While believing in an intended creation, realizing the advantage of rituals, and relating to the personal semiosphere (i.e. soul) should be scientifically possibility attitudes to hold, religion is a totally different thing. Religion is a social construction, each religion in its own culture. The regular cultural activity holds for religions as well: it is a realization that things happen in a certain way, conceptualizing it in the brain, putting it into words, and then even putting it in writing or making a ‘law’ out of it, i.e. asserting that ‘this is how things should be done’.
For example, when people realize how advantaging is realizing that a new moon has come up in the sky, because it is emotionally enjoyable to realize that there will be more and more light at night now, because it is good to pay attention to this for the segmenting time, or for any other reason, they make a law of it that the new moon should be celebrated whenever it comes up, everyone should join the celebration, that means everyone, even those who are not up to it at the moment, or those who are busy doing something else really important. As long as there are enough people in the culture that know and support this tradition, it stays, and it is forced on as many individuals as possible, and it is kept. Once conditions change significantly - because of a war, reorganization because a new elite enforces its narrative, or various other reasons - a tradition might fade away, be forgotten, be replaced by a newer version, or forced out. Merlin Donald, in his book ‘Origins of the Modern Mind’, calls this cultural product Exogram.
This is true for an oral culture. It is more difficult for cultures that put their ideas in writing, and still more difficult in those cultures who invented the idea of not only putting their culture into writing, but also claiming godly authority to the writing, in the form of law, or even more - by claiming eternal godly origin to what is written.
This is true for an oral culture. It is more difficult for cultures that put their ideas in writing, and still more difficult in those cultures who invented the idea of not only putting their culture into writing, but also claiming godly authority to the writing, in the form of law, or even more - by claiming eternal godly origin to what is written.
To be able to claim that a certain document has a godly descent takes a complex social system in which there are elements that are responsible to mediating between the god and the people, and a strong social centralized ruling element that can transfer it into costly writing, and enforce, to some extent, following the written story. But one other result of the claim of a godly origin of a text (i.e. creating a ‘holy text’ in the culture) is that it is impossible to alter. This is true in cultures where god is a supreme omniscient eternal being, whose will and laws never change.
Our modern world religions all ‘suffer’ from this phenomenon - being stuck with a text that is holy and unchangeable, and on the other hand is very old and in many cases irrelevant, not to say explicitly wrong.
