Challenge: Help with a religion?

Religions have always been based on money??

Shaminism, Animism, even the Nordic worship of the All Father and the Tree of Life??

I find this difficult to comprehend.


AS for the rest, a quick note on Phoenicians... Around 5-700BC, Carthage was engaged in both coastal & deep sea trade routes - deep sea is where you sail out of sight of land with an idea of where you are going. There is some indications - hotly contested - that they made it to Britain.

Also, the astrolabe isn't the only seafaring navigation device in history. There's at least some indications of others, if not concrete evidence. The astrolabe is certainly, err - most likely, the best ever developed short of gps satellites, but nonetheless, others appear to have possibly existed before it. Once the North Star is identified, you can even navigate with just your thumbs & a semi-accurate time device - which they did have.

I will say that the Antikytheria device illustrates a much better understanding of mechanical gadgetry, and time, than we had thought those cultures to have.

Regardless, that is the land of speculation :) no hard evidence in any direction exists.

Alot of second sons will die by rocks or shoals before they make land fall. Even the Spanish when they were sailing around the Caribbean had Native guides in canoes or brought along natives who knew the Caribbean with them.

True, as their ships were deep sea ships with large drafts, rocks & shoals were a danger to the Spanish. And the British and the French.

A Phoenician merchant ship was a bit different. Their warships quite a bit different. Shallow draft, raisable oars and rudder, etc. When placing colonies up and down the Iberia & African coast, they routinely pulled their ships onto shore, and placed their colonies exactly one day apart (rowing) so they could stay overnight on land, in shelters. At least, for warships.

For their merchant ships, they had a smaller boat (though we don't know if it was fastened, mounted, or towed) that they used for shipping freight to non-tidal docks rather than approach to closely. The greeks called their merchant ships 'tubs' and described them as wallowing :)

I don't think the merchant ships could survive in the open atlantic... but their smaller warships, while built completely differently, actually somewhat resembled the Viking longships... (it actually took me two or three days to reluctantly give up on the idea of a cross-pollination of ship building ideas from Scandia to Phoenicia, but they are built different, and there are *no* examples anywhere in the spaces between them)

Anyway - the religious ideas here were sufficient for me to start the timeline :) I used the Phoenicians, and will shift their religion shortly (in the TL)

Thanks! :)
 
Religions despite what they claim have always been based on wealth in some way.

I think that's overstating it somewhat. Religion began as a means of explaining the otherwise inexplicable. It is true that in most, though not all, religious traditions, sooner or later leaders notice that they can use the beliefs their people have developed to control people and empower themselves. I won't say the wealth isn't an end in itself, as it certainly becomes that in most cases. But I think the power is more important, and even then, some religions never get that far.

Mind you, I'm not saying I think the hypothetical religion we're discussing here won't go that far. In fact, I think it's almost a guarantee it will. It's one thing to believe that we can all commune with the spirits to apologize for killing a deer or persuade them to make the rain fall. But the religion we've devised here has an all-powerful deity that operates on a reward/punishment system and a class of priests who can interpret His will for other people. The original priests who used their power to persuade people to make lots of babies and be excellent to each other may have had their people's interests at heart, but things will get corrupted in time.

The religion we've devised will probably not be an Abrahamic faith. I don't know anything about the traditional religion or religions of the Phoenicians, so I don't know what kind of deities or priestly class they'll be starting with. But if they've gotten as far as having a deity who has demands and issues punishments, and a written holy book codifying what is demanded of them, then I think the effects will be the same. This is ostensibly a religion of peace--but so are Christianity and Islam, and I don't think I need to spell out that train of thought.
 
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