Jeune Street

Temple of the Tooth, Sri Lanka

Just to pick up on the idea from the post below, that many of the great world religions appeared during the window of history when people increasingly became city-dwellers…

Living in small communities (for most of our history), people would have been bound by local ethical norms simply out of self-interest: it’s difficult to keep a secret in a small community, which creates incentives for behaving oneself. Before the rise of agrarian civilizations (around 3000 BCE), then, religion would have had a highly local social function: recognize and obey the divine as it is present in your family and environment. Certain ethical norms would essentially take care of themselves.

As people increasingly moved to cities, the moral inhibitions to behave badly would have eroded with the anonymity of urban life. The functioning of cities requires a level of abstract trust between people and an ordering of roles and relationships based on a spiritual ‘collective centre’. The need for universal ethical codes necessitated the spread of religions that could sustain order in the next stage in social evolution: from village to city.

Related to this point, an interesting piece of research by Murat Iyigun at Harvard has shown that the spread of monotheism within an empire or civilization is correlated with its geographic size and duration. I suppose how one interprets this history depends upon beliefs about the origins of religion – whether it develops out of social necessity or divine intervention. I’d contend it’s both: religion is an eternal feature of human existence, but as a divine response it changes with our social and cultural evolution.