Alf

The other day I saw a fascinating program on Animal Planet. It was a program about a group of chimps and one of the females had a child that had just died. She brought the corpse of the dead child to the group and they comforted her and appearantly mourned with the mother.

That got me thinking. I think this is strong evidence that religion among humans could have started out as simple as that. The loss of a beloved child or leader of the group was hard. The group mourned and from there someone came up with the idea that "s/he is probably with us still" - and then you got an after life. Also, there are so many things this primitive group of people didn't understand.

What is a man going to do if he has epilepsy - most illnesses in those days meant that you were cast out of the group and can only wait to die. However, with epilepsy people in primitive cultures has often reverred them and consider them capable of "talking with the gods". Surely, if you had epilepsy and you had the choice of being an important tribe member talking to the gods or cast out of the tribe waiting for some wolf or bear to eat you, what would you choose? Also, some people were smarter than others and found that certain leaves had medical effect. They didn't understand medicin but they realized that this leave help against people with those symptoms etc and thus that gave them power.

This power meant that they didn't have to hunt to get their belly filled, the other people of the tribe would do it for them. Enjoy the easy life! And so they started to add on to their "show" so that people would be convinced that they really had those supernatural powers that they claimed they had. Thus, religion was born.

At least that is how I think it all started. Of course, one problem is that much of this is speculation but that program showing those chimps really do suggest that religion can have its birth in something so simple as that - consequently you can then consider chimps to be religious beings. If so, that is a devastating blow to christians who claim that only humans are religious since humans are "created in God's image" and so I guess we can say we have evidence that that claim is not true - at least chimpanzees are also appearantly created in God's image as they are capable of being religious.

What do you guys think? I ask atheists and theists alike here.

Alf

premjan

elephants tend to show reverence or sentimental attachment to the bones of other elephants.

thegdin

you are probably partially correct. the emotional aspect of the death of loved ones probably assisted in the development of early religions. i would think that it is probably just a small part of a much larger picture. i would guess that a major contributing factor to the development of religious belief structures was mainly the need to explain the environment. weather, the sun, other stars, life, death, and many other things that primitive man observed needed an explanation. enter god or gods. presto, everything is explained. imagine being completely ignorant of all natural processes, states of matter or even what the sun actually is. if theres a big fireball in the sky that hurts you if you stand under it too long you might think its a god. somehow, the plants we eat only grow if they have exposure to the great fireball god in the sky. i think the controlling aspect of religion probably came about later as humanity began to lose its nomadic tendencies.

(edited to add a couple more thoughts)

Alf

I would guess part of that was the concept that forces of nature behaved like sentient beings. When you had storms raging, the nature was "angry" etc and when the sun shone, the nature was happy. Attaching emotions to the environment lead to a belief in Gods, so when the storm raged, the gods were angry etc.

A connection with for example someone doing something that people considered "offended" the gods shortly followed with bad weather then could easily lead to the idea that the bad weather was a result of the offending act etc. Thus, you had ceremonial dancing/, acrificing and/or prayer to please the gods to bring rain - voila! You have rituals.

Alf

mirage

Don't forget the very powerful group membership thing. Every tribe has its customs and rituals. Religion is often more about doing rituals than intellectual beliefs. You associate and subsume your interests with that of the group. The group becomes divine (backed by all your dead ancestors of course) it gets its own patron gods etc.
Durkheim I think felt that the transcendent feeling one gets when you associate with a greater self "the group" is the start of religious experience. You can easily see how this would be an evolutionary advantage.

Gunnaheave

And yet one very big difference between "religions" and ceremonial systems is that the former oeften split communities by giving them seomething to argue with while indigenous ceremonial systems generally unite communities far more effectively. One doesn't find tribes splitting up into sectarian sub-communities the way one does with religions per say. Both may have many of the same themes, but in practice there is a world of defference between the way that religions operate and the way that tribal ceremonial systems operate.

mirage

Good point. Do you know any tribal ceremonies performed in group sizes comparable with modern religions though? (where the ceremonies haven't been divorced from any religion, thereby becoming much less important). Nowadays religions and denominations are much less associated with ancestoral identity, so there is more opportunity to choose your individual preference. Doctrines have become intellectualised edifices with a history of recorded debate. I can't imagine many disputes over doctrine in a small tribal society where everyone you have ever met is related to you and of the same "religion", without theologians or written scripture. Even the nation of Israel held it together for many centuries. In addition, the more modern religions have a reasonably historical start point with seminal events to disagree on and usualy a history of early splits. Monotheism imposes intolerance of other gods and practices, especialy with the added stakes of a salvation escatology.

I could see why there would be dispute in modern religions without undermining the notion that tribal ceremony was where it all began.

thegdin

i have a question. which came first, the ritual or the belief?

i agree that religions love their rituals but you have to have the belief before you can consider group membership or rituals.

mirage

Certainly the ritual came first. It's so easy to pick up rituals you can do it unconciously. Habits. It's basicaly a developed form of obsessive compulsive disorder. You may then have some vague idea of avoiding bad luck by not changing things. I think the habit/ritual continuum is so basic I wouldn't be surprised if apes did it (you can ask Biff the unclean on this on). It's got to be basic to the brain. Obviously there is the extra step of communalising a ritual by which time you would think a belief had got attached...

It's also got to be strongly caught up with dancing in a group.

Spirits/ ancestor ghosts came later, though maybe still pre H. Sapiens.