The Origins, Philosophies, and Reasons Behind Major Religions

Religion and spiritual issues are at the core of human values and history. Religion acts as social control by exercising a pervasive influence on all other social institutions, moderating the activities of agents of socialization such as the family, school, peer group, mass media, and political movements. In some societies, religion reinforces the edicts of secular authorities, while in others it establishes independence and distance from them or provides the ethos of dissenters and new social controls . Religion also plays a role in the development of moral codes and forms of social control rooted in self-control. In nations that have successfully made the transition from small traditional communities to urban industrial societies, without a collapse into crime and chaos or the imposition of arbitrary and authoritarian rule by the state, this success has often been due to the development of forms of popular religion and their accompanying moral codes. **https://typeset.io/questions/how-does-religion-act-as-social-control-24afzit58c**
Organized religion traces its roots to the Neolithic Revolution that began 11,000 years ago in the Near East but may have occurred independently in several other locations around the world. The invention of agriculture transformed many human societies from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. The transition from foraging bands to states and empires precipitated more specialized and developed forms of religion that reflected the new social and political environment. While bands and small tribes possess supernatural beliefs, these beliefs do not serve to justify a central authority, justify transfer of wealth or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. Organized religion emerged as a means of providing social and economic stability through the following ways:

• Justifying the central authority.
• Bands and tribes consist of small number of related individuals. Organized religion served to provide a bond between unrelated individuals who would be prone to enmity.
• Religions that revolved around moralizing gods may have facilitated the rise of large, cooperative groups of unrelated individuals.

The states born out of the Neolithic revolution, such as those of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, were theocracies with chiefs, kings and emperors playing dual roles of political and spiritual leaders. Anthro-pologists have found that virtually all state societies and chiefdoms from around the world have been found to justify political power through divine authority. **https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of**
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1. Judaism is one of the world’s oldest religions, dating back nearly 4,000 years, and is considered to be the original Abrahamic faith (which include Islam and Christianity). As a monotheistic faith, followers of Judaism believe in one God. In addition to a number of sacred texts — the most important of which is the Torah, which outlines laws for Jews to follow. Most Jews (with the exception of a few groups) believe that their Messiah hasn’t yet come—but will one day
2. Buddhism is a faith that was founded by Siddhartha Gautama—also known as “the Buddha”—more than 2,500 years ago in India. With an estimated 500 million to one billion followers, scholars consider Buddhism one of the major world religions, although some scholars describe Buddhism as a philosophy or a moral instead of a religion.
3. The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation (Old Testament) to the spread of Christianity in the first century A.D. (New Testament). Critics of the Gospels such as Richard Dawkins and Thomas Henry Huxley note that they were written long after the death of Jesus and that we have no real knowledge of the date of composition of the Gospels.
4. Islam is the second-largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. As one of the three Abrahamic religions, it too is a monotheistic faith that worships one god, called Allah.
The word Islam means “submission” or “surrender,” as its faithful surrender to the will of Allah.
Questions: Can believers in different religions peacefully coexist?
Is religion still used as a means of social control?
What roles do religions play in the twenty-first century?