How does religion spread

Her comments are worth quoting at length:. When the chimpanzees approach, they hear this roaring sound, and you see their hair stands a little on end and then they move a bit quicker. Goodall has observed a similar phenomenon happen during a heavy rain. These observations have led her to conclude that chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are. This view fits with various theories in developmental science, showing that playful activities are often crucial for developing important abilities like theory of mind and counterfactual thinking.

Play also occurs in bouts: it has a clear beginning and ending. Play involves a sense of justice, or at least equanimity: big animals need to self-handicap in order to not hurt smaller animals.

And it might go without saying, but play is embodied. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men take part in the Tashlich ritual, during which sins are cast into the water to the fish Credit: Getty.

Now compare that to ritual, which is enacted, which is embodied. Rituals begin and end. They require both shared intention and shared attention. There are norms involved. They take place in a time within time — beyond the time of the everyday. Play allows us to do this. There is a continuity between the two. The second trait we must consider is empathy. Empathy is not primarily in the head.

The ritual symbolises the release of kindness and goodwill Credit: Getty. Empathy is absolutely central to what we call morality, says de Waal. It makes us interested in others. It makes us have an emotional stake in them. De Waal has been criticised over the years for offering a rose-coloured interpretation of animal behaviour. Rather than view animal behaviour as altruistic, and therefore springing from a sense of empathy, we should, these wise scientists tell us, see this behaviour for what it is: selfishness.

Animals want to survive. Any action they take needs to be interpreted within that matrix. Altruistic tendencies come very naturally to many mammals. Yes, of course there are pleasurable sensations associated with the action of giving to others. But evolution has produced pleasurable sensations for behaviours we need to perform, like sex and eating and female-nursing.

The same is true for altruism, says de Waal. That does not fundamentally alter what the behaviour is. Such a hard and fast line between altruism and selfishness, then, is naive at best and deceptive at worst. And we can see the same with discussions of social norms. An animal may perform the behaviour X, but does it do so because it feels it should do so — thanks to an appreciation of a norm?

Women prepare food for the homeless during a charity Christmas dinner Credit: Getty. De Waal disagrees, pointing out that animals do recognise norms:. The simplest example is a spider web or nest. They either abandon it, or start over and repair it. Animals are capable of having goals and striving towards them. In the social world, if they have a fight, they come together and try to repair damage. They try to get back to an ought state. They have norm of how this distribution should be.

The idea that normativity is [restricted to] humans is not correct. In the Bonobo and the Atheist, de Waal argues that animals seem to possess a mechanism for social repair. There is evidence for this mechanism in hyenas, dolphins, wolves, domestic goats. They behave normatively in the sense of correcting, or trying to correct, deviations from an ideal state. They also show emotional self-control and anticipatory conflict resolution in order to prevent such deviations. This makes moving from primate behaviour to human moral norms less of a leap than commonly thought.

How far back to these tendencies go? Probably, like those capacities that allowed for play and ultimately ritual , to the advent of parental care. Of course, nurturing is arguably seen in species of fish, crocodiles, and snakes, but the nurturing capabilities of mammals is really a giant leap forward in the evolutionary story. Our religious services of today may seem worlds away from the mammalian play and empathy that emerged in our deep past, and indeed institutionalised religion is much more advanced than a so-called waterfall dance.

But evolution teaches us that complex, advanced phenomena develop from simple beginnings. Our religious services of today seem worlds away from their ancient origins, but like all human behaviours, they are deeply embedded in evolutionary history Credit: Getty. How is it that Britain became a few hundred years later one of the most zealously global evangelizers of a religion from Palestine?

How is it that an Indian sect, Buddhism, which supposedly began with one man sometime in the 5th Century B. Answering such questions in detail is the business of professional historians. We know religions traveled back and forth through trade routes over land and sea and were transmitted by the painstaking translation and copying by hand of dense, lengthy scriptures.

All of these movements are also the movements of the modern globalized world, a construct that began taking shape a few thousand years ago.

In the animated map above from Business Insider, you can watch the movement of these five faiths over the course of 5, years and see in the span of a little over two minutes how the modern world took shape. And you might find yourself wondering: what will such a map look like in another 5, years? Or in ? Will these global religions all meld into one? Will they wither away? Will they splinter into thousands? Our speculations reveal much about what we think will happen to humanity in the future.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at jdmagness. We accept Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! To donate, click here. We thank you! The whole of the Middle East used to be christian before islam conquered it!?! I mean: the Kopts in Egypt, christians in Syria, Ethiopia….. And so on and so forth! Why was China ignored? Is the Tao not understood, or too diverse?

