What is the worlds oldest verified religion?
Hinduism is generally considered to be the oldest religion still being practiced today. This ancient religion was born when the Aryan peoples migrated to Northern India and first put their religious tradition into writing. The texts they created are the Vedas, which were written around 1,500 B.C.E. (before common era) and have greatly influenced Indian culture ever since. Several other religions are almost as old as Hinduism. Judaism traces its roots back to the patriarch Abraham, who lived around 1,800 B.C.E. While the Jewish people are descended from Abraham, it was Moses who first recorded the Torah, the Jewish holy text, in 1,400 B.C.E. Most sources consider the date of the Torah as the beginning of Judaism. Zoroastrianism is sometimes called the world’s oldest prophetic religion. It’s certainly one of the earliest religions founded by one person. Scholars are not certain when the founding prophet Zarathustra actually lived. Some believe Zarathustra lived in the 6th century B.C.E.,
Going by archaeological evidence, the oldest extant religion is that of the Australian Aborigines. Period. End of discussion. No other religion even comes close to its age. Complex religious pictograms found at two sites near Penrith and Lake Mungo in New South Wales and 1 site in Western Australia detail the Aboriginal belief in “The Dreaming” (i.e., the period of time in which the ‘Wodjina’ created, formed, and differentiated the world). These sites date from 45,000 BCE to 38,000 BCE respectively. Thus, the Australian Aboriginal religion must be at least 47,000 years old. Sorry, folks: Hinduism, Jainism, Dravidianism, Judaism, and Buddhism are infants by comparison. And the evidence found in Botswana is NOT evidence of RELIGION like the newspaper article claims; it is evidence of RITUAL… and there’s a big difference between the two, especially within the field of anthropology. Religion specifically deals with divine transcendent reality; ritualism simply deals with repetitive actio
