If you were ever a theist...

[CapnAwesome]

Just for the record anthropology is only a hobby of mine. My degree is in history. Personally I think it probably arose from an attempt by ancient man to explain the world around him. The limitation of knowledge of ancient man is pretty staggering. I think we don't have a very good perception of how little truly ancient people probably understood about anything. So when people ask basic questions, why do we die, what happens after death, why are there rainbows, why do people get sick, naturally people want to fill in the blanks. Given their limited understanding, they do their best and come up with supernatural explanations. That snowballs into religion. Although it is important to note the idea Theists sometimes say that 'every tribe worships' isn't really true. Most primitive people have supernatural beliefs but not all believe in deities and hardly all worship them.

As to why, some people have thought that religious belief gives some sort of advantage in survival or something like that. I don't really think so, I think the how of it is enough. There is no why, so to speak. They don't give a society any advantage today and didn't give primitive man any advantage either. Social evolution I think is like biological evolution. Not everything in biological evolution is an advantage, like our appendix or the fact we have 5 fingers rather than 6. Religion is like that, the appendix of social evolution.

Maybe and maybe not. If you look back to the Paleolithic time period, there are researchers who believe that religion (for want of a better word) took shape back then in the form of Shamanism. If that made society 'better off' who knows, but maybe mankind's sheer desire to wonder and be open to all it does not know and could never know, is where some of these ideas and rituals stemmed from.

Right, that's pretty similar to what I am saying. I'd say as soon as there is a Shaman, there is a religion. Anthropology leaves a lot of room for speculation on ancient man though and ancient man probably varied wildly from tribe to tribe back then, especially when we consider the time period that we are thinking about. Man existed in nature as hunter gatherers for many multiple the time that we have been civilize.