Very well put, Boss . . . i tend to think of religion as the product of shamanism attempting to explain the contemporarily unexplainable. Whether venal and calculating, or honest and compassionate, the shaman will eventually assume the dignity of priest.
to be fair Set (chow Bella); a degree of 'spiritual' ness can arise from an honest desire to 'understand' the 'whole'; but if followed by serious inquiry, moves into more meaningful areas of research.
Undoubtedly, Bo, and for the first 40,000 years or so of human history, observation of the cosmos entailed looking about oneself, and up into the sky, and applying what degree of intelligent analysis the observer is capable of the the observations--an nothing more. Shamans likely get to be shamans because they are more articulate and plausible than their contemporaries. Which is not a basis to assume that they would be any less prone to look for their main chance in such a plausible statement, and set up a deity or two, in need of daily services, in order to assure the security of their (the shaman or shamans) job security. Absent any other empirical method, anyone wishing to challenge the world according to Shaman will have to rely solely on counter claim. The challenger had better be damned charismatic and successfully aggressive, because they will have p*ssed in the tribe's collective Wheaties.
Society as a whole is still in the developmental stages of empirical thought, which itself can be "spiritual" in that it shares one of the goals of religion -- giving definition to all that surrounds us. The epiphanies and eurekas of scientific thought could provide a "spiritual" feeling much like religion, perhaps?
I think that it will take quite some time for our world to move away from religion completely, if that ever happens. We still have the primordal need to band together against some common enemy, and religion provides that commonality better than science does, for most groups. Perhaps it is because the shamen are more charismatic than the scientific leaders are, or maybe it's a result of our own impatience. It takes no time at all to explain life with religion, but we have many years ahead of us to get the kind of empirical evidence that people want to explain our surroundings.
Im a believer that, with the dawn of "planning" , there was consciousness. Toolmaking and the evolution of stone tools to more complex forms, common over 100K years ago, to my way of thinking , implied that the maker had a sense of consequences of their craft. it(the hand tool) became better at doing its job, therefore indicating memory and learning and consciousness of its fashioner. Homo habilis fashioned hand tools, as did H ergaster, yet these tools never improved over half a million years .
Attaching a point to a pole implies planning and a sense of recognizing a consequence of the
craft
