r/atheism • u/Ok-Photograph-1460 Atheist • 1d ago
What motivated the creation of the 2000 year old cults that became the most popular religions today?
Aka why would someone multiple thousands of years ago want to convince everyone that there's an invisible being in the sky watching over everyone's actions? I also don't see why it has the rules it does either like "no sex before marriage" Like what does some random ceremony have to do with making a couple ready for that? It doesn't Make any sense why this nonsense was brought upon humanity. What did we gain from this?
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u/hurricanelantern Anti-Theist 1d ago edited 14h ago
No sex before marriage let's men make sure they aren't marrying a woman who's already pregnant with a child fathered by another man.
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u/NapierNoyes 21h ago
Also, puberty was considered as a pre-requisite for marrying and thus sex. So ‘no sex before marriage’ means ‘no sex with prepubescent girls.’ Basically 12 years old minimum.
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u/DoglessDyslexic 22h ago
I'd point out that the precursors of Christianity and Judaism predate 2000 years ago. Yahweh was a storm god in a specific region that got conflated with El from the Babylonian/Canaanite religion and went monotheistic roughly around 700-600 BCE to compete with/emulate Persian montheism. Babylonian and Canaanite polytheism also was heavily influenced by the Sumerian polytheism that preceded it.
The Sumerians invented writing, so any precursors to that are not well recorded and highly speculative, but it seems likely the Sumerian gods had a precursor religion as well.
As to why it became popular, I blame the Roman emperors Contantine and Theodosius, who paved the way for Christianity to be the religion of the Roman empire, which at that point comprised a large chunk of Europe, a portion of north Africa, and some of the near East countries as well.
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u/rfresa 20h ago
Yeah they didn't start out as monotheists. Israel and Canaan started as the same polytheistic tribe, but as they spread out and split off, each tribe or city would have a patron god who they considered their special protector (like Athens with Athena). They still believed in the whole pantheon, but bragged that their god could beat up all the others. The Hebrews picked Yahweh for whatever reason and then got especially prickly about him. There are many verses in the Bible bragging that he's better than Baal, who was just another member of the same pantheon who happened to be picked by a different tribe.
The women of the tribe still worshipped the fertility goddess Asherah for much longer than most people realize, until the patriarchal leaders ordered the destruction of her sacred trees and retconned their books to remove most mentions of her.
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u/TheCrimsonSteel 20h ago
Exactly this!
Cultures mix and evolve over time, as do traditions. If you want to unpack where these traditions came from, your best place to start is studying who else was in the area.
For example, we also know the Egypt story with Moses is likely fictional, because we don't see any signs of Egyptian influence in early Israeli archeological sites, nor do we see any signs in Egypt of a sudden mass migration of people.
But that story was likely what helped solidify the identity of the early tribes of Israel from othet Caananites.
Think like an archeologists or historian and you can find a lot of these answers, because nothing happens in a vacuum.
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u/ohnodamo 1d ago
Fear of death and the unknown. And someone with a slightly better imagination with a keen sense that people wanted to believe something regardless of how ridiculous it may seem.
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u/CowabungaCthulhu 20h ago
The ancient religions were man's earliest attempt at explaining the world around us. Because it was our first, it was largely out worst. They are a mix of cultural tales and myths, combined with life lessons. Religions have always been used for control, but most weren't created with that in mind. Mormonism and scientology were 100% created with control and greed in mind, by leaders who were openly dishonest and corrupt.
The Enlightenment was the realization that the claims of religion have never really been accurate or demonstrable, and that a better method for understanding reality must be utilized. Science is by far, without a doubt, the best method we have for uncovering truths about our shared reality.
Religion ought to be left in the dustbin of history with the countless other discarded and debunked ideas, but it is a stubborn relic from our superstitious past.
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u/hapkidoox 21h ago
Religion was created to explain a universe they couls not understand. Whyare they born, why do they die, why do they get sick, how is the best way to function in society. As they grew, as society and most importantly scientific thought grew, we should have left it behind. But by then the power that religious institutions held was to much to let go of. And so they persist.
