I'm Certain Religions Came From Dark Nights

What has always interested me is the daily life of humans both today and in prehistory. That is, what do humans do with the time between sleeping, what do they eat, what do they wear, how to they earn enough to stay alive and what do they think about? Billions of people living their lives set the direction of humans on the planet.

What humans do with their time between sleeping inevitably determines in part what they think about. For some years there has been a saying, "We are what we eat." Another powerful saying is "We are what we think about."    

As more information is found about indigenous peoples in North, Central and South America the more we may be learning about prehistory humans. Something interesting to me related to religion is the art of storytelling. If one thinks about humans since they came on the scene about 300,000 years ago, we have to realize that for most of human existence there was no light after the sun went down. Thus, several hours a day were spent in darkness. In movies portraying "primitive life" after dark there is always torch. But the expense of a torch and its smoke had to rule this out most of the time. People lived several hours every day in the dark. These many hours in the dark had to have been spent doing enjoyable things, games, singing and storytelling. 

Story telling is discussed quite a bit in literature about indigenous Americans. Some people excelled at the art. Surely, storytelling after dark was an important entertainment for all humans over most of their 300,000 years. It would be reasonable that the best story tellers and the best stories were requested the most. If people had questions like, "Where did we come from?", "What causes lightning and thunder?", "Is there anything in the sky beyond what we can see?" and "Are there beings we cannot see?" why would not a good storyteller fill in an answer with gripping, creative and believable tales? We'd expect a good story to be on minds of listeners the next day.

Over the centuries, stories after dark changed as societies changed. To me, the origin of Greek gods, Hindu gods and even the God in Christianity is storytelling after dark. A good and believable story became a story repeated as fact in day light. We know the difference between dreams/visions and observable events was different than it is in modern times. Today, the majority of people do not treat dreams/visions as real historical events. It is easy to conclude a storyteller after dark telling of his dreams/vision left audiences thinking they had learned historical facts.