It took me some time to realise what the origin of human belief systems is. However, after I had read the Wikipedia page on Inuit religion, one day I suddenly had the idea that the origin of religion and religious story-telling might simply largely be rooted in the sentiment of fear. Religions tend to emphasise, in one or another way, fear of a single deity or many deities, and very often fear of other strange creatures as well, such as demons or ghosts. The sentiment of fear solved a large part of the puzzle for me as to where beliefs, or superstitions if you will, come from. This is, of course, not to ignore the cultural function that these beliefs may have, as religions are not isolated from cultures but religions and cultures traditionally come in pairs. However, the overlap between belief/superstition and fear is an important finding that might help to explore the origin and essence of religion.
F. Hadland Davis expresses a similar understanding coupled with a strong intellectual desire to explore the origin and essence of religion just over a hundred years ago when he wrote in his book about the sacred narratives of Japanese folk religion better known as Shinto:
The subject of Japanese superstition is of special importance, because it serves to indicate the channel by which many myths and legends, but more particularly folk-lore, have evolved. Superstition [i.e. fear] is, as it were, the raw material out of which innumerable strange beliefs are gradually fashioned into stories, and an inquiry into the subject will show us the peasant mind striving to counteract certain supernatural forces, or to turn them to advantage in every-day life. [...] It is scarcely necessary to point out that these superstitions, selected from a vast store of quaint beliefs, are necessarily of a primitive kind and must be regarded, excluding, perhaps, those associated with the classic art of divination, as peculiar to the more ignorant classes in Japan.
[Japanese superstitions, p. 302 of Myths and Legends of Japan by F. Hadland Davis, freely available at Gutenberg Project]Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with the last sentence of the quote above, the important point to note is that Japanese superstition is probably largely rooted in fear. What the author regards as "primitive" is perhaps the close association with human emotion, particularly that of fear. If the world's religions are rooted in human emotion, particularly that of fear, then it is no wonder that all human indigenous religions would routinely be labelled as "primitive" from a traditional Western perspective, altough Western religion is by no means free from this emotional experience that gave rise to not only religion and mythology but also art, philosophy, and culture. Humans are a unity of the emotional and intellectual, the mind and the heart, the irrational and rational. Some religions emphasise one more than the other, and some religions verbalise beliefs more than other religions. To take Japanese indigenous religion as an example, this religion tends to emphasise experience and feeling more than expression of belief, which makes it appear more primitive in the eyes of the traditional Western observer who is more used to the verbosity of Western religion.
Being totally open to the experience of emotion is somewhat strange to Westerners, because they are particularly prone to hide, deny, and suppress their emotions. Control of emotions, which involves the frontal part of the brain, is what is encouraged in Western culture, and emotionality is generally looked down upon. The Western spirit is essentially at war with the emotional part of itself, while it seeks to entirely replace it with its rational part. The emotional or irrational, as the opposite of the intellectual or rational, then inevitably has a bad connotation to traditional Western minds. The struggle with the emotional self that is characteristic of the West stems from the Western "either-or" mind-set which seeks to contrast things and deny one thing in favour of another thing.
However, the prevailing mind-set in the East, and to a lesser extent pretty much the rest of the world, is a "both-and" mind-set which seeks to embrace opposites simultaneously if that is deemed to serve practical or cultural purposes, such as ensuring group survival or maintaining harmony within a group. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Eastern religion - while the numerous indigenous religions around the world invariably tend to follow this example in one or another way - experiences and makes use of emotion much more freely than Western religion, although the latter by no means lacks emotion but simply only seeks to hide, deny, or suppress it by means of a highly developed verbosity. In this light, the verbosity of Western relgion may be seen as a shield or facade.
Pre-Christian indigenous European religions, such as the surviving pagan religion of the Mari, nevertheless, tend to be more tuned in to emotions while placing less emphasis on verbosity. As in Japanese folk religion, ritual and practice tend to be more the centre-point of religious life/focus in these pre-Christian religions. This is, perhaps, also why Japanese as well as other ethno-religious groups around the world may feel uncomfortable with the term "religion" which makes them think of Western religion, and feel a preference for alternative terms, such as "way" or "spirituality." What these people may well seek to express through this distinction is the emotion-embracing quality of their indigenous religions as opposed to the emotion-denying quality of Western religion.
