Creation of the Sacred by Burkert

Here is some quotes from the book I read.

"If religion was ever invented, it has managed to inflitrate practically all varieties of human cultures; in the course of history however, religion has never been demostrably reinvented but has always been there, carried on from generation to generation since time immemorial" (Burkert1)

"Founders of new religions, their creative achievement consisted in transforming, reversing, or rearranging existing patterns and elements which continue to carry an undeniable family resemblance to older forms.(Burkert 1, 2)
Yet there are impressive simliarities in their understanding and practice of religion, their myths, and their rituals, temples, and offerings.(Mesopotamian, Jewish, Greek, Roman)"(1)

The worldwide similarity of religious phenomena is easy to point out; they include ritual behavior appropiciate for venteration; the practice of offerings, sacrifices, vows, and prayers with reference to superior beings; and songs, tales, teachings and explainations about these beings and the worship they demand(3?)

Chimpanzees, for all their genetic closeness to man, have neither art nor religion(12). Cf. Plato Prot, 322a "man alone among animals has made the belief in gods manatory"

The basic hypothesis of sociobiology is the "coevolution of genes and culture, with constant feedback between the two(10)

There are clear traces of religious practice since the upper Paleolithic that can be brought into line with the attestal religious phenomenia(12) Cf. Burkert, 1979, 33f; 88-94

Still earlier, Neanderthals practiced ceremonial burial of the ; many think that religious ideas must have accompanied such activies about 100,000 years ago(12)

In a naive way, an explanation of religion as an expression of cultural fitness had already been advanced on the basis of social Darwinism(12)