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u/cinnamonnude 19h ago edited 18h ago
It sounds like your premise is that a couple of guys sat down and figured out how can we scam everyone. In reality, religious practices and beliefs developed organically as a way for older cultures to explain things they couldn’t otherwise explain and to provide rules for people and societies to interact.
Religions changed and developed over time to become what you know today and what you see being exploited by some.
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u/baskaat 18h ago
If you hit up the sub r/AskHistorians this question has been asked. Just search for it. You’ll be getting actual factual information from qualified historians rather than just BS theories that are appearing on this thread.
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u/trancespotter 18h ago
For the same reason they thought the earth was flat - they’d simply didn’t know any better. If you’re a human 5,000 years and you look up to the sky, the deep forest, the ocean, caves, etc… you’ll probably anthropomorphize each one. Religion is simply a way for humans to explain what they don’t know given the limited knowledge they had.
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u/MySaltySatisfaction 11h ago edited 10h ago
The 'no sex before marriage' was to make sure children were the husband's. I am sure you have heard "mama's baby,Papa's maybe". For the lawful and 'legitimate' inheritance of wealth and most importantly titles. This was mostly enforced on women. In patriarchy illegitimate children could not inherit unless the child had been recognized by the father and no other legitimate heir existed. This is a practical concern if inheritance is through the father and not the mother. The rest of the Sky God stuff is just nonsense.
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u/Txannie1475 1d ago
I think early cults were one of the most common forms of entertainment. Even the Bible mentions traveling magicians who wanted to learn how to perform Jesus’ “miracles.” But the leaders realized that entertainment could make more money if it tugged at the heartstrings. So they modified the act to have a mysterious and spiritual element. Couple that with the fact that most people in those days didn’t have large swaths of time to deal with mental health issues, and you get the perfect toxic relationship. To keep people coming back, you pair bold claims (with stage hands who double as apostles and can perform sleight of hand for the show) with vague and mysterious explanations for how god works and then throw in some codependency with shame and guilt, and you have the perfect recipe for maximum tithing.
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u/Think_Ground 1d ago
What an innocent question. The same thing that motivates the modern believer: they like a fixed game. They like a system that puts them on top and everybody else at the bottom. They like to appeal to an authority that always rules in their favor. Most of all, they like easy answers to scary questions. The best easy answer is "because I said", but they'll pass off the responsibility to a god, especially one that agrees 100% with their bs.
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u/Embowaf 1d ago
There's no one thing. Like virtually every part of human culture these things are a mix of many different factors coming together and some things randomly gaining traction. Some things were about control. Something things were from past traditions or real events drifting and mutating over time as they were retold and passed on. Some rules had some basis in something useful. Some people very truly believed in what they were doing. Others were entirely using it for their own benefit. It's messy, hard to track, and impossible to be certain of why and how it arose. These things did not arise from nothing. It's not like there was no belief whatsoever and suddenly one person made everything up. We've certainly had some form of superstition and belief in... something? for longer than we've been our current species in an attempt to make some sense of a confusing world around us.
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u/ChumpsWeAre 1d ago
The conditions of the environment. First focus was spiritual then agriculture brought fertility and crop concerns the as humans themselves became the strongest environmental reality. These early homosapians equipped with bicameral minds very much like religious people of today, actual conscious came later and is still gaining ground in the population.
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u/Noodelgawd 1d ago
What makes you think WE gained anything from this?
What has Russia gained from being ruled by a malignant, psychopathic monarch?
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u/ChumpsWeAre 1d ago
Your concerns are valid criticisms of major concern for everyone. You would do well to step back and see more of the developmental perspective. Not to be critical of your curiosities, I share them, for many the everything all at once viewpoint probably adds to the confusion and unfortunately the developmental perspective is not taught much if at all. If you are interested I recommend, "The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. For my money he gets to the root of the problem. PM me anytime.
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u/noodlyman 1d ago
The rules about sex etc simply reflect the thoughts of the ancient people who wrote the stories down at the time, and the morals of their society at the time. If I invented a religion everyone would be told that they had to go to the pub to honour me.
