The purpose of this research is to examine religions of the world from the ancient period to the present day. The research will set forth the archeological, anthropological, and historical context out of which the origins of religion emerged and then discuss what religions have in common and how they differ as regards the issues they address and the human needs they satisfy. In the first part of the research, primitive religions and the religions of the earliest civilizations will be discussed, as well as the religions of India and China. In the second part, the rise of the monotheistic religions from polytheistic roots, as well as the contemporaneous religions of China and Japan, will be addressed. The discussion will conclude with an assessment of the role of religion in human experience and ways in which, in the modern period, it appears to have both remained constant with and deviated from its earliest development.
The term primal religion, as Nielsen, et al. explain (21), is at once quite common to the discourse of prehistoric and preliterate societies and misleading in the fact that it is by and large a Western designation for non-Western (especially non-Christian) modes of worship that were encountered by missionaries and explorers from the 16th century onward and that were taken to be undeveloped versions of the idea of the sacred that evolved into the religions typical of the structured and literate culture of Europe. It is arguable that modern monotheistic religious belief and practice have identifiable antecedents in remote antiquity. Frazer's elaboration of commonalities between agricultural rites of vastly different cultures is one index of this. According to the sociologist Max Weber, the difference between primitive and historic-era religious traditions is the difference between magical and rational explanations of human experience of the universe (Gerth and Mills 51). Even in the modern period, attachments to nonrati...