any ancient civilizations that do not credit gods/goddesses for their creation?

it appears that every ancient civilization traces their roots back to gods and goddesses for their creation and the stars. has there yet to be an ancient civilization that does not attribute it's birth to these entities? the concept of gods and goddesses seems too complex a task for humanity to take on without outside help, if one subscribes to the theory of evolution. the timespan we've been given for evolution is too short for us to come this far, at least that's how i feel on the topic. nowadays it seems that many want to throw out the idea that we came from an outside source and feel this life is all we have and that we should only live for ourselves alone, which i see this lifestyle is exactly what is putting mankind down the drain.

for the record I�m an atiest.
but I get your point, standard religion from (western eyes) ex catholism and islam, are based on, contrary to its leaders who claim its love, fear.
if you do not live a deasant life your gonna burn in hell!!!!
in the time before there was modern police and social structure, there was religion telling us what to do.

now, in the time of the information age when we know that the world was not created in 7 days we know that if we do somthing evil god id not gonna smite us.
becouse of the fact that the fear that was used so effectivly to control the people and was stamped in our subconsous that fear became a part of us, when the fear of a god goes away and you have nothing to fill that space with, u get what u get. (not to say that leaders have stopped to use fear as a way to control the people of a nation to do as they wish)

what needs to be done is to effectevly remove all traces of "godfear" and replace it with responsobility.
instead of seeing ourselves as children of god, the creator of our world. we should se ourselfes as the fathers of our children, the creators of their world.

I know its sounds really corny but thats just the way how i feel on the topic.

ps. according to plato, (hope i not mixing them up) atlantis didnt worship gods. but then again, he also named that to be the reason for their demise...

disturbence, i never have really talked to an atheist, what do you belive happens after you die? Do you belive that you are just energy and go on living?

When people say i belive when your dead your dead what happens? Do you just see darkness for eternity? It does not make much sense there has to be something?

Originally posted by cloud
it appears that every ancient civilization traces their roots back to gods and goddesses for their creation and the stars. has there yet to be an ancient civilization that does not attribute it's birth to these entities? the concept of gods and goddesses seems too complex a task for humanity to take on without outside help, if one subscribes to the theory of evolution.

I would have to say it's quite the opposite really. The one thing that a lot of God and Goddess duality religeon's of ages past have in common, is the awe and wonderment of natural creation. This is why many had a special ritual for the purposes of copulation and conception. Ever wonder why the Venus of Willendorf looks pregnant.

There were some pre-christian religeons that was mono-theistic. From off the top of my head, comes Mithralism. There were some that had only a single Goddess and no God. Certain Greek traditions involving the Goddess Diana come to mind.

oh.. I see. I thought you were wondering why many ancient religeons typically followed *both* a God and a Goddess. I would be inclined to think that if any such a tradition existed it may have been the beginnings of Natural Philosophy. I suspect the godforms came into being when hominids developed the ability to reason, as a result were awed by what had been seen around them and felt the need to understand the forces around them.
With the ability to reason also came the ability to communicate, thus many probably shared ideas to pass time when they cannot go out and hunt for food, but still too awake to sleep. heh, kinda like what we are doing now...

[edit on 25-7-2004 by Crysstaafur]

i think to answer your question more properly, civilizations in the east never wrote anything substantial about where the earth came from, in such religionas as , buddhism taoism and confucism, tobe honest i can't think of any civilizations, but i can only think of religions

disturbence, i never have really talked to an atheist, what do you belive happens after you die? Do you belive that you are just energy and go on living?

When people say i belive when your dead your dead what happens? Do you just see darkness for eternity? It does not make much sense there has to be something?

thats the thing really, why does it have to be somthing after death??
why have we not gone past the anciant idea that when we can�t find an explanation for somthing, we feel forced to make up one.
Why is there a big rock in the middle of the meadow when there�s no mountain in sight? it has to a giant who picked it up and put it there.
well, for someone who does not know about iceages, and the giant inland-ice (excuse the poor translation from swedish I hope u get what I mean) that draged these rocks far away from the mountains.

thats basicly how the consept of religion is born, someones desperate atempted to explain whats beyond their knowlege.

