Mobile People, Mobile God: Mobile Societies, Monotheism, and the Effects of Ecological Landscapes on the Development of Ancient Religions

Implications and Further Questions

While it is interesting to consider the effects of the natural environment on the development of very ancient religions, this research bears real implications for our modern world. To claim that ancient humans, as biological beings, would have been affected psychologically by their respective ecological cradles seems no great revolution. I suggest that this research is eminently relevant to modern humans because we continue to be affected by natural and built environments. Our modern minds and bodies are shaped, partly, in pragmatic response to spaces in which we develop individually and collectively. I position this research and writing as one call for more work to be done to understand the effects of our environments on our minds and ways of thinking. This call for scholarship – for understanding – comes, not accidentally, at a time when the implications of human psychological responses to the environment are particularly unsettling. As the tide of human-caused climate change begins to flood our societies and world, how too might the currents of an unraveling biosphere affect our minds? If the development of a mobile deity and mobile society was the pragmatic response of a people to agriculturally marginal landscapes, what economic, social, and religious constructs might be borne of ecological devastation?

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