Certainly China has representative groups of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist followers. A lot of inaccuracies in the animated map. The biggest is that the entire Middle East and North Africa is shown as pagan until Islam spreads there. It was Christian. The funniest is that it shows Newfoundland as pagan even today. It seems the web browser you're using doesn't support some of the features of this site. For the best experience, we recommend using a modern browser that supports the features of this website.

Religious beliefs of the peoples of the Silk Road changed radically over time and was largely due to the effects of travel and trade on the Silk Road itself.

For over two thousand years the Silk Road was a network of roads for the travel and dissemination of religious beliefs across Eurasia. The religious beliefs of people along the Silk Road at the beginning of the 1st century BCE were very different from what they would later become. When China defeated the nomadic Xiongnu confederation and pushed Chinese military control northwest as far as the Tarim Basin in the 2nd century BCE , Buddhism was known in Central Asia but was not yet widespread in China nor had it reached elsewhere in East Asia.

Christianity was still more than a century in the future. Daoism, in the strict sense of that term, connoting an organized religion with an ordained clergy and an established body of doctrine, would not appear in China for another three centuries. Islam would be more than seven centuries in the future. The peoples of the Silk Road in its early decades followed many different religions.

In the Middle East, many people worshiped the gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pagan pantheon. Others were followers of the old religion of Egypt, especially the cult of Isis and Osiris. Jewish merchants and other settlers had spread beyond the borders of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea and had established their own places of worship in towns and cities throughout the region.

It posited a struggle between good and evil, light and darkness; its use of fire as the symbol of the purifying power of good was probably borrowed from the Brahmanic religion of ancient India.

The Greek colonies of Central Asia that had been left behind after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great had, by the 1st century BCE, largely converted from Greco-Roman paganism to Buddhism, a religion that would soon use the Silk Road to spread far and wide. In India, on side routes of the Silk Road that crossed the passes to the Indus Valley and beyond, the older religion of Brahmanism had given way to Hinduism and Buddhism; the former never spread far beyond India and Southeast Asia, while the latter eventually became worldwide in extent.

Coming at last to China on our west-to-east survey of the ancient faith of the Silk Road, we find that rulers worshipped their own ancestors in great ancestral temples; they were joined by commoners in also worshiping deities of the earth, the four directions, mountains and rivers, and many others. There was, as yet, in China no official state cult of Confucius, no Buddhism, and no organized religious Daoism.

The beliefs of Korea and Japan at that early period are largely lost in an unrecorded past, but they appear to have been ancestral to the later Japanese religion of Shinto, a polytheistic belief system that emphasizes worship of local gods and goddesses, the importance of ritual purity, and rule by a king of divine descent. That the religious beliefs of the peoples of the Silk Road change radically from what they had been when trans-Eurasian trade began to take place on a regular basis was largely due to the effects of travel and trade on the Silk Road itself.

Over the centuries for two thousand years the Silk Road was a network of roads for the travel and dissemination of religious beliefs across Eurasia. Religious belief is often one of the most important and deeply held aspects of personal identity, and people are reluctant to go where they cannot practice their own faith. Traders who used the Silk Road regularly therefore built shrines and temples of their own faiths wherever they went, in order to maintain their own beliefs and practices of worship while they were far from home.

Missionaries of many faiths accompanied caravans on the Silk Road, consciously trying to expand the reach of their own religious persuasion and make converts to their faith. The dynamics of the spread of beliefs along the Silk Road involves a crucial, though little-remarked, difference between two fundamental types of religions.

Generally speaking, religions are either proselytizing or non-proselytizing. That is, they either actively seek to recruit new members to the faith from outside the current membership group, or they do not. In the former case, ethnicity, language, color, and other physical and cultural differences are taken to be of relatively small importance compared with the common humanity of all believers, and the availability of the faith and its particular canons of belief, forms of worship, and promises of salvation to all humans everywhere.

In the latter case, that is, of non-proselytizing religions, membership in a religion often coincides with membership in an ethnic group, so that religious participation is a birth right and not a matter of conversion; conversion often occurs only when a person marries into the faith, and in extreme cases conversion is rejected as an impossibility.

Examples of proselytizing faiths are Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; non-proselytizing faiths include Hinduism, Judaism, and Shinto.