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The ancients regarded religion as nothing more than ancestor worship. The Greek Gods were historical kings who lived and were deified by their own relatives and descendents because of what they had achieved. They were not created to explain the universe.
Hero worship came first in all of the ancient religions including that of the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks.
Before writing there were no gods whatsoever since no memory can be passed down beyond living memory without it. Before writing was invented and ancestral kings were made into gods nobody believed in anything except the forces of nature, and in that case they were regarded as nothing more than the physical forces that they are known to be today and markers of time, the weather and the harvest. Nobody is born with any urge whatsoever to worship any kind of god. Religion is something that is brainwashed into you. Animals don't worship gods and neither did pre-historical humans.
The gods of the Babylonians and Assyrians were the kings of the Sumerians. The gods of the Egyptians were their predynastic rulers. The gods of the Phoenicians were their past kings and those of the Jews, Hurrians, Greeks, Romans and Hindus were the same entities as the gods of the Hyksos period who were Minoan kings who ruled over Palestine, Egypt, Crete and Troy. That is what the historical consensus is and always has been.
The evidence suggests that there was no religion in the Palaeolithic era at all. The only thing the people of that era feared were the forces of nature. Before people worshiped their own ancestors as gods they only things that the held in any kind of reverence were the forces of nature and the motions of the objects in the celestial sphere. Reverenced doesn't mean worship. You don't worship the Reverend Geralden Grange the Vicar of Dibly.
All there was an attempt to explain nature by the means of observation of natural phenomena. No tribute, ritual or sacrifices were ever made to these phenomena so it is stated they were no considered religious. Egyptians did not worship the sun. They worshiped Ra after he had lived and died and whose name they associated with the sun.
Eusebius, Diodorus, Plutarch, Jerome, Apollodorus, Herodotus, Plato and a whole series of historians even Sir Isaac Newton say that the ancient Gods were defied kings, and not once ancient writer or historian says anything different. That was the historical consensus.
Even the animal Gods of the Americas or Africa are deified ancestors. In India they have animal Gods but we know these Gods are also represented as humans and the same goes for the Egyptian Gods. Since native Americans have names such as Running Bear their Gods were most probably created out of the spirits of deified ancestors bearing the names of these animals or the animals themselves were named after the deified ancestors. If these animal Gods are also meant to talk to humans then it is clear that they originated as humans.
The Chinese make it clear that all of their gods are deified ancestors. Before these defied kings Chinese texts say nothing of religion. This reinforces what ancient historians has written. Even the word Tao is a Indo-European word. Why do the Chinese used a clearly indo-European word, Daoism or Taoism to refer to their religion? Simple. In approximately 1675 BC when Zeus or as the Hindus called him Deyus Piter became ruler of the world as stated by ancient historians, China became a vassal state of India and the Daioi imposed on China their own choice of Satraps. This is why the Chinese religions of Daoism refers to Dao or Tao as a controlling and ruling force rather than a physical God.
The ancient Gods were created from deified ancestors by their decedents. The Japanese still do this today. They have the state Gods and their own house Gods. The Japanese worship their own family members, emperors and Gods in exactly the same way as the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians and Rehab did. They have shrines in their homes to them as did the Romans and the Greeks and the people of the Bible like Rehab. The Japanese made all their emperors into God just like the Romans, the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. The Hindus made their early kings into Gods and their later kings into Heroes just like the Greeks and even had their Gods coming back to earth to take part in wars just like the Greeks.
Before people decided to worship the spirits of the dead there were no Gods except the forces of nature. Religion is a recent invention. The first Gods were deified ancestors worshiped by the state and before them people believed in the spirits of their own family members and before that they believed in what the thought were the principles of physics.
Even the Jews were rabid polytheists well into Hellenistic times. The names of over a dozen Phoenicians Gods appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls and seven of them are used to refer to the Gods worshiped by the Jews. How more polytheistic could they be. The Elohim were the Gods allied to El who fought with him against Baal-Shamun. Thou shalt not worship any Gods other than Pharaoh (ie. YHWH) meaning you will not follow or make alliances with the kings of other states that are hostile to Pharaoh.
Ever hear the one about Adam being made in gods image. The god of the bible was the Pharaoh of Egypt. The book of Jeremiah states this outright. Most probably Amenemhat IV (Adam) was driven from Egypt by Sobeknefru (Eve) at the same time as Agum I (Adam again) was ruling in Babylon and that's where the Adam and Eve being driven out a paradise story came from.
Take a look on Hinduism. All the Gods are related to Brhama. Why would family relationships even exist unless the Gods were defied ancestors. Look a Gilgamesh who is directly related to the Gods who are part of an extended family as are the Hittite Gods and the Egyptian Gods. All ancient Gods display human type family relationships and all have birth mothers even Christ. Jesus was another defied ancestor to add to the thousands of other defied ancestors who the people of the Roman Empire already worshiped. Christianity took Plato's entire notion of god and superimposed it on the religion of the Jews and a crucified Jew who was defied by his friends in order to make up Christianity.
All of these Gods had human attributes because they all began as humans. Only the metaphysical God of Plato and the philosophers before and after him was devoid of human characteristics such as anger and jealously and genocidal tendencies and he was not even recognised officially as a God becauses God were ancestors. That is why Socrates was found guilty of inventing new Gods despite the fact that prior philosophers said the same things he did.
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