Why do most if not all divine religions ( Not counting buddhism ) have the same major points. God creator even if he isn't the main god. Flood. The underworld. Souls.

5 days ago by Sev to c/religion

The only exceptions are the religions following a divine person or a way of living.

Christianity and it's many forms has a disagreemend if we live in hell and if god is actually the devil. Generally they agree on the events resaulting to the creation of the bibble and every couple houndread years a sub section agrees that we actually live in hell and god is actually satan.

Muslims Say the Bibble is correct but this guy muhamed is also divine. They are also divided on a lot of things but I am not well informed.

Asian Slavic Norse and Sauth american religions are very interesting because A) They do have a god creator and a devil of sorts. B) They share major events in the bibble mainly the flood.

Island religions They are very intersting cause they also share characteristics even if they were Isolated. The thing they vary in is their gods are much more twisted version of the ones above.

The only religion that altough is unique still has similar characteristics is Hinduism. And Hinduism still has major religius schisms and I think almost all the major gods are evil in a way.

Personally I thing Christianity is the most boring and administrative one focusing on a book and a god worshiping your lorde and paying taxes compared to the whole thing that is ancient religions and paganism.

elevenbones 3 points 5 days ago

Okey dokey 👍

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sylver_dragon 2 points 5 days ago

People create gods and myths based on their experiences. Throughout human history (and pre-history, but I'm just going to use the catch-all term "history"), many of those experiences were very similar through out the world. Floods, for example, have been a common occurrence in history. Given the close attachment humans have had with river valleys, and coastal areas, it is incredibly likely that most civilizations have experienced catastrophic floods sometime in their existence. Those events will get passed on via verbal and eventually written transmission, likely growing and gaining supernatural attribution along the way. What might have been a localized catastrophe eventually gets spun into the gods seeking to wipe out all humanity.

Other myths follow similar trajectories, humans have experiences and build stories around them. Lightning was an incredible, often destructive force to ancient humans, which defied explanation. So humans built stories around it and we got various deities causing or wielding lightning. Of course, unconnected communities of humans would have come up with different stories, but all of them are starting from the same question, "what is lightning?". So, it's not surprising that their myths have similar themes even before we start considering the cross-pollination of myths between different areas of the world as trade networks grew.

And it's important to remember that the ancient world was connected by trade and war. Cultures interacted and subsumed one another over the course of millennia. And much of that occurred among per-literate societies. While they may have had a strong emphasis on oral traditions, mistakes and intentional changes have a way of creeping into stories over time. A thousand year long game of telephone is going to changes things. Re-tellings of stories may have picked up something from a nearby tribe, or as one tribe was militarily dominated by another, details may have shifted to deal with that domination. Traders bringing back stories from far flung lands may have been misremembered but still incorporated into the local myths.

As an example of this, look at the Isis cults of the Roman Empire. Romans got fascinated with the Egyptian deity and founded temples to her in places as far away from Egypt as Germany. With the Isis of the Roman cults being quite divergent from the Isis of earlier Egyptian myths. Were those cults still active today, they might have picked up Jewish or Christian influences as the Roman Empire adopted Christian mythology.

In short, humans are the same all over and have been having similar experiences everywhere. Some places have special circumstances and their myths may account for these things, but the broad strokes are going to cover a lot of the same terrain. Questions like "why are we here", "what happens when we die", "why did the river just eat everything" and "WTF was that bright flash and loud boom". The stories for these things are going to end up in the same ballpark. And once you account for information moving about, it would be strange if they didn't seem similar.

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FiniteBanjo 2 points 5 days ago

Plagiarism.

Sometimes not even subtle, somewhere is an old depiction of the abrahamic god's chariot being pulled by enslave deities of other religions, in reference to a verse in Deuteronomy "with myriads of holy ones from the south" but I can't even find it in the ocean of slop that is the internet, right now. Sometimes similar depictions popped up in Ezekiel's vision in place of the ophanim. I believe Isaiah's vision included a court ruled over by god which resembles the egyptian and roman pantheons that predate it.

At least two but likely more well known outer deities are depicted as devils in abrahamics: Astaroth and Pan.

This isn't a new phenomenon, either: the chief deity of the Greek pantheon ruled over the chief deity of older religions like Dionysus.

A better question is why humans keep worshipping floods, earthquakes, and eternal tormenters? The answer is fear.

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