The ancient Egyptian culture recognized a spiritual existence as demonstrated through mummification and sending along items for everyday comfort, even mummifying pets for the departed. Well, from our vantage point 2000 years later we can see it all seems a bit ridiculous. Yet this belief system was in vogue from 3100 BC to 30 BC; more than three thousand years. What will be said of Christianity and Islam two thousand years from now?
In 323 AD, a council of learned religious leaders met in Nicaea and codified Christianity, that was 300 years after the fact, after the principals lived. It would be as though today, in 2022, a group of theologians got together and gathered texts from the Bible, the Koran, and maybe some from Buddhist and Hindu scripture and delivered a new set of religious doctrine as would have been expounded by the Great Enlightenment of 1700 (or so). It isn't far-fetched, it happened then and it could again. The results would be the same as that of the Egyptians, reasonable, logical, consoling but not at all the way it really is.
