@neologist,
neologist wrote:
korkamann wrote: . . . My question to you, what about all the millions of years of man's existence before the concept of the one-god came into being or before mankind even thought of an entity be it trees, animals or the one god? . . .
Flippant neo answer: "I wasn't there."
Seriously:
What befuddles me about this is how written language developed so suddenly. And, collaterally, how so many religious practices and beliefs have common origins and developed concurrently. When we explore that, we may get a better understanding of the truth.
I don't think the written language developed so slowly. There was the Egyptian hieroglyphs initially. The Rosetta Stone was the key to understanding the meaning of hieroglyphs. The earliest writing can be traced to Sumer, in Mesopotamia. This system did not use an alphabet, instead it used pictographs which are symbols representing familiar objects. This type of writing was called cuneiform, or wedge-shaped writing. Egyptians used hieroglyphics, also a pictograph system.
The use of an alphabet probably originated among the Phoenicians sometime between 1700 and 1500 BC. This Semitic writing had only consonants; the ancient Greeks later came up with the idea of vowels. The Chinese writing system, also very ancient, maintained its pictograph character instead of developing an alphabet.
"The history and prehistory of writing are as long as the history of civilization itself. Indeed the development of communication by writing was a basic step in the advance of civilization.
"Yet writing is little more than 5,000 years old. The oldest writings that have come down to the present day are inscriptions on clay tablets made by the Sumerians in about 3100 BC. The Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Egyptians in the Nile River valley developed writing about 100 to 200 years later.
"Writing is sometimes spoken of as humankind's greatest invention. It was developed by many people, in many places, and over a long period of time. The identity of the individuals responsible for the major steps in the development of writing is not known. Their names, like those of the inventors of the wheel, are lost forever in the dimness of the past."
http://history-world.org/writing.htm
The average man in the street during the earliest periods of writing were illiterate with ministers, Rabbis etc the educated ones. During the time of Jesus ordinary people were not educated. There were religious prophets all over the place preaching the word of God. It is speculated Jesus was also a prophet. No disciples writing in the New Testament lived during the time of Jesus and the story of Jesus' sojourn during his short life has many contradictions.
The need for a protector is something that exist in all men, and this is where gods come into place. We know how the "Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), all of which trace their origins to this misty figure, and which together claim half the world’s population." We know a Pharaoh named Akhenaten was the originator of Monotheism, and when the Jews were freed from Egypt they took the Monotheism concept with them, with other Egyptians returning to polytheism. Human groups migrated carrying some parts of the culture with them, especially the need to worship a god.
Later....
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