The only real god, though, is the Christian god.
And that is why we have religious killings and strife to this day and well into the future.
My reading over the years suggests to me that he's speculating about questions other people already have better answers for. He's a psychologist, how civilizations are born and grow and die is not his area of professional expertise. It also seems to me that the idea that only the biggest god builds a civilization is patently false. Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Romans, built pretty sophisticated civilizations without a dominating deity in their mythos, they had pantheons of competing deities that were petty, mean, selfish, uncaring, vicious, vindictive, and promiscuous. Pretty much like the god of the Old Testament except for that last one.
I think the point he is making is how it was used. Farming, writing etc came before Major religions, but they did expand from that point forwardor disappear. When people start to live together then a system to control, direct etc is needed.
History of agriculture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Agriculture involving domestication of plants and animals was developed at least 10,000 years ago, although even earlier people began altering plant and animal communities for their own benefit through other means such as fire-stick farming.[1][2] Agriculture has undergone significant developments since the time of the earliest cultivation. The Fertile Crescent of Western Asia, Egypt, and India were sites of the earliest planned sowing and harvesting of plants that had previously been gathered in the wild.
Evolutionary origin of religions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Organized religion traces its roots to the neolithic revolution that began 11,000 years ago in the Near East but may have occurred independently in several other locations around the world. The invention of agriculture transformed many human societies from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. The consequences of the neolithic revolution included a population explosion and an acceleration in the pace of technological development. The transition from foraging bands to states and empires precipitated more specialized and developed forms of religion that reflected the new social and political environment. While bands and small tribes possess supernatural beliefs, these beliefs do not serve to justify a central authority, justify transfer of wealth or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. Organized religion emerged as a means of providing social and economic stability through the following ways:
• Justifying the central authority, which in turn possessed the right to collect taxes in return for providing social and security services.
• Bands and tribes consist of small number of related individuals. However, states and nations are composed of many thousands of unrelated individuals. Jared Diamond argues that organized religion served to provide a bond between unrelated individuals who would otherwise be more prone to enmity. He argues that the leading cause of death among hunter-gatherer societies is murder.[38]
• Religions that revolved around moralizing gods may have facilitated the rise of large, cooperative groups of unrelated individuals.[39]
The states born out of the Neolithic revolution, such as those of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, were theocracies with chiefs, kings and emperors playing dual roles of political and spiritual leaders.[13] Anthropologists have found that virtually all state societies and chiefdoms from around the world have been found to justify political power through divine authority. This suggests that political authority co-opts collective religious belief to bolster itself.
Invention of writing[edit source | editbeta]
See also: History of writing
Following the neolithic revolution, the pace of technological development (cultural evolution) intensified due to the invention of writing 5000 years ago. Symbols that became words later on made effective communication of ideas possible. Printing invented only over a thousand years ago increased the speed of communication exponentially and became the main spring of cultural evolution. Writing is thought to have been first invented in either Sumeria or Ancient Egypt and was initially used for accounting. Soon after, writing was used to record myth. The first religious texts mark the beginning of religious history. The Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt are one of the oldest known religious texts in the world, dating to between 2400–2300 BCE.[40][41][42] Writing played a major role in sustaining and spreading organized religion.
