Fireworks of Religion

During our discussion in class today about the origin of religion I had an interesting thought.

While Professor Smith was being hounded by those who argued that it is ridiculous to take the fragments of a society that existed long ago and try to build a picture of what that society may have had in the way of religious thought and expression, I was reflecting on their statements. In this reflection I analyzed the diagram Professor Smith had drawn on the board of what I would term the axis of religions.

The center of this axis is the fundamental concepts of religion as a whole, and the spokes all lead out to the specific "windows" (religions) that are present in modern human societies. Our exploration of the paleolithic people is in hopes of finding some idea of what this center is composed of, without the interference of the plethora of culturally produced religious variations present in the modern world.

Besides the physical similarity to the image of a firework, this metaphor can be taken one step further. Religion is similar to a firework in that it starts as one ball which contains all of the essentials to forming the rays of burning, colored debris (this stage is in the early stages of human development). Once this ball is launched into the air and explodes we get a great variation of colors and directions that this debris has chosen to take (modern times). An examination of the debris once it has dispersed so greatly will most likely not be effective in distinguishing what had originally made up the ball of fundamentals.

However, if you were able to find a section of the original ball (that had likely been blown into many fragments), you would be able to examine more closely, and infer more accurately as to the original composition of the ball. I am not necessarily saying that we can understand the entire culture of the paleolithic people from the fragment of evidence we have in their cave paintings, but this is probably the best method in our search for the contents of the fundamental firework of religion.