To continue documenting my thoughts on the origins of religion, what happens when a relatively established cultural group, with their own ideas of how everything works, what is possible, not possible, etc. is visited by outsiders that have some technological superiority?

This is the idea of extraterrestrial contact, but in this context, the visitors don't have to be extraterrestrial - just technologically advanced. We have many examples of this happening, and each marked a shift in technological progress. How did the bronze age become the iron age?

Some great fiction that does a wonderful job explaining technological progress is the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I'm not going to develop this idea of technological shifts too much further, but when an outsider shows how the impossible is not only possible, but readily achievable, it makes a culture rethink its beliefs.

When a culture only knows their plant, or continent, or region - and believes themselves to be alone there, maybe even superior there, and a visitor from an unknown origin shows up, with vastly improved technology, including the ability to travel to that region, it is a big deal. "We are not alone."

For us humans now, with dominion over much of the planet, that visitor would likely need to from another planet, dimension, or time. For someone living in a nomadic hunting tribe with no knowledge of the world outside their region, or beyond their seas, that visitor could just as easily be from a different continent.

But I think those visitors came from much further away, and had to have come from beyond the skies. Most religious traditions observe deities that come from (or live in) the heavens. There are plenty of sun gods, for example. Star worship, building to reach into the sky to either signal or communicate with gods - all of this points to extraterrestrial visitation. It is just too prevalent to have come from elsewhere.

We do have some religions that worship nature, or a "mother earth", and I think this would be the default state of faith, pre-visitation.

I also find it curious that several of the oldest religions seems to have got their start or really taken off around 1500 BCE. Most newer religions were just split off of the older religions. Judaism, Christianity, and then Islam, for example. There was something that caused a drastic shift in faith around 1500 BCE though, followed by a lot changes in faiths and social structures.

Was this shift just a technological breakthrough, or the result of a visitation? We can look a lot more recently, and see a lot of accounts of ET phenomena in the mid 20th century CE, and here we are, living through a technological avalanche of activity, which has brought us modern computing and communication, and which may now be bringing us a radically different money. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that Satoshi Nakamoto may be ET. Whether or not is not the point, though, just part of the observation that a shift is happening, and it is causing societal structures and religious faith to be re-imagined.