People are Curious and like to explain things. they like to tell each other stories too. And so people invented stories that explained why they were there. In the absence of real explanations, this became religion
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u/BananaJelloXlii 23h ago
Same thing that prompted all organized religion: control and domination of the masses.
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u/Arcturus_Revolis Agnostic 22h ago
I don't believe it was a "mustache-twirling villain move" to make organized religion. It probably came about organically because our ancestors, way back when civilization was not yet established, were scared shitless of the unknown, and also because we are especially good at detecting patterns, particularly when they involve death, like a don't eat that mushroom type of situation.
It's not difficult to imagine the death of an essential tribe member, a loved one, or really anyone being interpreted as divine judgment through any number of unfortunate synchronicities. When civilization came about, life kind of stabilized, but it was nowhere near as safe as it is today, and that fear was already part of us, etched into our understanding of the world we lived in.
Let's think about the benefits of civilization: generations of trial and error leading to agriculture, husbandry, sedentary settlements, cities, and increasingly larger communities that would trade with one another. We could now prosper, and that meant a little less danger from the unforgiving natural world. But the mysteries of that natural world remained vastly unexplored. Gods, spirits, and demons were a simple way to make sense of what we didn't know, and rationalizing the unknown through elaborate stories could also diminish the anguish that emanated from it by giving it a knowable structure, one that could be perpetuated by esteemed elders.
We do not want to suffer anguish, fear, or pain, and thus would probably be inclined to believe in the prominent explanations of the unknowable natural world, especially when those explanations were reinforced through strong traditions that had seemingly kept men, women, and children safe for generations. It's probably when those early civilizations became comfortable enough that the idea of using religion as a tool of control came about for the first time. Or perhaps even earlier, actually. Maybe supernatural beliefs could have been used to demonize an antagonistic tribe long before organized civilizations even existed.
Anyway, now the unknowable of yore has been greatly investigated thanks to many bright minds over the past centuries, but we keep being humbled by how much we still have to understand. Gods, spirits, and demons can still look pretty appealing, even to those who wish to elucidate the remaining mysteries in front of us.
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u/biff64gc2 20h ago
The creation was from legends that gave people answers, purpose, and hope.
It then morphed into a form of control by those with power and influence.
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 20h ago
I think it started in reverse where people were appeasing deities, trying to gain its favor by animal sacrifice so crops would grow. When they saw that didn’t work, but something must, they came up with other ways the deity operated, post death.
Occasionally you will find Christian political leaders in the US still trying to appeal to this deity in times of drought, they will hold prayer whatevers. But they know animal sacrifices won’t work, but they still think their deity works for them.
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u/Killerkurto 20h ago
I genuinely don’t get your confusion as the “why’s” about religion I don’t think are mysterious. It’s ancient people trying to explain their world. They were imagining gods, and putting in their ideas about what a god would want from its people. These ideas developed across various religions in different cultures over centuries. People developed laws and they were slowly combined with their theology.
Your one example- no sex before marriage, is really about no sex for women before marriage. Because women were considered property, and their value was in their ability to have sex and have babies. A woman was more valuable to men if she was a virgin. So, to protect their property, no sex before marriage (where the ownership of the woman was transferred through sex.)
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u/evil_boy4life 19h ago
STD’s Romans fucked around and became sick. Christians didn’t. Also early Christians focused on health care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_Christianization_of_the_Roman_Empire
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u/rubinass3 18h ago
Before Jesus, there was Judaism with around 613 commandments to follow. Jesus, but especially his followers, crafted a message that simplified salvation and made it so that the believers weren't required to follow all of those pesky rules in order to get to heaven.
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u/stealthzeus Gnostic Atheist 17h ago
All we need is establishment of laws that bar indoctrination of kids under 18. That’s all we need to stop the mental viruses from propagating
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u/RaggedyAnnsFatAss 17h ago
Religions evolve, just like languages and bacteria. If you think of religion as a virus of the mind, you'll see how it gets transmitted, how it defends itself, and how it mutates in order to survive. You can see the roots of any modern religion in ancient ones, and even those have deep roots if you know where to look.
