Religion. Ever hear about any new Civilization that did not have any religion? Religion provided people with the basis for a rule of law . It got people to work together rather than fight each other.
Simple... They didn’t believe in killing babies. UNLIKE the left today.
Possibly. I think religion had far more beneficial aspects to history than most atheists will tell you. But I’ve always read that it was agriculture that triggered the development of cities and therefore civilizations. Only it was a hard sell: people didn’t go for it in great numbers because they preferred the hunter-gatherer existence. Once it caught on, however, it was impossible to compete with any civilization that had adopted it, because of the greater populations it could support. So it spread by necessity. But I still think there is more to it that needs explaining.
Religion. Ever hear about any new Civilization that did not have any religion?
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What and how we think of religion was not how others in the past saw or thought of “gods”. Ancient Egyptians has no word for religion. The “gods” were symbols of various aspects of life/nature because they thought symbolically, unlike present day where we think logically. It is not really possible to say whether “gods” gave the basis for a law or that a law provided for how a god was portrayed.
The problem lies in how we apply current thinking (logic) to how others in the deep past lived. Its a sort of culture shock which is not helped by specialists like anthropologist, archeologists etc who are driven by peer review, grants et al to arrive at consensus thinking, which only occasionally and rarely admits new ideas, rather seeks to impose an agenda on the problems at hand.
We still think of Ancient Egypt the same way it was formulated by classical Greek historians with a few embellishments from the 19th Century, despite a host of new findings which suggest that the Greeks were almost totally wrong; therefore, much of the new findings are buried, not admitted, relegated to museum basements, or destroyed - all to keep the consensus thinking alive.
And so our image of of what is labeled religion in the past becomes heavily distorted, and no interpretation of a symbol or word is allowed to contradict the prevailing ‘scientific’ insight
Hunter/gatherers settled down, stayed in one place and started farming/raising animals.
That's worked out well...