DAUGHTER OF KURA

I am especially interested in how religious beliefs have come to be so nearly ubiquitous. When did belief in the supernatural begin? Why? How did these ideas spread? Sometime during human evolution, people became prone to strongly held beliefs that directly contradicted their own senses. An amazing example is the belief that consciousness persists after death. Even our earliest ancestors must have understood that no one ever woke up again after the body decayed, and yet, most people believe that humans have a non-corporeal spirit that persists after death. More than twenty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnons buried their dead with tools and decorative objects, apparently expecting them to come in handy. What about the ancestors who came before them? Why do religious beliefs come to us so naturally?

Daughter of Kura explores the earliest stirrings of religious beliefs. Somewhere, someone was the first person to spell out the idea of a supernatural power, of life after death, of an individual spirit separate from one’s body. Who was it? Why did those ideas catch on? Were there conflicts between the believers and the unbelievers? I want to know how that first proselyte convinced the second, and how everyone else reacted.