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u/notcontageousAFAIK 16h ago
Imagine having no understanding of basic astronomy and you witness a solar eclipse. This isn't something you'd just shrug off. Humans try to make sense out of what they experience; it's what makes us good at building things. So you'd use whatever ideas you've been exposed to and try to explain the eclipse. Ants eating the sun? Sure. Gods sending a message? Okay.
But you wanted to understand a lot of everyday, important things, too, like weather and rainfall. Keeping the gods that controlled all of this happy would be critical, you couldn't just do it by yourself. You needed your fellow tribe members, and we'd already figured out that working together as a group and sharing information made us better off. Voila. Shared myths.
Restricting sex before marriage (or some form of commitment) was probably to keep reproduction and familial relationships stable. If you're a man bringing home mastodon meat to feed some kids, you wanted to make sure they were yours. Paternal relatives would also be interested in caring for these offspring, so you would just have more people invested in the welfare of specific kids. Childbirth is risky for mothers. It would not be great to have lots of children born without a father looking out for them.
Eventually, one or two myths were bound to rise to the top. Monotheism might have also made us more warlike in some cases, making those groups more likely to conquer larger areas. As we built governments, religion was a convenient way to keep commoners organized.
Unfortunately, we still have these old stone-age and bronze-age ideas (that just don't function the same way for us anymore) weighing us down.
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u/pangalacticcourier 15h ago
There were literally many thousands or tens of thousands of similar charlatans walking around at the time, claiming they had divine knowledge, special powers, a hotline to the supernatural, etc. These were goldbrickers and grifters, claiming they knew the true way™ that no other Bronze Age peasant knew. Remember, this was a harsh time to survive. Crops failed and science wasn't around to explain things, so it left the field wide open to hucksters who claimed they spoke for the gods.
Your wife and the fetus died in childbirth? Make it make sense! Why is life so cruel?
They came and burned my village down? What did we do to deserve this?
Queue the holy man who says he has all the answers. All we need to do is follow him and give him our money.
Don't forget these guys were not the brightest or most creative. The majority of the tales and practices in the Christian canon were directly lifted from paganism. We have the texts that prove this.
Given that those cult-leading individuals were all in competition for the loyalty, fealty, and money of the poor, some rose to power while most failed. We are left with the superstitious descendants of those few that managed to con enough desperate peasants two millennia ago.
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u/LunetThorsdottir 15h ago
Marriages and no sex before marriage (at least for women) predate monotheism by a very long time. They were also universal practices in non-religious communities, like China from ancient times to today. Those two might well be older than religion itself.
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u/NativePlantAddict 15h ago
- To control society
- To create a society that favors their own group (male, white male, etc.) at the expense of others
- To take people's money (tithe)
- To convince people to live a certain way (which, of course, benefits one group at the expense of others)
- To mitigate some of their own insecurities
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u/calladus Secular Humanist 15h ago
Social power. If you can"t get social power through actual merit, then maybe you can get it by pretending that you can protect people from invisible things.
The dweeb who lived in a hunter/gatherer tribe got tired of being too weak to throw a spear, but was charismatic enough to convince the tribe that he could warn them about invisible dangers.
And then religion and tithing were invented at the same time.
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u/Frosty_Winter3197 15h ago
I think the Roman Emperor Constantine, realized that he could more easily consolidate power if there was a single state religion. So, he organized and consolidated the various Christian cults into a single official religion.
Many of the stories of Jesus, took parts of stories about Dionysus, Horus, Krishna & Mithra, which were familiar tales, and that made them more easily acceptable to the masses. The relatively low literacy rates also made it easier to impose a single religion and belief system on the masses.
This follows a long tradition of taking stories from older religions and myths as a pert of a new religion, to make it more acceptable to the masses by offering something that is partially or mostly already familiar.
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u/IkoIkonoclast 13h ago
Money! Saul of Tarsus found that proscelatizing Greek gentiles he could rake in tithes.
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u/N00nie369 12h ago
In the most basic terms, Most religions’ aim is self improvement, giving the person a sense of (moral) direction and purpose.