The non-Western emotion-embracing indigenous religions may seem primitive to Western observers for the very simple reason that they do not hide, deny, or suppress emotionality as Westerners are accustomed to in their own culture and religion. Strictly speaking, Christianity is not a Western religion in that it originates in the Middle East, but for the sake of simplicity, I speak of Christianity as a Western religion because even though belief in Christianity has been steadily declining in the West over the past decades after the end of WWII, it is currently still the prime example of Western religiosity. The ultimate expression of the inclination towards verbosity in Western religion is the sermon, and it is interesting to note that as there is the sermon in the Church, there is the speech or nowadays presentation in the Western business world. The typical emphasis on the verbal expression of ideas is, of course, also present in the Western business world, and thus the speech or presentation serves a similar practical purpose as the sermon in the Church.
For this reason, anthropologists have also suggested that Western culture is a low-context culture, i.e. a culture where everything has to be explicitly expressed, whereas Eastern culture, and pretty much all other cultures of the world, are high-context cultures, i.e. cultures where things are usually implicit. It has to be kept in mind, though, that we are talking about a relative rather than an absolute distinction when it comes to low-context and high-context cultures, because cultures which are defined as low-context cultures may, quite obviously, occasionally show characteristics of high-context cultures and vice versa. There is clearly some overlap.
Nevertheless, a good example of this implicit expression of ideas is when you are at a Chinese friend's home and you tell them that you are hungry. They will immediately assume that they should cook you dinner, and thus telling them that you are hungry is enough for them to understand that they should cook dinner for you. However, in Western culture one usually has to ask a guest explicitly: Would you like to eat dinner with us?
As non-Westerners are simply unlike Westerners in their manner of expression and hence of thinking, the perhaps unique inclination of the West towards explicit expression may also have contributed to the idea that non-Western peoples are somehow "primitive" by default, which, in that context, may have to be interpreted as an expression of the Western sentiment that other peoples lacked and/or are strange to Western values, norms, and habits. This sentiment may, of course, have translated to a sense of Western cultural pride, and even cultural supremacy, although this "native vs. alien" world-perception is by no means strange among human populations. Tribes can identify themselves and the Other, and this, in a cultural and practical context, may aid them in their survival. Doubtless, this sentiment of "self vs. Other" may have historically aided the West, and may be seen in a neutral context despite modern negative historical connotations, because it can be traced to the same tribal awareness that we see in other peoples around the world today.
This awareness of self and Other can, no doubt, potentially be abused or exploited for bad ends, but its cultural function is not to be ignored. As fascinating as the human awareness of the self and the Other may be, I believe that it is still the duty of the scientist to remove such biases, perhaps by means of using some relativistic perspective such as is common practice in the social sciences. This does, however, not mean that a worldwide crusade against indigenous "ethnocentrism" (to use that somewhat negatively judgmental term) is necessary. I am simply saying that I believe that within the context of science, it may be desirable to be free from such biases, because it may hinder understanding of other cultures. Nevertheless, I also believe that peoples are free to believe what they want to believe, and if any people like most other peoples believes that it is somehow unique or better, then it does not necessarily ring alarm bells in my mind because this is quite normal around the world, and has historically also been quite normal, and may even have helped cultures to survive.
The vital point to be grasped here is that, on the one hand, Japanese folk religion (Shinto) and other indigenous religions may not be primitive by default while, on the other hand, (primarily republican) ideological paranoia about Western cultural misconceptions vis-a-vis foreign cultures as well as the cultural misconceptions of other cultures about foreign cultures may be quite unnecessary. Moreover, neither misplaced paranoia about cultural pride nor ill-based claims of primitivity are an aid to science. When we replace one popular bias (e.g. "others are primitive") with another bias (e.g. "those who think or say others are primitive have murderous intentions"), we are still not doing our scientific duty which is to study the world around us while liberating ourselves from biases.
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