Ok, this may get long, (and that's saying something coming from me. I may break it into a few chunks. But I wanted to write something on my theories surrounding the origin of religions.

At first, we were nomadic small groups, providing for the group by tracking and killing animals. When the game was plentiful, we would hunt it there, until it was no longer plentiful - either because we exhausted the supply, or the animals chose to move away from us.

During this time, there was much we didn't know. We may have had a notion that thrre was something unexplained that controlled aspects of our environments - weather, sun, moon, etc. We may have done things that we hoped would help our chances of a good hunt, improve our shelter conditions. And we may have even had some superstitions around death. Most of these traditions would have been passed on orally, whether through song, or just listening and learning from others in the tribe, particularly the elders.

Here's where my theories start to diverge. I'm going with my older theory first.

At some point, a tribe was in a place long enough to begin to observe and learn some basic agriculture, like how to pick and eat from the same plants year after year, and how to transplant them, and how seeds work to grow more of them. Plants can fill you up kind of like meat, but with some interesting side effects. But tending to plants means that you must stay where your plants are growing, and not move with the meat. Well, whomever felt strongly about this needed a way to keep most of the rest of the tribe from wanting to move on. They also needed their tribe mates to work in the fields, rather then spending their days hunting.

It was likely more popular among the elders, who were physically tired of moving, and didn't have the caloric burn of movement in hunting to require the fats and proteins that hunters did, so they would be more than happy to sit around and subside on plants.

But they also needed more young active people to do the hard work associated with agriculture. How to do this?

Well, they already had some beliefs and superstitions, so one (or more) of them needed to twist these beliefs into a threat and a promise. The threat needed to be something along the lines of "if you don't do as we say, it will not go well for you." And the promise would be "as long as you do as we say, life will be better." It was pretty simple to use that unexplained notion of something else in control to appeal to, citing knowledge of how that something else works, and claiming to have some kind of direct link or influence over it.

But what about when things went wrong? Blight, drought, fire, poor crop production, flooding? Inevitably, the leaders of the agriculture change would have some explaining to do, as to why their promise was broken.

Time to pivot. Blame some bad forces, or blame some people who were not falling into line. Blame disbelievers, outsiders, whomever. Maybe even kill some of them to appease the forces of nature and get the plants growing again.

Note here that agriculture both requires and allows larger groups to form - what may have been a hunting family of 10-20 people was now growing into a community of 100 or more people, which required a lot more plants to sustain, and more people to care for and process those plants.

So the community leaders (also the ones appealing to spirituality for purposes of control over the larger community) would far more people to choose from for punishment, and could probably find someone to blame and punish that was not also their immediate family.

This is where the sickness of power takes over. What happens when punishing (even killing) some people doesn't make crops better? Well, being in control is nice, and what is the ultimate way to demonstrate that control? Demand (and execute) measures of sacrifice. Make sure the leaders are getting fed, demanding a portion of the plants (and animals still being hunted, but now also being domesticated) be given to the leaders so the leaders will be motivated to continue asking the forces of nature for positive outcomes.

It gets worse - demand children be sacrificed, or given to the leaders as aides and assistants. Or things will definitely go poorly. Obey!

(And this devolves into various perversions of child abuse, sexual abuse, paedophilia, whatever depraved act a ruling class might care to engage in)

But adults are still needed to do the labor, and do it they will... especially if their child's life may depend on it.

Here is where I will remind you, history is written (and passed down orally) by the winners, those alive to retell it - so they wouldn't care to disparage their own practices. Any religion that survives today surely has some dark history, same as any nation surviving today.

I can dig a lot deeper into what this does to the mindset of people, controlling them through fear, incentivizing them with promises that could not be always delivered, but when not, putting the blame back on the people themselves, so in addition to fear, there was also self doubt. I think I'll stop here though, on that thread anyway.

I mentioned a divergence. Well instead of all the agricultural stuff that would likely have taken centuries to go from settling in a fertile spot to enslavement and child sacrifice....

What if a charismatic sort just took all the elder's wisdom, got really weird and started freaking out a bit - and claimed to have communed with the forces of nature one-on-one? The rest of the tribe sees he's acting weird, and he claims to have some kind of divine knowledge - well, now if he gains the trust of the tribe (or already had it) we have a prophet - or a seer. I tend to think of prophets as younger charismatic males, and seers as older, well-established females, but there is no need to assume gender or age with these terms.

Does it take a wholly different path? Not necessarily, establishing a cult, creating a leadership, ruling a region, demanding sacrifices when things go poorly, it can all go the same way

One thing the charismatic leader can more easily do is convince his followers that his god is the best of all other gods, or even the only god, and all the others are fakes and weaklings. And if things happen as he says for a while, then people might get in line with that message. Besides, people are probably tired and fed up with trying to appease all the different forces or deities, so having just one simplifies things for everyone. This may be why sun god cults pop up everywhere, especially nearer the equator.

These divergent theories can both go together, as the move to agriculture would open doors to both, and a stagnant leadership can fail in the face of a charismatic leader with a new idea

Any of this sounding familiar?

But what happens to all of the above when alien intervention in thrown in? The intervention doesn't even have to be alien, really any meeting of two civilizations where technology is more developed in one than the other.

Seems like magic (or god-stuff) when unexplainable things are being done - making the people performing these unexplainable acts a little god-like themselves...

Again, sounding familiar?

But I will stop here, I will definitely write more about the religious and cultural impacts of alien intervention another time.

Until then, buenas noches - GN.