Simple thoughts on world religions - part 1 (How may the belief in Spirits and Gods have arisen?

When living your life you cannot help but wonder about people and the way they live their lives.

Through technological developments we now have internet. We can hardly imagine a world without that anymore. Meeting people from other cultures has become very simple and as it is, trying to understand them usually involves a bit of study into their background.

Because religion is such an important part of every community I made an effort trying to understand a number of what we call "world religions". I did so by working through a course offered by the SNU (Spiritualist National Union).

HOW MAY THE BELIEF IN SPIRITS AND GODS HAVE ARISEN?

It is of all times that people have wondered about life in all its forms. All natural phenomena like the sun and the moon, the stars, storms, rain, thunder, lightning, the movement of the earth when there was an earthquake would sure enough make people look for explanations.

The way people were born, fell sick and died (without books to find out what that was all about and why and how things like that happened) would make people realise there had to be a cycle in life, that there should be a meaning in all this. Would it be strange then to wonder if people from the dawn of days even had questions like “who am I, where did all this come from, where is it going to, why is there birth and death?”

Because people were more related to nature than they are now, there would have been signs and omens that could be interpreted by the most experienced (elder) people, the change of seasons for instance, the daily cycle of dawn till night, the meaning and importance of the sun, the moon and the stars. Man should have realised this could not be due to humans and could only be explained by invisible or supernatural powers being present and therefore should be treated with respect and even placated in various ways to avert the evil for which they could be responsible.

That should have been the beginning of mythology. (In the study of folklore, a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form). People could pass on information about the wonders and agonies of daily life through storytelling and surely from day one the stories would have been about nature (probably having a will of its own), gods and heroes, stories in which all questions could be related to something or someone overseeing all this. These stories would have grown through time and deep felt emotions would be embedded in them.

In mythology and folklore of almost all nations there are also accounts of paranormal phenomena, of people who could see, hear or feel spirits of a.o. dead relatives or friends, therefore realising there is life after death.