You might have a point about the rainbow serpent being the oldest continuously worshipped deity.
But there is evidence of religion in the form of ritual burial from long before humans first went to Australia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_religion
I guess we need to think about how you define religion, but as I imagine the lives of early humans, their group’s success, or even survival, depended so much on the whims of forces they did not understand. Our brains are so good at pattern recognition and hardwired for social living, that we inevitably see the randomness of weather or prey migration patterns as the results of our actions, imagine some spirit/god has control over certain things, and then start to organise our society around ceremonies to placate these powerful forces.
Tldr depending how you define it, i think religion is the default human way of knowing the world
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 1 week ago
Yeah, I don’t think humans are ever getting all the way to antibiotics and moon landings without first using religion to acquire that fundamental knowledge which is so useful for survival. Jewish people don’t eat pigs because they carry disease. Indigenous Australians care for the environment so well because of their totemic connections to it (I could write a whole comment about this alone, let Me know if you want to hear more). Newton discovered gravity while looking for beauty in the Lord’s works. Greeks sacrificed foods to the gods, and thereby ensured their productive capacity always exceeded demand, limiting overpopulation.
Kill the first religions, and you either delay religion a few hundred years, or stunt humanity at the stone age forever.