries/embezzling money/whatever? Chances are that the guy on TV telling you that God wants you to send money isn't nuts, he's just a greedy liar. And the people who listen to him are morons.


IMHO, religions get started when a liar, crazy, or a bit of both, who is especially charismatic, comes across a group looking for some sort of meaning. He offers them meaning, they offer him belief in his hallucinations/money/poontang.

Discuss.

I believe that religions started in the first place as like an early version of science. "Why are we here, what made the universe?) People didn't know much so to them a higher power made sense.

Religion had developed before the process of scientific induction and the analysis of "why we are here" and "what made the universe," questions to be first asked by an already religious Greece. The first religions developed due to vitality itself, and in more advanced primitive civilizations for reasons of the solidification of community and a justifiable social order. Namely, primitive religion developed due to the wonder of birth itself. Women were idolized and worshipped for that very reason and given prime responsibility in the early civilizations of man. From this, rituals developed and were solidified by their continuation which led to a firm communal religion. The oldest religious idol was found in modern Turkey and it was of a fat woman giving birth. The questions proposed by YellowDischarge are fairly modern questions with which primitive man was not yet concerned.

Sinclair also assumes a modern perspective of religion by thinking of characters such as Moses and Mohammed and associating them with the founding of religion. He then appropriates religion to its modern function: its association with 'meaning'.

The development of religion in the primitive ages was not a question of meaning or knowledge, but a truth of wonder and life that man idolized and turned into religion.

note: I have synthesized this information from reading Fernand Braudel's Memory and the Mediterranean, which documents the development of early civilization on the Mediterranean up until Rome.

Illiteracy.