Is there an identifiable evolutionary trend to world religions?

I am wondering, given that there is such a variety of religious traditions apparent in world, whether there is some coherent evolution of spiritual understanding with regards to each other?

Mostly people claim their religion is the one true religion, or that they follow the absolute truth and everyone else is being mislead, but if we strip away the hero-worship, traditions, cultural adornments, and perhaps a few politically motivated additions, is there something, some trend, that is fundamentally related between religions?

a reply to: AllyofHumanity9220

Yes the trend is they all are invented by man attempting to understand what we can not...God.

God begins where humanity's imagination ends.

I have always had my suspicions but never really thought of chasing up the evidence,.
Its a great question, many flood accounts around the world, many similar accounts of myth.
I think there is and will follow this thread with interest.

Great question

a reply to: AllyofHumanity9220

There sure is a trend, that being they are all full of nonsensical gibberish.

Any core truth that may or may not have been present in the beginning has been washed away and replaced with self serving control constructs designed to keep in place the status quo.

No question about it...

After spending literally hundreds of hours researching this, I became convinced that all false religions have a single common source.

The agenda behind religion is to steer people from the truth about ourselves and the true God.

All religion does is drive people AWAY from God, this is Satan's real agenda.

“...for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” – 2 Cor. 11:14

Satan's most effective method of seducing men and women to yield to his control over them is via a religious system. Source

"Every major religion in the world has been manufactured or infiltrated by the Illuminati to enslave and brainwash society. In essence, religion was the first form of mind control." Link

What if I were to tell you, that there is a vast Satanic conspiracy to deceive the masses of every society on earth? What if I were to tell you that the top leaders of the world’s religions were in league with the Devil? Would you think I’m crazy? I would! Yet, the truth is stranger than fiction! You have been lied to my friend. Few people in the world today are aware of just how much Satan has infiltrated and is behind ALL false religion.
Source

"Today the religions of the world remain a major tool of the Illuminati agenda." Link

"What if there were people within the various Churches of God who covertly were guiding the members to slowly accept new ideas which are alien to the true faith and who were dedicated to destroying that faith at all costs?"

JESUIT-JEDI MINDTRICKS

originally posted by: UnknownUsr
Most people do not believe in God because either some one has pushed religion in their face, has given a false presentation of who God really is, or anything regarding a persons bias, or opinion. Don't base your relationship with God off of what you have heard, experience it for yourself. Religion was made to divide and cause animosity. Your mind set automatically shifts. The moment you hear the name "God" you already have a false image portrayed!

...most of our institutions are infiltrated and run by racists, satanists, perverts and criminals, often masquerading as devout and God-fearing Christians.

Did the Illuminati Exterminate Canadian Indian Children?

Satan is behind ALL false religion. What if I were to tell you, that there is a vast Satanic conspiracy to deceive the masses of every society on earth? What if I were to tell you that the top leaders of the world’s religions were in league with the Devil? Would you think I’m crazy? I would! Yet, the truth is stranger than fiction! You have been lied to my friend. Few people in the world today are aware of just how much Satan has infiltrated organized religion. Source

originally posted by: AllyofHumanity9220
is there something, some trend, that is fundamentally related between religions?

well yeah, I didn't think it was some huge mystery either. You could probably find hundreds of threads here that discus it in extreme detail. Organized religions are all fundamentally connected though the fact they are a form of mass mind control.

Nomadic hunters & gathers don't tend to have gods that they see as divine, nor do they tend to view themselves as somehow superior to other life. But rather, they view there environment and everything in it as divine, to which they are simply just a part of. Instead of being some separate entity with a higher purpose, like we tend to think of ourselves now.

If your looking for some kind of higher truth in spirituality, then studying the belief systems of cultures like the Australian aboriginals (the oldest still living culture in existence) would probably be a good place to start.

a reply to: Murgatroid

Personally i blame Man for the perversion of all organized religion. No need to bring Satan into the mix considering we are far more than capable of making a mess on our own. When you think about it Man is responsible for far more evil and perversion regarding our reality than the devil has ever been implicated in. Point of fact Satan has quite possibly met his match or even been superseded regarding the capacity for true evil by a bunch of semi-intelligent Monkeys.

Religion, all religion, is a form of continuity for a species always on the edge of insanity for lack of understanding.

Our species has a need to understand everything around it, from the smallest particles we can discover and define, out to the largest objects such as the universe. This drive to know everything is overwhelming to most people because we lack a collective consciousness and the ability retain all knowledge. But a God can be all knowing.

In ancient times stories were told to retain the knowledge, but it would change or die out with the people. Writing directly developed as the first attempt to retain knowledge over generations without it changing, but that was limited and fragile. Early tablets and scrolls do survive from thousands of years ago, but they are rare and incomplete.

Religion has always been there to fill in the gaps of lost information.

We built libraries right along with our places of worship because it gave us security. But libraries and churches were burnt, desecrated, or destroyed with the changing governance, mood of a current leader, natural disasters, or some beetle that liked the taste of the parchment. So information continued to be lost.

The simple technology of producing concrete has come and gone, and been rediscovered again, simply because we couldn't retain specific information over generations. But we still had the continuity of Gods.

The printing press was a massive leap in being able to make so many copies of something that you could be sure, if disseminated widely enough, information could be preserved over time, and unchanged. Of course religious texts were the first to be printed for wide distribution because that was our single thread of unbroken data. Even with all it's faults and interpretations, the blood spilled because of it, the lives lost and loves consecrated, that single thread of continuity held groups of humanity together.