now thousans of years later u ask me what happens after death, why should
I try or anyone else try to fully anwer a question that lies so far beynd our knowlege? the anwer to that question will maybe be found generations beyond ours, when we possess the knowlege to at least understand that we have found the anwer. maybe that anwser says that we die and thats it, we have our 75 years or so and then there nothing, or they may find out that we indeed go to some higher existence where everything is wonderfull and god has the coolest party every day, maybe its something you and I never could imagine, put why should I try to speculate in that?
I do not need ten comandments to differ right from wrong.
why waste anergy? when we could try to anser more relative questions, such as why the american people are sush push-overs that they barly react when their president lies his ass off to them (and dont even shoe the respect to try to lie good) even after he is exposed they dont as mush as lift a finger....
how thats for an enigma for you?

Originally posted by zi2525
disturbence, i never have really talked to an atheist, what do you belive happens after you die? Do you belive that you are just energy and go on living?

When people say i belive when your dead your dead what happens? Do you just see darkness for eternity? It does not make much sense there has to be something?

I've seen this question alot since I'm an athiest... My answer is simple.

Do you remember how you felt in 1856? Was there just blackness? No, there was NOTHING. Blackness is something, seeing is something, thinking is something...there is nothing. You are no longer exist, just as you didn't exist in the year 1856 or any other year you weren't alive.

In 1856 people were healthy, sick, laughed, cried, studdied, murdered, cleaned the house, and in general lived life...yet YOU did not. The same can be said of the future. People will do all those things, live will go on but you return to the nonexistance from where you came.

People seem to have such a hard time understanding nonexistance when we ALL used to not exist. You just return to that when you die.

Originally posted by Quest

Originally posted by zi2525
disturbence, i never have really talked to an atheist, what do you belive happens after you die? Do you belive that you are just energy and go on living?

When people say i belive when your dead your dead what happens? Do you just see darkness for eternity? It does not make much sense there has to be something?

I've seen this question alot since I'm an athiest... My answer is simple.

Do you remember how you felt in 1856? Was there just blackness? No, there was NOTHING. Blackness is something, seeing is something, thinking is something...there is nothing. You are no longer exist, just as you didn't exist in the year 1856 or any other year you weren't alive.

In 1856 people were healthy, sick, laughed, cried, studdied, murdered, cleaned the house, and in general lived life...yet YOU did not. The same can be said of the future. People will do all those things, live will go on but you return to the nonexistance from where you came.

People seem to have such a hard time understanding nonexistance when we ALL used to not exist. You just return to that when you die.

Thats pretty scary, but i guess it wouldn't be cause you dont know your dead, you wouldn't know a thing. Its just hard to belive you can go from thinking all these thoughts and then nothing, just nothing for eternity no more fun nothing.

How do you explain people like john edwarsd though?? (he does actually work i went there he knew alot about my family and had some crazy connections) and i know for a fact he did not know any personal info becouse i went with my freinds mom and she bought them cash, they did not ask any questions such as name ect ect ect.

[edit on 25-7-2004 by zi2525]

The concept of an ancient society crediting anything but a god or godess would be stupid (unless one of them did haha). All Im sayin is do you expect archiologists to uncover a civilizatoin that credits evolution? They didnt have the resources we do, someone had to study fossils and all that jazz (haha) to come to the conclusion we evolved from uh old stuff. Maybe there is a god, I dont know.

Originally posted by zi2525

Thats pretty scary, but i guess it wouldn't be cause you dont know your dead, you wouldn't know a thing. Its just hard to belive you can go from thinking all these thoughts and then nothing, just nothing for eternity no more fun nothing.

[edit on 25-7-2004 by zi2525]

zi2525, I suggest you carefully read over the plentiful resources this board has to offer in the Paranormal and Relegious threads. I won't spend time trying to convince you one way or the other because it doesn't work. You'll pick what you believe when you're good, ready and well educated. I once spent days searching for these type of answers to what happends. Though I havn't made up my mind yet, im willing to listen to both sides of the arguement because I understand that this life is more then just live and die.

