How do you picture God belief beginning?

Question

Not for you, individually, but for early man...

Answer 1

Light and darkness - sun and moon patterns had to be first. Prayers that the sun would come up!! The Sun (and moon) were made "gods".

Then, that morphed into individual gods for "seasons" - hoping and praying that winter would leave and spring would come.

Answer 2

I think early man found life so tough that he/she had to invent a god just to cope and now we have different gods for different religions. I keep hoping that there is something that cares for us but religion has not answered the call for me. This much is undeniable: We are born, We live for a while through pleasure and pain and then we die and rot in the ground or are burnt to ash.

Answer 3

Used to explain things before the real explanation was found. Probably began as a type of polytheism (one god that makes the sun rise, one that lights up the moon etc etc).
As science advanced, the need for godlike explanations grew less and less. Eventually monotheistic religions like Zoroastrianism and Judaism sprung up and reduced god to the "he's there but he can't be detected" type we see today.

Answer 4

There's two questions here - how did belief in "God" start, and why is it different for different people?

Religions came about as a way to explain the world, how people fit into it, how to survive in it, why there is death, what happens after we die, etc.

And those circumstances were different for different peoples.

If you lived in an environment that allowed for very little wiggle room for survival, then your idea of God would be different than the idea of God that the people living in a very temperate climate that had lots of uncultivated food available.

And then there is the poetic imagination of the people themselves, which is very different from culture to culture.

Most Gods started out as Gods of place - the spirits of the local water supply, the weather of the region, the local flora and fauna, etc, and those also were quite different from place to place. These were syncretized into Gods of certain people - tribal or societal Gods.

Now , the poetic imagination of various peoples (also different from place to place and culture to culture), results in different kinds of heros and villains, and different tests they do through, so you have different teaching stories. The "moral of the story" will be very different in different environments..

Last, add a bit of the rules to live by (which will largely be determined by the environment), shake well, and viola! you have a religion!

So it's actually quite logical that there would be different Gods for different peoples, and very different types of religions.

Answer 5

Historically, I think religion began with ceremonial burial. As soon as the ancestors of man did not longer ignore the death of one of their number and tried to protect his corpse from wild animals by burying or otherwise covering it, they must have had a more or less vague idea of an afterlife. Adding gifts to the grave makes it obvious. Contemplating death, and fearing it, might have led to the first ideas of a superior power whatsoever.

Answer 6

In "Why God Won't Go Away," Andrew Newberg has a very interesting speculation. I would recommend it highly.

Answer 7

a man wanted to become tribe leader so he came up with a god and said that god told them to do thing but he was realey god and he got control of the tribe

Answer 8

It's the same now as it ever was. Man finds he doesn't know something, seeks to fill the gap in his knowledge, and fills it with whatever makes him most comfortable.

Not all of us, of course. Some of us are uneasy with the idea of believing the comfortable and seek to expand our minds and learn the truth.

Answer 9

God created Adam and Eve and they knew Him, He walked in the garden with them. God walks among us, and speaks to us. He dwells outside of the universe, but walks in an unseen cloud. He has spoken to people in the Bible and to saints, and to ordinary people. For early man it was no different than now, it takes silence and faith. Elijah said that he looked for God in thunder and in rain, he looked for God in mountains and in rivers, but he found God instead in the still small voice in his heart,and he answered him: here I am Lord.

Answer 10

Some guy thought the Sun was pretty important.