In recent years religion has been increasingly considered a human instinct shaped by evolution with a genetic component involved. There are strong indications that already the Neanderthals buried their dead, very much for the same reasons we do nowadays, to honour our deceased loved ones.
The evolution of religion roughly went through three stages at different times and places in history:
- Animism
- Polytheism
- Monotheism
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have had an evolved sense of spirituality, however, they didn’t have organized religion and dogmatism was virtually unknown. This changed with the early civilisations. We see polytheistic religions popping up soon after the advent of farming everywhere. I have argued that these early civilizations were not only hierarchical but stratified to the previous mode of subsistence, with the descendants of early farmers making up the upper class (many of who had inherited their wealth), pastoralists the middle class filling the slots of artisans and hunter-gatherers making up the lower class, being labourers and slaves.
The defining feature of polytheistic religion is that their deities were stratified, like the society in which they were practised. It seems likely to me that these deities had been created out of the worship of ancestors of the different classes, with the ancestors of farmers making up the highest echelon of gods. Priests were right at the top of the social hierarchy too, keeping their ideological inheritance and dominance within the upper class, just like the nobility kept most of the wealth within their class. Before formal law was established religion was an instrument of power justifying the social hierarchy.
The descendants of early farmers therefore inherited
- Material wealth
- Ideological power
- Genetic traits like being hard-working and ambitious
Basically, they had all the means to keep polytheism going for millennia and for some time they did. However, a few millennia later we see monotheism pop up everywhere. How could that have happened?
Visionaries started to dream of social change and started with the ideological superstructure. Where did those visionaries come from? Most likely from the hunter-gatherer class, because their sense of egalitarianism made them hate hierarchy and authority. The first attempts at monotheism were probably very short-lived as they must have met with considerable opposition from the farmer/priest class.
The first successful hunter-gatherer to establish monotheism was pharao Akhenaten, who established the god Amun as the only god. This cult fell out of favour again after his death but might have lived on in the lower hunter-gatherer class and been the basis for Judaism provided that the Israelites really once were part of the Egyptian lower class.
Whenever we see religious founders (visionaries) in history promoting monotheism, we can be pretty sure they were from the hunter-gatherer part of the population: Zoroaster, Jesus and Buddha.
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