Here we go on religion... this should be interesting.
I don't really know what I am. In order of occurrence I have been a baptist, a satanist, an athiest, a baptist, an agnostic, and now somewhere in the middle between agnostic and baptist.

First I'll get to the actual topic of this thread. It seems to me that if there is a God, then there was always religion and the oldest religion is the true one. (My guess is that it vaguely resembles what Sumeria believed, which had connections to what the Hebrews believed, which evolved into what Baptists believe- so long story short I believe there are a lot of half-right religions.)

If there isn't a god though, then religion would have started when man gained the complex reasoning ability and the language to match it that was required to ask "why am i here". Super-natural seeming powers would have grabbed the imagination of early believers. The sun is the first and most obvious God. Then volcanos, earthquakes, and storms have to be considered. For costal people you've got to wonder about that huge constantly moving sea, and why doesn't all water mover like that. So nature worship would be one of the first religions, and it could take the shape of every other religion as it evolved.

It is important to realize that not all ancient civilizations believe in the exact same thing. They all believe in something mystical, because they didn't understand science. There was no alternative. But there are big differences too. I think it was the Norse who believed that Earth occupied the middle ground between a place of ice and a place of fire. The Greeks believed that the Gods were this big dysfunctional family of super-humans who lived on a mountain. The Egyptian religion revolved around the passage of Ra through the sky and the way that every other God helped or opposed him.


Now for some good old religious guesswork (because thats all religion is- even athiesm). The theory of nothingness before and after death is a little hard for me to swallow until I know for sure how consciousness works. Energy never ceases to exist. It can be dissipated, but you can't get something for nothing and you can't create nothingness out of something. So, if there is anything physical at all about the "soul" then in some shape or form you must always exist (of course if you define your "self" as the specific configuration of energy that makes you up, then I suppose that's no longer true- in fact you aren't even the same self for your whole life then, AND if you ever re-occured at random you wouldn't have any knowledge of your prior self, right?)
If the "soul" is intangible it opens up an even bigger can of worms and then we get heavily into pure mystical religion where science and logic may not be able to help us much.

I can't tell you all anything about God. I think he and I sat down and discussed the entire truth of the universe once, but the whole thing just slipped by mind afterward, and I can't get it back.
All I know is that everyone's theories make difficult assumptions. Every theory of origin includes either inifite existence, something from nothing, or both.
The world implies intelligent design though. It could be self-organized, or it could be a pure accident, but the odds are astronomical.
So let me pose a little question to the athiests- Would you consider the existence of "intelligence" stopping short of God? For example, would you find it remotely possible that the the universe as a whole is conscious, just as we, being only an arrangement of matter, are conscious, and that the universe formed itself into what it is?

I am a scientist but I believe in a Creator. Both science and religion are searches for the truth.

As to the earth being created in seven days, I assume the story to be symbolic, not literal.

However, I have read Genesis many times. I am amazed each time how specifically the sequence of events, leading to the evolution of man, correspond to the theory of evolution.

Here is my logic: The most basic premise of science is that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Yet matter exists. This could not have happened without a Creator.

I recall from an old sociology class that social scientists are in virtual agreement that no civilization has ever existed with a belief in a creator. The general assumption is that religion is a genetic part of man.

For this reason, many theologians believe that - following the termination of one's life - he or she cannot deny that they did not know a Creator existed and cannot deny that he or she cannot deny knowing right from wrong - or what was most likely expected.

Atheists claim to not believe in God. Yet every atheist I have known, and there have been quite a few in my field, place their faith in some substitute for religion. The most common substitute is humanism. Communists placed their faith in the State and humanism as well.

My error. The above statement should be interpreted as: "All societies that ever been known to exist on earth have believed in a Creator."

