ABSTRACT
How did religion begin? This question has not been definitively answered and is probably unanswerable because it is put the wrong way. The words religion and begin are misleading here. The discussion in Chapter 1 on the way religion, as we understand it, is a modern concept may have suggested this to you. If you were to visit a tribe of very early humans, and you tried to ask them what their religion was, the chances are they wouldn’t know what you were talking about, because what we think of as the special religious dimension of life was just part of the way they lived. As we will see in Chapter 3, they told stories that were at one and the same time entertaining, imparted practical information, and dealt with questions about the origins of life and death. Before they went out on a hunt, they danced, perhaps acting out the way a primal ancestor hunted, but that was as much getting instructions as religion. If they returned successful, they might dance, feast, and make an offering to the spirit of that primal hunter, but that was just gratitude, not religion in some modern sense. These gestures were at one and the same time prayer, celebration, and passing tribal ways on to the next generation. It was just a part of the process of becoming human. They were ways of learning to think as humans in the universe.
