@Rival Since I never really answered your OP when I contributed to this thread earlier (really just questioning points made by one poster), this is my belated response.
I concur with elements of what
@Harel13 has been saying, inasmuch as pre-Abrahamic religion often lacked a developed theological system in the way that Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars thoroughly enquired into aspects of their faith, intellectually and systematically, and also apologetically.
Because of the Christian cultural assumptions that many sociologists and evolutionary psychologists bring to their field of study, often unconsciously, the focus of Western academia is too often premised around strongly theologically-based doctrinal religions.
The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar rightly noted that, in the grand-sweep of human history, this is too narrow a paradigm for properly studying the religious phenomenon, because it “
completely ignores the fact that for most of human history religions have had a very different shamanic-like form that lacks moral codes”.
These religions were much more about
doing than
believing, namely '
doing because its what our ancestors did'. The religions that arose from the so-called 'axial age', essentially offered a new definition, relative to many pagan traditions, of what it meant to be "religious". Roman religion, for example, had been largely amoral - it was about offering sacrifices to the gods, whereas morality was something within the field of philosophy and there was a pretty clear distinction between the two.
You can see this in the use of the very word 'religion'. There was a linguistic tussle in late antiquity over the precise definition of the Latin word
religio (from which we derive 'religion').
According to the pagan rhetorician Cicero (106 BC – 7 December 43 BC), 'religio' was derivative of 'relegere' ("to re-read") which entailed 'rote learning', meaning that to be 'religious' was to studiously and uncritically retain the ancestral Roman polytheistuc cultic traditions and customs of one's forefathers. Therefore in his dialogue, De natura deorum, one of the main interlocutors Aurelius Cotta, affirms: "
For my part a single argument would have sufficed , namely that it has been handed down to us by our ancestors...I think that I should defend those opinions which we have received from our ancestors about the immortal gods, and the cults and rites and religious duties. I myself will indeed defend them always and always have defended them" (Cic. Nat. D. 3.9).
The early fourth century church father Lactantius argued, on the other hand, that religion was not derived from relegere "to re-read" but on the contrary from the root ligo "to bind", that is to to intellectually and emotionally bind oneself to what one believed to be the 'truth', whether or not it happened to be ancestral or time-immemorial. Thus he wrote: "
Wherefore, since wisdom — that is, the inquiry after truth — is natural to all, they deprive themselves of wisdom, who without any judgment approve of the discoveries of their ancestors, and like sheep are led by others" (
Divine Institutes, Book II).
And so, in this vein, Lactantius commented on the difference - as he saw it - between the type of 'religion' exhibited by Christianity and the quite conflicting variety evident in Greco-Roman paganism of the time:
CHURCH FATHERS: Divine Institutes, Book IV (Lactantius) (newadvent.org)
"The worship of the gods, as I have taught in the former book, does not imply wisdom; not only because it gives up man, who is a divine animal, to earthly and frail things, but because nothing is fixed in it which may avail for the cultivation of the character and the framing of the life; nor does it contain any investigation of the truth, but only the rite of worship, which does not consist in the service of the mind, but in the employment of the body.
And therefore that is not to be deemed true religion, because it instructs and improves men by no precepts of righteousness and virtue....
Since, therefore, as I have said, philosophy and the religious system of the gods are separated, and far removed from each other; seeing that some are professors of wisdom, through whom it is manifest that there is no approach to the gods, and that others are priests of religion, through whom wisdom is not learned; it is manifest that the one is not true wisdom, and that the other is not true religion. Therefore philosophy was not able to conceive the truth, nor was the religious system of the gods able to give an account of itself, since it is without it.
But where wisdom is joined by an inseparable connection with religion, both must necessarily be true; because in our worship we ought to be wise, that is, to know the proper object and mode of worship, and in our wisdom to worship, that is, to complete our knowledge by deed and action.
Where, then, is wisdom joined with religion? There, indeed, where the one God is worshipped, where life and every action is referred to one source, and to one supreme authority: in short, the teachers of wisdom are the same, who are also the priests of God.
Nor, however, let it affect any one, because it often has happened, and may happen, that some philosopher may undertake a priesthood of the gods; and when this happens, philosophy is not, however, joined with religion; but philosophy will both be unemployed amidst sacred rites, and religion will be unemployed when philosophy shall be treated of. [Otherwise] observance is by the hand and the fingers, not by the heart and tongue, as is the case with ours, which is true. Therefore religion is contained in wisdom, and wisdom in religion."