Not necessarily.

@Storm1752 yes necessarily.

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@Storm1752 why wouldn't a small tribe count as a society?

an individual can believe in a god but it's usually a god someone else created. theology or no theology, that doesn't matter. the question was about fear of god, not organization.

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@genessa is that true. Defined broadly enough, "god" can be anything. The sun. The universe. RELIGION comes from a collective memory born of oral traditions,: heroic stories, mixed with creative imaginative embellishment and exaggeration and whatnot. But the original impulse to try to explain the unexplainable might be there in everyone.

@Storm1752 i don't think you and i are talking about the same thing. i stand by what i have said, at any rate.

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@Matias There I disagree with because I have 8 domestic hens and 1 Rooster, 2 of them ARE the original females whilst 6 are the off-spring of the 2 females and 1 Rooster, they have a social order, they are related, they have no need of religion but they form their own social structure.

So how do you explain that?

@Matias Yes, but modern studies are usually done using MODERN Ideologies as the base point, are they not?
For example, An Archeologist digs up an object that may or may not have been a votive offering from perhaps 3,000 years ago.
The object is cleaned, examined, compared to similar objects found elsewhere in that region and, quite naturally, 1+1 is mentally added together and, voila, it suddenly becomes an item offered to a God/Goddess simply because that is what the modern trend leads towards.
We really have little or no actual idea as to how, what and why our earlier predecessors did, thought and behaved, we are simply guessing, slightly educated, based on modern behaviours, trends and assumptions derived from them.
One salient point that comes to mind is the one, recorded by Champilon himself btw, was when he announced he had "found the key to unlock the writings on the Rosetta Stone" he was handed by the Archbishop of Paris a Papal Edict ORDERING him to NOT publish any translations that could be harmful to the Church, modern beliefs, etc, and he MUST ensure that his translations of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs MUST paint the view that the Egyptians were little more than barbaric Heathens. IF he didn't do as ordered his entire family would be excommunicated and he would be imprisoned for life.
This, like numerous other ideologies, has had and still has reverberations and influences throughout the Archeological world continuing to this very day.
So, I hope that you see the point I'm trying to get across here, WE do NOT know precisely the truth about our most ancient of ancestors/predecessors, we merely guess based upon what influences prevail at the time.

Agreed.

@Matias An "explanation?" That's a strange way of putting. It. Religion "explains" the existence of a city? A city forms for commerce at a place where goods are exchanged. Religion can "explain" why people exist to begin with, but the free-enterprise system, which must predate even religion, explains the existence of complex societies much better!

@Storm1752 Religion only offers up a completely unfounded and unbased hypothesis as to WHY people began to exist, etc, etc.
To even claim religious commentaries are 'anecdotal' is, imho, a vast STRETCH of anyone's imagination.
It is extremely similar to the old 'Telephone message experiments' where I tell you a particular thing and you then tell someone else, etc, etc, down along the line and through a hundred or more mouths it goes and grows until the original because embellished that it cannot be sifted from the fictional embellishments when the whole thing finally comes back to its point of origin.
It is an experiment really worth trying and the result almost always turn out the same.

Religion comes first, then some manipulate it. Religion begins as oral traditions passed down and AT SOME POINT is codified. As a fluid body of songs, poems, old hero stories, etc., it is always changing with the times. Once it is written down. It solidifies. At that point it csn be interpreted into law and msnipulated. It's no different than a gun used by a righteous warrior ir a mass murderer: same gun, much different result.

Societies don't just appear out of thin air. As societies absorb peoples, they co-opt their religious belief systens into the dominant religions, like Christianity took existing myths, mystery religions, zoroastrianism, greek and roman pagan dieties, and many others, threw them all in a pot with Judaism, and voila! The water walker appeared! Later they mixed in northern European gods and traditions. As time went on they continue to change.But after the Councils of Trent and Nicea, not as fast.
So as societies grow, theur religions change to accomodate those whom they absorb.. To a point.