RE: What human purpose does religion fill?
September 7, 2015 at 7:33 pm
(This post was last modified: September 7, 2015 at 7:34 pm by Tartarus Sauce.)
Religion would have been one of our earliest systems of facilitated social bonding. The ceremony-heavy aspects of early religion would have acted as a catalyst for strengthening and maintaining tribal interrelations. In addition, as has already been mentioned, it provided explanations during a time when explanations were scant. We are pattern seeking species, we don't like having incidents left unexplained.
As hunter-gather bands began developing into larger communities, sometimes as far as reaching civilization stage, religion became the foundation social structures were built upon. It wasn't particularly difficult to utilize religion as a means for enforcing the elite's control, people were already naturally attuned to that way of thinking and their state religion would have been an organically developed deviation of whatever the earlier belief sets were. The rulers were likely devout followers themselves, at least in belief.
As hunter-gather bands began developing into larger communities, sometimes as far as reaching civilization stage, religion became the foundation social structures were built upon. It wasn't particularly difficult to utilize religion as a means for enforcing the elite's control, people were already naturally attuned to that way of thinking and their state religion would have been an organically developed deviation of whatever the earlier belief sets were. The rulers were likely devout followers themselves, at least in belief.
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