You must remember that one mans science is anothers religion. Our society is somewhat unique because we have two social spheres of influence, technology as well as religion. In ancient cultures science and religion were not seperate enities they were the same thing. Religion and science both seek to explain the unknown and therefore on the most basic human level they are the same. To any ancient culture they looked to nature to explain itself , they studied nature to the best extent that their technology could carry them. If one defines a God or Goddess as some sort of divine force than it is not surpring to note that all cultures had some sort of divinity worship because at some level all that was not understood was devine and therefore out of the hands of man and in the hands of whatever God or Goddess was created to illustrate an aspect of humanity and nature. Up untill the Renisance the science of the western world was fully predicated on religion, intrestingly enough "hard" science was succesfully melded with religious dogma for centuries. It was not untill staunch and visible opposition to the dogma of the catholic church was challenged that a significant rift between religion and science occured in the western world. Even in todays world the few questions that science can not answer are found by some in religion, it appears that as science evolves so will religion and even as the unknown shrinks people will still turn to Gods and Goddesses to answer any ultimate truths that escape science, in much the same way that ancienct civilizations embraced the unknown.

Originally posted by cloud
it appears that every ancient civilization traces their roots back to gods and goddesses for their creation and the stars. has there yet to be an ancient civilization that does not attribute it's birth to these entities?

Yes, indeed. A lot of them, in fact.

(ohboy... it's time for Anthropology of Religion 101 -- DUCK!)
The concept of religion and a structure of gods and goddesses is actually an outgrowth of the political system and seems to evolve only when the groups of people actually form into a large social structure.

(definition of the group types is here
www.cabrillo.edu...

Bands tend to not have a religious system of gods and goddesses, though they may practice animism (spirits in the world) and they have shamans but no priests (priests require both a political and economic structure to support them.)

The "big man" organization and the tribe also tend to be conglomerates where there IS no central religion or set of gods and goddesses. People join and leave these groups and th e leadership changes in a fairly democratic way (if you don't like what the leader is doing, you leave.)

Organized religion and religious hierarchies and god systems can't form under these conditions, although Clan Totems DO exist (they are not gods.)

We start to see the rise of religious organizations as means of controlling political power in chiefdom systems and by the time that the people are organized into states, the Official Religion And Roster Of Gods is pretty well set. Usually it consists of a collection of the Chiefdom deities... and whose deity gets to be Head High Honcho depends on who has the most political and economic power.

the concept of gods and goddesses seems too complex a task for humanity to take on without outside help, if one subscribes to the theory of evolution. the timespan we've been given for evolution is too short for us to come this far, at least that's how i feel on the topic.

A little bit of reading in anthropology will open your eyes to a lot of new concepts -- and in six million years or so, we've invented a lot of social groupings and laws and an infinite number of religions.

nowadays it seems that many want to throw out the idea that we came from an outside source and feel this life is all we have and that we should only live for ourselves alone, which i see this lifestyle is exactly what is putting mankind down the drain.

You're trying to say that having an alien origin is going to solve problems caused by overcrowding, bigotry, conflicting systems of morals, power struggles and so forth? I don't think so.

Originally posted by Cryptosapien
The concept of an ancient society crediting anything but a god or godess would be stupid (unless one of them did haha). All Im sayin is do you expect archiologists to uncover a civilizatoin that credits evolution? They didnt have the resources we do, someone had to study fossils and all that jazz (haha) to come to the conclusion we evolved from uh old stuff. Maybe there is a god, I dont know.

You sell the ancients short. In fact, there were a number of ancients who studied older civilizations and how their culture evolved from those older civilizations.

One of the 26th Dynasty Pharohs, Psammetichus (who reestablished Egypt after the Assyrians conquered), conducted experiments to see whose culture was older and whose language was older -- Sumerian or Egyptian. He came to the correct conclusion that the Sumerian culture predated the oldest Egyptian culture... some 2,600 years before the present time.


...and that's all the anthropology lectures for this evening.

[edit on 27-7-2004 by Byrd]

interesting indeed... but everyone has there own opinions

You're right, that everyone has their own opinions; and everyone should be able to express them without being dissed here. I notice on the UFO discussion area that the webmaster or one of his assistants had to step in to stop belittling comments.

Some people like me can't be put down, or at least really don't care, but it rankles me to read someones expressed opinion and then see some bully insult the comment.

I've noticed that most (not all) atheists are the most likely to do this. Wonder why that is?

Some just like to rattle our cages. I was an agnostic at first.Then turned to the Ufo idea which I thought was all technical.
Then after all these experiences I know there are Visitors,Elementals,and some Great Spirits.So i guess for some,you wiere never privelaged to have one visit you.