What is the oldest religion.?

Well there is evidence the Aborigines worshiped a form of God over 60,000 years ago.

There were gods before there were people here. I believe the Sumerians were the first in recorded history. The gods were directly involved with the people at this time. The people worshiped them in temples erected for a particular god who ruled over his domain. When the gods would get into sibling rivalry, the people would go to war for them.

There was no religion at this time. It was only after all the gods left this earth or died out, that religion was established.

It is my understanding that the Gnostics were the first to elicit spiritual awareness and knowledge of One God above. It is difficult to really know the origin of religion, since the very word was not even a concept back then.

Peace and Blessings

Up until very recently, like just this year (2006), Hinduism was held to be the world's oldest religion, at least the oldest that is still in practice today. Hindu religious texts, the Vedas, are the oldest known written works on Earth and are seen by some scholars and theologians to be the basis for all contemporary religions. The estimates on just how old range anywhere from 5000 to 20,000 years old.

Probably the animism of the Khoi and San peoples of South West Africa. They still use symbols that are seen on rock drawings that are 60,000 to 70,000 years old. Also these people are genetically closest to the original human stock.

There are Neanderthal burials showing evidence of religious ritual (at Shandihar, among others).

This means 'religion' was around before modern humans.

The earliest religions were probably practised by proto-hominids - maybe they were even developed by monkeys.

But we evolved past that.

Well, atheism, ancestor worship and worshiping one over-weight goddess figure or another are probably the big three. Polytheism comes with a little more complexity, and the big four current religions wouldn't come around for another 180,000 years.

Still practiced today, Hindus and the Parsi/Zoroastrians both have a claim to being the oldest religion still in existence.

Oldest ever was probably an animist pagan religion.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_oldest_known...

the truth is that nobody knows,

logically, since the mesopotamians are the first human civilization they had the first religion.

what it is interesting, is that the place described in the Bible as Garden of Eden, is close if not in, Mesopotamia.

Dreamtime Creation Mythology.

More than 40 thousand years of the same Creation Myths and songlines.

Animism.

It's funny how people are saying Christianity, do you people not realize we know when Christ was born, assuming he actually existed? Weren't a lot of Christians before Christ, which you could probably figure out if you thought about it for a bit.