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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Arcvasti]

Fun fact that few are aware of: the Torah (Bible: Episode 1) never mentions any kind of afterlife whatsoever.

What are the specific circumstances that make a religion start focusing more on the afterlife?  Nowadays it's near impossible to find people who believe in God but no afterlife, to the extent that most people assume that the two are intrinsically intertwined, yet history implies that this was not always the case.

It doesn't explicitly mention one, but there are parts of it that could be read as referring to an afterlife. Job's reward after all of his trials seems pretty in the spirit of an afterlife to me. There's also the one time where Samuel's spirit comes and talks to Saul, which definitely implies the persistence of the soul after death, if not an organized afterlife.

[IndigoFenix]

Fun fact that few are aware of: the Torah (Bible: Episode 1) never mentions any kind of afterlife whatsoever.

What are the specific circumstances that make a religion start focusing more on the afterlife?  Nowadays it's near impossible to find people who believe in God but no afterlife, to the extent that most people assume that the two are intrinsically intertwined, yet history implies that this was not always the case.

It doesn't explicitly mention one, but there are parts of it that could be read as referring to an afterlife. Job's reward after all of his trials seems pretty in the spirit of an afterlife to me. There's also the one time where Samuel's spirit comes and talks to Saul, which definitely implies the persistence of the soul after death, if not an organized afterlife.

That's why I specified the Torah (Five books of Moses).  Samuel comes a few hundred years later (and moreover even that doesn't really suggest any kind of reward or punishment in the afterlife, which is generally the crux of the issue when people talk about the afterlife in relation to religion).

As for Job, that refers to worldly reward (and is a pretty weird book any way you look at it, since it implies that divine justice can be a bit of a screwy and incomprehensible thing).

[Telgin]

Kind of getting a little off topic, but one thing about the story of Job that always bothered me was that Job's family was (mostly) killed off, and God made it better by giving him new kids.  That... doesn't really fix the problem.  Didn't he care about his old kids?

[Arcvasti]

Fun fact that few are aware of: the Torah (Bible: Episode 1) never mentions any kind of afterlife whatsoever.

What are the specific circumstances that make a religion start focusing more on the afterlife?  Nowadays it's near impossible to find people who believe in God but no afterlife, to the extent that most people assume that the two are intrinsically intertwined, yet history implies that this was not always the case.

It doesn't explicitly mention one, but there are parts of it that could be read as referring to an afterlife. Job's reward after all of his trials seems pretty in the spirit of an afterlife to me. There's also the one time where Samuel's spirit comes and talks to Saul, which definitely implies the persistence of the soul after death, if not an organized afterlife.

That's why I specified the Torah (Five books of Moses).  Samuel comes a few hundred years later (and moreover even that doesn't really suggest any kind of reward or punishment in the afterlife, which is generally the crux of the issue when people talk about the afterlife in relation to religion).

As for Job, that refers to worldly reward (and is a pretty weird book any way you look at it, since it implies that divine justice can be a bit of a screwy and incomprehensible thing).

Ah, fair enough. I still think there's an argument to be made that Job's "Persevere through your troubles and God will reward you" deal is really close to the "modern" notion of an afterlife. There's a more tenous argument that Job's reward is a metaphor for an afterlife, but that's more my personal interpretation then how it was likely perceived before the advent ot Christianity.

[TD1]

Apparently English people worship magpies.

Who knew.

[IndigoFenix]

Egyptians worshipped dung beetles.

It's probably harder to find something that wasn't sacred to anyone than to find something that was.

[Descan]

You'd have to get either really specific or really modern. Whether that modernity is discovery or invention.

So like, "this one dog in Talbuk with a gnarly toe" or "angler fish."

[Frumple]

I'unno, you might not be able to get away with anything living, depending on how you look at it. There's some radical pacifist groups that consider basically everything alive to be sacred, iirc, so both talbukian gnarldoggo and angler fish would be included. Might have better luck with inanimate/unliving stuff, maybe.

[Rolan7]

And even then you get into Animism and the exact definition of "sacred".

[RAM]

I have a theory that the religion most likely to be accurate is the one with the most numerous independent inceptions. I suspect that this is "a bunch of talking animals(especially if you include animal-human hybrids) being terrible to each other". I am now wondering if only sadistic furries go to heaven. This seem rather at odds with modern sensibilities, but I am yet to locate the flaw in my logic.

[Egan_BW]

Wouldn't it be more common for people to independently come up with no religion in particular?~

[KittyTac]

I suppose that the earliest humans were irreligious.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[redwallzyl]

I suppose that the earliest humans were irreligious.

as far as we know they were shamanistic.

[KittyTac]

I suppose that the earliest humans were irreligious.

as far as we know they were shamanistic.

I meant the very earliest humans. Before any real culture formed.