A Story of the Origins of Religion

It's been awhile since my last essay on religion, and while I've shared my personal testimony and death rituals from around the world, I haven't written about the fascinating origins of religion. I know what you're thinking, how it's rather sacrilege to try to pinpoint and explain the beginning of spirituality—I know that it is far easier to explain things in retrospect—but it's an interesting rabbit hole nonetheless. We begin with Friedrich Max Müller, a European comparative philologist born in 1823 who is now most well-known for pioneering and founding the academic science of religion, what we now call Religious Studies. Müller's theory of naturism, or physical religion, posited that early religion began with humanity's direct sensory perception of the physical environment and natural forces. He argued that awe-inspiring phenomena—the sun, the sky, the weather and storms, dawn and dusk—inspired awe, terror, and an intuition of the Infinite. Early humans personified the forces as…