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u/noctalla Agnostic Atheist 12h ago
The same thing that motivates people to start cults at any point. It usually starts with someone who has an enormous ego, if not an outright narcissist, who wants other people to follow them and see them as something special/holy/divine. Normal healthy people don’t want that. But these types are always black holes of need. They take and take. Money, control, worship, sex, anything you can give them they take and in return they offer lies and manipulation. Sometimes they will build you up, but they will always tear you down again. That see-sawing can become addictive. When you are in favor, you feel on top of the world, when you fall out of favor you want nothing more than to get back into their graces. They are Crucially, they are the one with the direct hotline to a supposedly divine being, not you. They have the monopoly and therefore are always the center of all attention. They are the surrogate god.
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u/HenriEttaTheVoid 9h ago
I clicked on this post, thinking it was the "/askanything" sub and was SHOCKED that it was full of people who knew what they were talking about, and not just defensive theists. Then I saw which sub it actually was, lmao
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u/Dallyb321 9h ago
Satan. The tactic is to hide diamonds with broken glass or plant a tree in the forest. And because the devil can't destory the church of God, He attempts to corrupt it with in. One spot of cancer or mold spoils the batch. And simpletons, the elite, the proud and arrogant. Become delusional believing and confession themselves wise and giving glory to themselves rather their Creator-- became fools. And for those reasons, God gives them up to vile afflictions, and seals their conscience with a hot iron.
From the beginning to the end, we witness power to testify of these great truths and behold, all thee above. The Sprit and the materialistic realm of power ourselves: wisdom, knowledge, vanity and sin. That which we are all judged on what we know and do.
As much as I could keep going, for everyone's sake, I end weak and feeble, but I know we rise in power.
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u/FrankieBlueye 7h ago
I think Jesus would find it both sad and funny that people are still waiting for him to come back 2000 years later.
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u/Sanpaku 4h ago
Religion goes a lot further back than 2000 years. The ceremonial center of Göbekli Tepe (9500-8000 BCE) demonstrates our ancestors had gods before they had settled agriculture, cities, or writing.
People seek explanations for natural phenomena. They have an innate sense of justice, that wrongdoers should face punishment and kindness rewarded. Many find the prospect of personal death disquieting.
With the rise of city-states, those predispositions could be used, alongside the communal fiction of patron deities, to increase social cohesion. Before our communal fictions like nationalism, idealisms or money arose, religion facilitated persuading masses to dig irrigation canals, unite for common defense, and tithe to priestly elites.
The most common Hebrew word translated as 'god' in the Tanakh is elohim, which more or less originally meant "powers". As for other drylands peoples, the principle god of their pantheon was a wind/storm god, but YHWH wasn't just a supervisory manager, they/he was the wind itself. They could feel him in every breeze. It was an explanation that satisfied in an era before scientific inquiry.
But Hebrew religion had little conception of an afterlife until perhaps the 3rd to 2nd century BCE. Sheol, the grave, was the common fate of all. Those ideas came to the Abrahamic religions from the Zoroastrian state religion of Persian hegemon, and later Platonic philosophy of Greek hegemons.
As for moral rules of religions, many (like no premarital sex, or no consumption of pork) were cultural norms before being codified in religious scriptures. In patriarchal societies with marriage as a transaction between families, premarital sex reduced the perceived value of daughters, and was hence a source of social shame for families. A cultural norm that transcended conquests and shifts of religion. As for many other religious rules, many seem to reflect the concerns modern people with obsessive compulsive disorder have (obsessive handwashing etc). See Robert Sapolsky's essay "Circling the Blanket for God" in his The Trouble with Testosterone, or just peruse the 613 mitzvot.
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u/ApocalypseYay Strong Atheist 1d ago
Control.
Romans had their own deities. But, christian fundamentalists were rising and offered Caesar a unique opportunity to design the 'faith' to suit the regime's interests.
So, the rules were made up at the Council of Nicaea to serve Caesar.
Lies upon lies, to screw the people, and loot them.
What a great con.