I have wondered the same thing and to me it speaks very loudly that our beliefs are not totally unfounded. I was reading the works of a late 19th century critic of evolution. He made some critical points that I don't think should be overlooked. He questioned why the unity of religions and what their inner-meanings behind them were. Similar questions were spoken about by CS Lewis and other authors. But according to evolution, all religions were evolved or invented by humanoids for some inexplicable reason or to explain lightning or some other natural phenomenon. But I'm not speaking about merely physical elements. There are far more similarities than dissimilarities-- too much to be mere coincidence, some would say.
who said they are unfounded? you mean based on reality? the unity of all religion is to explain and form human understanding of the universe, are you trying to claim it has a root outside explaination?
the reason there are similarities is that all the worshipers are humans and we all think along the same lines of thought, that is all.
yes all religions evolve, even christianity evolved, lots of people like to ignore this though.
If the evolution of man was some slow and arbitrary happenstance we should expect to see some fortuitous results and not any kind of homogeneity between the religions. We would expect them to be widely divergent and perhaps would be perplexed to see if different cultures, separated by oceans and mountain ranges, agreed on great and important points, especially on points which could not be clearly arrived at by reason.
your understanding of mankind is just wrong, people think of the samethings no matter the culture because they all have the same problems.
food,shelter,lust,desiers,etc. why do you think we have therapists?
all people have storms,snow,earthquakes etc, or something like it or trade with those that do
What in reason, the question goes, teaches us that an animal sacrifice is a proper way to worship God, especially when it could be viewed as unmerciful, barbaric, and down right bizarre? How could unassisted reason ever arrive at the conclusion that God(s) is/are properly worshipped by the immolation of innocence? We could certainly grant that one section of the anthropoids might have stumbled on the idea, but how can we account for its prevalence or its universality among different cultures? Perhaps it is by revelation-- a revelation that man only had a shadow of an idea. Afterall, isn't animal sacrifice merely a symbolic gesture?
because the human psyche is drawn to things like that, go read some carl jung to get an idea of this, its a universal subconcience archtype.
the part is blood = life, people see blood drain out of someone,they die, they conclude in every culture that blood is life, so they sacrifice live things to the gods to protect them from storms and wolves
He also made mention of the division of time into weeks of 7 days, prevalent among many ancient cultures. Why a division of weeks in intervals of seven? Why a division of days at all? Could this not hint at something more than pure coincidence?
this author needed to read more about things, the romans had a 9 day week before constitine became christian, and we use it because thats what its been
you have to realize that the jews got their week from the babylonians, and the babylonians considered 7 a lucky number, it has to do with numberology and the planets
one theory is sargon after conquring ur instituted a 7 day week most likely to honor the gods. who they believed were the first 5 planets they could see and the moon and sun, it was very common for man to look at the planets and see a god of some sort.
There are hints of an original religion with the division of time, Sabbath days, sacrifices, the existence of priests, temples, etc.
no its just human assioation and thought patterns, its pretty common,
your logic just doens't work, the human mind follows patterns that are easy to see in any religion, but they arn't because of some lost religion,but because we all think alike