Why Religion?
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A language and consciousness that included the ability to think about the past and future, would raise the question of why. Why do things happen as they do?
As written above, somewhere along the line, the thinking and fantasy of Homo Sapiens most certainly lead to a search for meaning or the why of what happens. According to Berger and Luckmann, as well as many other social scientists, a search for meaning is a fundamental anthropological condition of man. Homo Sapiens, partially because of their ability to fantasize about the future and their instincts to eat and survive, constantly were involved with projecting why things happened as they did and how they could change the future. For such reasons they created systems of beliefs, interpretations of reality, why things happen, who or what caused results, etc.
Creations of such systems continued up until recently when we evolved to our present perfect society. Part of the reason for this present historical thesis is to give an explanation as to how we arrived at our present stress-free society with no reason to question why we live, what we are doing or where we are going, since all these questions could lead to stress.
Earlier, a very understandable assumption would be that something, someone, some person, some animal, some object which had superior power had control over happenings that Homo Sapiens did not have control over. In different locations and at different times, which animals or beings apparently had such powers could be for example the bears, the sun, or the goddess Adoness. There are indications that religion of some kind existed at least 40,000 years ago. There are a number of discoveries such as the 31 centimeter Löwenmensch. (This Lion man was found in a cave at Hohlenstein in the Lone Valley in 1939 and later assembled in 1969. This mammoth ivory sculpture is calculated to be approximately 35,000 years old.) It is, however, first about 5,000 years ago that there are sufficient archeological findings to give any idea as to how life actually was and even here there is a lot of guesswork. By this time, it seems quite apparent that there were hierarchical systems with kings and gods as in Sumer. Baumeister, R. F. (1988). The problem of life’s meaning. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 138-148). New York: Springer-Verlag. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Thurfjell, D. (2020). Granskogsfolk hur naturen blev svenskarnas religion. Stockholm, Norstedts. |
