Religious women push lawmakers to investigate Kavanaugh, suspend confirmation

[MineralMan]

35. Assuming that earlier civilizations were non-religious isn't

supportable, really. Religion of one sort or another appears to have developed at the same time as homo sapiens. We also have almost no records of pre-historic cultural practices, so we don't really know if slavery even existed in earlier cultures. However, we do have evidence of some sort of religious or spiritual practices among those cultures that left enough evidence to judge that.

Since religion serves as a system for answering unanswerable questions and for establishing some sort of ethical norms, it seems to follow along the development of human cultures and civilization.

My neighbor just down the street is a Hmong shaman. That culture's religion is a naturalistic one, which believes that spirits inhabit virtually everything. Friendly spirits and mischievous spirits and even harmful spirits. I hear him conducting rituals in his home, which involve playing a gong, dancing and chanting.

He's an interesting man, but his English is halting, at best, so I can't really talk to him about that. His son has explained the traditional Hmong religious beliefs to me to some degree, and I've done some reading about it as well. Once I learned to be polite in the Hmong language, with greetings and the like, the shaman is quite friendly with me, and we've helped each other with snow removal.

His son's generation, however, is a mix of Christianity and the old religion, which makes for an interesting combination.

But, religion is part of human culture. Even more a part when knowledge about the physical world was limited. I do know that slavery was never a part of Hmong society.