Hindu hell

[Brian37]

I wouldn't say the "same point" but more like the same era within several hundred years. But concepts of super natural afterlife reward punishment existed even in the oral tradition prior to the written era.

Oral or written it still amounts to humans looking at prior and surrounding claims and creating new stories to compete.

But even without direct or indirect contact, humans completely independent of each other came up with the same bad guesses in antiquity. Fear of celestial bodies like comets,  and seeing patterns in the stars were made in antiquity in places like Australia and South America and Africa and China.

Even building upwards to the sky was an idea of worship, that you can find worldwide. 

The new Cosmos Series that came out a few years ago hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson, brought this up in almost every one of the 13 episodes.

The reason motifs of god/s/dieties/ even just spirit worship of your ancestors all started worldwide in an age of ignorance. All those claims are merely a reflection of human qualities, desires, fears and narcissism.

The sentence I used: "same point" refers to the "same time in history"/"same era" too.

The common thing between all nations and races is that all of them can see the sky and the stars. But why did all of them had claims of a "God existing in the sky"?

Why not an army of monsters, if fear alone was the motive of the claim?
Why not sky beasts wanting to come kill all?

You see where I'm going: the sky is so big, even without telescopes. Why would a primitive, ancient human assume a God in the sky and not assume another kind of life? another kind similar to what they see on earth.
Not divine, not superior.

There is no smoke without fire.

The philosophy of religion -the concept of a God/s controlling earth and residing in the sky- is in itself a block that raises the question: why this scenario specifically? there are other scenarios as many as the stars themselves.

For most, it is a hard concept to accept the truth of independent and not connected similar claims.

I am giving you the answer. Humans do not even have to know each other or ever meet each other to come up with the same independent bad claims.

The truth of our species is that evolution drives us to seek patterns, and to survive, and we don't like the idea of being finite. In the age of ignorance, even in our oral tradition, long before the first writings, humans whom never met, would project their human qualities on the world around them.

It is simple human psychology to try to associate the world around you to something you are familiar with, and back in antiquity the only thing we understood was that we existed. So when bigger events, such as volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes, migration patterns, we stupidly, AND independently guessed that since we could think ourselves, there was a anthropomorphic human like/super natural force we had to bargain with, bow to or avoid the wrath of.

Even today, you could literally put say 20 kids whom are 3 to 5 years old, and without indoctrination, being in that same room would manufacture their own bad guesses as to why things happen. 

The simple truth is humans were projecting their own qualities on the world around them because they didn't know any better.

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You gotta admit, followers of such belief are really brave people. It's a pure mind torture to believe in such stuff.

My mother had an interest in Buddhism once, and said her teacher had told her to cherry pick what seems useful and disregard the rest. Pretty enlightened (NPI) for a religious instructor, given that's how all but a few adherents deal with religion. Many are driven literally insane by the concept of torture in the afterlife (especially Xtian/Muslim hell, which is commonly thought of as being infinite agony) and I'm not sure I would call these people brave. Indoctrinated, yes. Far braver to publically deny the veracity of such doctrine based on, well, having a grip on reality RE there being no evidence for such things other than words written and told by human beings. Stephen King's IT was invented by a human too, and is VERY popular, but I doubt anybody who believed in infanticidal sewer-dwelling clown monsters would ever be termed brave. Also, believing is not a choice and so cannot be termed brave. We merely believe what we perceive to be the truth.

Cherry picking is not enlightened, not even for Buddhists. Other Buddhists have also "cherry picked" to the point of justifying harm to Myanmar's Muslims. And it isn't like Tibet's Buddhists agree with Chinese Buddhists and it isn't like China's Buddhists agree with Japanese Shinto Buddhists.

I wouldn't put it like that. I'd say, considering humanity cant force any religion off the face of the planet without starting a nuclear war, I'd say if any "cherry picking" is to be done, it should lean towards non violence and protecting human rights and pluralism. 

But the problem for well intended liberals, whom have the empathy, it still remains that religious zealots read the same holy writings to come to a different conclusion.