Even now, as we turn information into binary code for easy dissemination and duplication, the fear persists that we will lose something from our past. Certain things, like religion, are hard wired into the collective consciousness of our species because the fear runs so deep. But there are also things that have nothing to do with religion that are also in every mind on the planet.

I can type one word on the next line and everyone reading this will get a similar image in their mind.

Fire

That's continuity, and that is the common denominator of why humanity has held on to religion for so long. The simple need to gain and retain information.

There have been books written about the evolution of religion through history, which may or may not answer your question.

Otherwise, I recommend reading a bit about what people in early civilizations (Sumer, Babylon, Egypt etc) believed and then follow through with Hindu mythology, the Greeks, Judaism, the Romans, Christianity and Islam.
I would suggest adding New Age spirituality into the research as well since it is, at least in my opinion, the latest addition to humanity's repertoar of religion and belief systems. It even incorporates beliefs and some practices of earlier concepts of spirituality.

Learning a bit about atheism might also contribute to the research.

That's how I would go about finding answers to your question. If you are serious about finding out that is.

Fear of the unknown mixed with superstition has snowballed ever since we were able to comprehend and articulate our surroundings, to the point where we're cutting people's heads off and wearing magical underwear.

That is unless you actually worship the one true god of course......

a reply to: AllyofHumanity9220

Guten Morgen- All the organized religions™ are "different" This makes them the 'same' so remove what is the 'same' (along w/a healthy dose of DOGMA) and TheTruth will revealed. Any Body, entity etc. that has the Self look for answers outside of that Self will not often work, as ALL the answers are "inside". When You get Preached to, You're getting that One's interpretation not to mention those who needn't a "Rule Book" to Live/Love. Why not get it "Straight from TheSource"? (pun intended)

We are also in the deep throes of Yin, The Devine Feminine. Religion™, military™ and politics™ are as YANG as One can get besides the impression of a phallic symbol across their forehead..

Each Self is 'TheCreator' working their way back from whence they came, The One Infinite Creator who resides in TheOctave.

namaste

1) Fear of mortality.

2) Need for cultural identity.

3) Need to believe in something beyond physical reality.

4) The need for individual validation, that the individual's life means something beyond just surviving and reproducing.

People are scared to death of reality. Always have been. So they make stuff up and invent religions and 'spiritual thought' and 'truths', because they can't understand suffering and death. So the social primate known as human beings makes up rich spiritual fantasies (that differ all around the world, culture to culture) so that they can continue being social primates in the afterlife. So far in our history, I'll state that, IMO, spiritual truths are nonsense coming from the perspective of not-so-advanced-as-they-might-think primates who wouldn't know real truth from a hill of beans. Go look at the philosophy forums for a good example. The vast majority of spiritual 'truths' being posted there are by people that don't even have Philosophy 101 under their belts. The world is chock full of this sort of crap.

a reply to: AllyofHumanity9220

if we strip away the hero-worship, traditions, cultural adornments, and perhaps a few politically motivated additions, is there something, some trend, that is fundamentally related between religions?

Everyone has a soul, that being the conduit through which spiritual lessons, awareness and wisdom flow. Man made religion requiring worship of places, people and things out side of us supplants that true spiritual quest humans should be on.

Instead of outwardly seeking to worship some duly ordained deity in a building for instance, the journey should be an inward one of discovery of our true selves and communion with the real spirit world. What better way to reach the spirit but through the spirit?

I think thats why it is said, the Kingdom of Heaven is within.

Rather than worship someone, thing or place, worship from within your self. Marvel at the night sky, a drop of water , blade of grass or the cycle of life. Desire to be fulfilled and wait patiently. Life is life long. Keep seeking the answers from within, not from religion.

a reply to: boymonkey74

I would say that perhaps they were all inspired by a deeper impulse, a pure experience of some sort. Of course, they would all have been manipulated and changed by humans from their original form, making it very difficult to really get to the heart of their essence.

I am a student of the Greater Community Way of Knowledge. In my understanding, such as it is, God is the sum and the Source of all relationship. God is an experience, a Presence. So, maybe religions were initiated by this deeper experience, as a means of cultivating it in one's awareness...

a reply to: andy06shake

Any core truth that may or may not have been present in the beginning has been washed away and replaced with self serving control constructs designed to keep in place the status quo.

Very likely so...

a reply to: andy06shake

Personally i blame Man for the perversion of all organized religion. No need to bring Satan into the mix considering we are far more than capable of making a mess on our own.

Interesting point... In the Greater Community Way of Knowledge, evil is merely seen as confusion. In this reality you will see countless demonstrations of profound confusion, which can of course be cruelty, selfishness, greed, ambivalence, dishonesty, you name it!

a reply to: anxietydisorder

Even with all it's faults and interpretations, the blood spilled because of it, the lives lost and loves consecrated, that single thread of continuity held groups of humanity together.

Interesting point! Certainly, the major religions of the world served to unite many tribes and small groups together, allowing for civilizations to emerge and to grow...

a reply to: ABeing

If I really wanted to spend the next few weeks with my nose in ancient theological texts I would not have posted this

As it stands, I am more interested in hearing from those who themselves have pondered this question, or who have unique perspectives and insights regarding specific faith traditions.

originally posted by: Calalini
1) Fear of mortality.

2) Need for cultural identity.

3) Need to believe in something beyond physical reality.

4) The need for individual validation, that the individual's life means something beyond just surviving and reproducing.

I wonder, what makes us fear death? What drives the need for shared identity? What drives the need for greater meaning in life?

a reply to: intrptr

Very good insight, thank you! As a student of Knowledge, I am in agreement with you that the path lies within, although the world certainly has a lot to teach in its demonstrations and manifestations...