Every Religion is Related? How One Form of Religion Stems to All Forms
Usually when we think of god, we think of one god. This form of religion is monotheism.
Not all religions are monotheism. It is a coincidence that the most common religious systems are monotheism. This is why in the perception of many people there is only one God.
There are religions that have multiple deities, there are religions that think every matter has a god in it, there are religions that claim humans can train themselves to deities.
Their difference is too gigantic that it seems like these religion types are totally unrelated, but it is not.
There are theories of how one form of religion evolved from another form. And after understanding the human progress in religion development, it looks like all forms of religion arose out of one form.
We arrange all origin into a story. See the step-by-step of how every religion type begins. From believing everything is a god, to denying any existence of god.
This is Antlerium PotatoNews, a series focusing on the daily lives of ordinary people, including cultural customs. Today we explore religion: different forms of religion and their precedence relations.
Origins of religion
We humans have a inborn worldview: every event should happen with a reason. In prehistoric times, humans do not have sufficient knowledge to comprehend most phenomena, so we supposed everything has supernatural power.
And when you think everything has supernatural power, then everything is a deity. This is a type of religion known as animism.
Animism
Under animism, everything is spiritual, is a deity. It is like treating everything as a god. A stone is a god, a tree is a god, an animal is a god etc.
But we humans have the ability to manipulate our environment, and we have the ability to create, store, and spread knowledge.
Gradually, we know more and more about the cause and effect of events, and we start to delete the non-scientific explanation, deleting gods object after object.
After deleting the idea that god is in everything, only a few gods remain. At this point, the religion has developed into polytheism.
Polytheism
In the worldview of polytheism, there is a collection of deities with their own duties, working together to help the world function.
Today, most religions are polytheistic. Greek mythology, Indian mythology, Chinese folk religion, and other smaller but historical religions. We can't count how many polytheistic religions the world has right now.
Comparing with animism, gods in polytheism are more prestigious, more popular than ever before. Not all humans deserved to communicate with them. Therefore, shamans appear.
Shamanism
Why we want to speak to the god?
The answer is simple. We believe gods can change the world, so we want to order them to do what we want.
Shaman is a figure that helps the community to communicate with gods. If a religion still needs shaman, that religion is shamanism.
Shamans summon god through rituals, commonly dancing.
To convince the gods to do the things we want, we have to conduct more rituals (e.g. sacrifice) to show our loyalty.
Now, shamanism is still quite common in mobile regions.
As time went on, we want the gods to be relatable, we need to enhance their relatability, so we give them a human form and a backstory.
Personified deities
Personified deity is usually the meaning of the word “god“. God appears with a human form, but more powerful, perhaps have special abilities like flying, summon lightning.
Since people found them more relatable than the ancient formless gods, these personified gods grew in popularity to become what people tend to worship.
While formless gods ultimately disappeared, they left a trail to the culture.
A lot of mythologies have the story of mainstream personified gods overthrowing their ancestral deities to dominate the god world.
In Greek mythology, gods are originated in a race called Titans, and the older Titans were destroyed by the younger generations of Olympians in an event called “Titanomachy”, War of the Titans.
After gods are personified, they can be drawn, they can be built into statues. These help the promotion of religion even more.
With the progress of human society, class society formed. And we decided to give the gods hierarchy too. A social structure for god was thus created.
Hierarchy of Gods
In different civilizations, their traditional polytheistic religions have hierarchy. The positions of gods are clear, some gods are better than others.
In all mainstream folk religions, there is only one god stands at the top of the hierarchy.
In Greek mythology, it is Zeus.
In Roman mythology, it is Jupiter.
In Nordic mythology, it is Odin.
In Egyptian mythology, it is Ra.
In Chinese mythology (Taoism), it is the Jade Emperor.
In some cases. all the gods are arranged into one family tree. For example, in Greek mythology, all smaller gods are descended from Zeus.
Gradually, the minor gods became irrelevant, only the leading god remains. At this stage, we are getting close to one-god religion, monotheism.
Monotheism
While other smaller deities disappear one by one, the leading god get rebranded with more and more power.
Ultimately, only one all-powerful god exist in the religion. This is "monotheism", the "mono" in the word means one.
All Abrahamic religions are monotheism.
Technically the Chinese folk religion also has a monotheistic version that begins thousands of years ago - Tian (天), also known as "heaven". Emperor is chosen by heaven, hence comes the term "mandate of heaven", and he earns the name "son of heaven" (天子).
In China, the concept of emperor chosen by god began in Zhou dynasty. Starting from that dynasty, the rulers of China have the title "son of heaven".
But I cannot provide you pictures of Tian. In fact, no one can.
Since monotheism usually come with one phenomenon - incorporeality.
Incorporeality
Once again, god is formless. No one can know the actual form of the monotheistic god.
If the god is personified, it is not that all-powerful. Switching back to formlessness gives the god the greatest prestige.
If the god is formless, unobservable, isn't it possible that he is monitoring you?
If the god is formless, is it possible that he is bigger than the universe?
With the fearful feeling from this incorporeality, people will show respect to the god, fear the punishment sent from god.
Now that is what we call all-powerful.
In Abrahamic religions, you will never know what god looks like.
You can't draw Jehovah or Allah (technically they are the same god).
If a religion is monotheism, usually the god is formless.
Inner god
On the other hand, animism may evolve into thinking that "we have a god inside us".
When our knowledge increase, we delete the idea that god is in everything. But when humans get more and more powerful, the idea that "we have a god inside us" is not dead, it is reinforced.
At the end of the day, we need a reason to explain why we humans are highly intelligent.
If there is a god live inside us, there must be a way to awake it.
If you can unlock the inner god, you will evolve into an entity that surpasses ordinary people.
In Buddhism, you can evolve into Buddha; in Taoism, you can evolve into Xian(仙).
Atheism
As human civilization advances, more and more knowledge are founded.
Looking back to the beginning, our ancestors do not have sufficient knowledge to explain how the world works, they use gods to explain. Now, we have science, more and more questions about the world are answered, and things become explainable.
We started to question if there is a god at all. We started to become secular, become non-believers. And atheists started to appear.
Atheism is the denial of any kind of god.
All types are connected
From believing everything is a god, to denying any existence of god, we can create a story to link it all.
All religion types evolved from one another, and animism started it all.
Knowing that all religions have the same origin, you should respect people with different religions.
And of course, don't try to force your religion on others.
This is the story of how one form of religion stems to all forms. To learn more about social customs or other topics related to our ordinary life, make sure to follow PotatoNews. We will also post some cliffsnotes on our socials, make sure to follow them.
If you want to know why people remain religious up till now, check another article we wrote.