According to Zweemer, author of The Origins of Religion, the oldest traditions were of one supreme God and other beliefs came later.
Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place. For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life.
The oldest known representations are the aboriginal cave paintings of Australia, supposed to be around 50,000 years old (which seems weird to me, since I thought the aboriginals of Australia were only 40,000 years old); however, the origin of all religious thought (e.g. in native Americans African aborigines, etc) point to the presence of a "head honcho" who supervises the other "gods".
May I remind you, you were talking about gods and fundamentalists...I had something to add to the conversation along those lines.
I was indeed talking about "gods" but not from a doctrinal point of view. Please add your views relevant to the topic only. Theological threads are a few floors down if you decide to fully engage in them!
Is that so...were you just making up your information concerning 'gods' on the fly...shooting from the hip so to speak?
Here is some more information, but I haven't checked it for accuracy: http://www.custance.org/old/evol/2ch1/2ch1.html
Well as for "Wilhelm Schmidt" he was an ordained roman catholic priest at the time. So fitting facts to support monotheism would be quite a religious duty to self assure others including himself. The primitve monotheism theory is quite interesting but remember there are civilizations like harappa and moinjodaro that predate sumerian civilization by at least 10000 years.
Hmm sure, could you tell us anything about the religions of the Harappans?Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Harappans probably exercised some sort of goddess worship. There is, however, some sort of male god (maybe) that has the head of a man with the horns of a bull. In addition, we believe from various artifacts that the Harappans also may have worshipped natural objects or animistic forces, but the circumstances of this worship can only be guessed at. Harappans were eventually supplanted by waves of migrations of Indo-Europeans. These new peoples, however, did not seem to adopt the religious practices of the Harappans, so it is not possible to reconstruct Harappan religion through the religion of the Vedic peoples, that is, the Indo-Europeans who constructed the rudimentary Indian religion represented by the Vedas. Harappan writing was a pictographic script, or at least seems to be; as of yet, however, no one has figured out how to decipher it or even what language it might be rendering. The logical candidate is that the Harappans spoke a Dravidian language, but that conclusion, which may not be true, has not helped anybody decipher the script. Like the rest of Harappan civilization, the writing was lost to human memory after the disappearance of the Harappans.
Actually, the Sumerians were not a Semitic people although their language took on some Semitic influences from the Akkadian people (who were). See http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Sumerian language The religion of the region may also have had some Akkadian/Semitic influences but the basic belief system and dieties pre-dated those influences.
