The Evolution of Faith-Based Belief Systems

     The original title for this post was ‘The Evolution of Religion’ but religion is sometimes a poorly defined entity. An acceptable definition perhaps would be: Religion is a collection of cultural and belief systems with symbols that relate humanity to spirituality. The usage of the word ‘collection’ is probably key in that to be a religion, the religious ‘system’ must be organized,recognized and followed by a significantly large group, generally with rules that oblige members to adhere to that particular dogma.

     A religion will often provide moral guidance but what is most important, a religion provides a structure to build a ‘larger’ tribe, one that is bigger than a simple family group and, sometimes, as large as a nation. Different schools of thought argue that religion developed by natural selection of (ex building a larger tribe) or is simply a by-product of psychological mechanisms that developed for other,unrelated reasons.

     Religion falls under the umbrella of a ‘faith-based’ belief system and so, the title of this post is that: The Evolution of Faith-Based Belief Systems. This is a topic that is expansive, difficult to simplify and controversial. The schema below relates to religions in the western world (primarily derived from Sumeria/Mesopotamia,Egypt and thee Middle East. Asian/Eastern religions (once the category of ‘religion’ has been reached) do not necessarily have the same evolutionary development as often these ‘eastern religions’ were (and still are) to a large extent collections of philosophical thought and guidance.

Animal Spirit

Mother Goddess

‘prehistoric religions’

animal/spirit worship   ‘goddess’(mother earth) worship   sun/moon worship

present-day religions

Judaism   Zoroastrianism

     Christianity is perhaps the best example of religious evolution in our time. Today’s ‘Christianity’ is really a mixture of several variants of the same dogma but examining this allows us to see how and how quickly faith-based belief systems can evolve.

This is my attempt:

Judaism at the time of Christ (a ‘dissident’ Jewish event)

Judaism continues to evolve

                        Early Christianities (II)

                              *Ebionites (Jewish Christians)

                              *Marcionites (2 ‘gods’: Hebrew God-bad; Christian God-good)

Writing of the New Testament (3^rd century AD)

Council of Nicea (319 AD) – the establishment of ‘orthodoxy’

Reformation: Martin Luther (1517),  Calvinism, others

Separate Protestant Churches established

(Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, etc)

Orthodoxy consolidated in areas of influence

Variants of Roman Catholicism in much of Americas, Africa                                                                

Ouroboros and Solomon’s Seal

Ouroboros Tree

     Everything will probably look very different than it does now. It could be a cycle that never stops and re-creates itself like the Ouroboros  (see post: The Serpent).

It will probably go something like this:

     Christianity is perhaps the best example of religious evolution in our time. Today’s ‘Christianity’ is really a mixture of several variants of the same dogma but examining this allows us to see how and how quickly faith-based belief systems can evolve.

This is my attempt:

Early religion R (a ‘dissident’  religion X event)

Variants of early religion R (II)

The Establishment of ‘Orthodoxy’

‘heresies’ destroyed-Orthodoxy established as ‘truth’

Independent ‘Church’ 1   Independent ‘Church’ 2

continued search for heresies

Independent ‘Church’ 1 Orthodoxy consolidated in areas of influence

 Reformation

‘Off-the-Wall’ variants