Jesus was a time traveler who tried to destroy religion and convince people all you need is to live in the moment and be nice to each other.
They nailed him to a tree, and as a special “Fuck You” turned him into a new religion.The oldest known religions are those of Indigenous Australia. If any modern human is going back in time to kill Indigenous Australian religions, I think they’re racist.
I thought it went
- Hinduism
- Judaism
- Zoroastrian
Unless youre equating occupation with practice
https://www.britannica.com/story/which-religion-is-the-oldest
Adherents hold that Hinduism—one of the principal faiths in the modern world, with about one billion followers—is the world’s oldest religion, with complete scriptural texts dating back 3,000 years. The oral tradition that gave rise to the Mahabharata, for example, probably dates to about 850 BCE, although its written Sanskrit form is about 400 years younger.
So Hinduism is around 3000 years old.
https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/rainbow-serpent/
Scientists have found that the first paintings of the Rainbow Serpent appear in Arnhem Land rock art between 6000 to 8000 years ago after the last Ice Age when the seas rose. After much research it was discovered that the first snake images would have appeared after the rising of the seas due to the direct climate change.
So, the worship of the Rainbow Serpent (The central figure in many Indigenous Australian religions) has Hinduism beat by at least 3,000 years.
If we’re talking about world firsts, Australia has most of them. Oldest religion, oldest aquaculture, oldest machine, oldest aerofoil, oldest tools, oldest historical records… Now sure, part of that is because Australian civilisation is the most successful and stable in the world, so its culture, artifacts, and historical records stretch a really long way back, which you don’t see with the very tumultuous politics in Europe and Asia… but when it comes to modern inventions like the helicopter, Australia still does very well. First Australian David Unaipon invented the helicopter in 1914.
You might have a point about the rainbow serpent being the oldest continuously worshipped deity.
But there is evidence of religion in the form of ritual burial from long before humans first went to Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_religion
I guess we need to think about how you define religion, but as I imagine the lives of early humans, their group’s success, or even survival, depended so much on the whims of forces they did not understand. Our brains are so good at pattern recognition and hardwired for social living, that we inevitably see the randomness of weather or prey migration patterns as the results of our actions, imagine some spirit/god has control over certain things, and then start to organise our society around ceremonies to placate these powerful forces.
Tldr depending how you define it, i think religion is the default human way of knowing the world
Huh Neat
