Right, but that isn't how animistic religions work. They don't just decide that the sun or the sky or whatever are gods, they start with the assumption that every natural phenomenon is a conscious being with which humans need to establish and maintain relationships. There's no point of transition from "zero gods" to "one god", because everything is a "god", as far as the term is applicable, ever rock and tree and river. It's only later that we begin drawing finer distinctions and "god" becomes a more exclusively category, so only in retrospect that some of these little gods seem to loss their claim to god-hood.
It is not that cut and dry. You also have to factor in that humans themselves have different thought processes. Some humans will never see an inanimate object as something spiritual. Perhaps to the point they will never understand how some humans can. And it is not a cultural thing that enforces such a mindset. Humans accept things because of the culture they are in, just to fit in, but not necessarily in total agreement. Some may feel compelled to seek out other like minded humans, or they give up on their beliefs altogether and just exist the best they can.
Could there be at least one serious discussion of ancient religion that doesn't include ancient aliens?
It's not that everything is god so much as everything is a god; it's not pantheism, or at least it's not pantheistic in its premise, it's that every natural phenomenon is taken to be a conscious agent in its own right, a "god" so far as the term is applicable. And again, it's not that this a decision made empirically, that people started going "oh, that's a god, and that's a god, and that's a god", rather, it's the absence of a materialistic distinction between the animate and inanimate, it's entering into the world with the assumption that, if something appears to be motivated or propelled in some way, then it is a concious agent like you or me. Everything is a god, but in an equal sense there are no gods, because "god", "spirit", "sorcerer", all these terms begin to collapse into each other, because they all describe beings of power, distinguished not so much in any essential way as how they appear in the world. By the time that anything even approximate to the modern concept of godhood emerges, these belief-systems have been active for thousands of years.
Well, it seems like it should. If your classical pantheons, your Olympians and your Aesir and your Tuatha Dé Danann all have their origins as an elaboration on more basic animistic entities, if they can trace their origins to ancestor-spirits or river-monsters or big rocks that look like they're probably pretty important, then where should we assume that there's a point where a classical god (if such a thing exists except in monotheistic retrospect) just springs fully-formed into the human imagination? If humans emerged from the third-dude-along-on-that-monkey-chart operating on the assumption that any force beyond human control represented another, greater will than their own, why does their need to be a discrete moment at which humans decide to consciously pick out one of these forces and frame it in terms of explicit godhood?
If it is not a serious discussion, then what makes it not serious? Would you prefer not to know the origin of religious thought? Calling it human imagination, seems too restrictive. If we ridicule imaginary friends, at what point did we start and stop the ridicule? There has to be enough physical phenomenon involved or someone's imagination will never catch on to the point of acceptance. Every religion on earth claims there is something besides this physical reality. Why claim the notion that something physical actually gave humans such thinking is any less plausible than humans themselves thinking they received information from other physical beings? If some humans, just made things up, why is there evidence to the contrary?
Space aliens. It was a serious discussion until space aliens came into it.
If it's space aliens, produce the evidence. If it's some supernatural being telling people to believe in them, let's see the evidence. After all, doorknockers and online preachers keep telling me the "evidence" is all over the place, but they never say what it is.
What evidence?
Is this an attempt to tap dance around the word "aliens"?
Do you mean evidence that their DNA included reptilian instead of afarensis markers? I am just pointing out that there were different types of humans in which the dna was noticeably different. They existed at the same time. I pointed out, we do not have evidence they were superior, but they were not exactly primitive either. They stopped existing after a seemingly specific point in time. I also pointed out this difference between one group of humans and the remaining humans could be the basis of our current religious thought that begin at the time the one group were no longer around. And this could have happened about 10,000 years ago when the records we do have seem to have started. Enough so, that a major event changed the earth in a drastic manner, and humans wanted a reminder of the event, or tried to reconnect with them.
