Methodology — the Feynman framing

Religions are like languages: they share stories either because they're related (descent), because they borrowed (contact), or because human minds reinvent the same answers (convergence). This vault traces each major religion and each shared myth back to its earliest evidence and classifies which of the three it is.

People everywhere have always died, dreamed, gotten sick, watched storms, and needed their group to stick together. Religion looks like the toolkit humans invented — many times, in many places — to handle those things: it explains scary events, makes strangers trustworthy, marks who belongs, and makes rules feel bigger than any one person. Because all humans share the same brains and the same problems, the stories rhyme: great floods, dying-and-returning gods, sky fathers, underworld journeys.

The language analogy: Icelandic and German sound alike because they share an ancestor (descent). Icelandic has "tékka" because it borrowed from English (contact). Every language independently invented a ma- word for mother because babies' mouths work the same everywhere (convergence). Tracing a myth is exactly like tracing a word.

Rule: only classes 1–2 ground an attestation_earliest. Claims resting on 3–5 alone are labeled speculative.

Durkheim (cohesion) · Norenzayan "Big Gods" (cooperation enforcement) · Malinowski (anxiety reduction) · Boyer/Barrett (cognitive by-product) · legitimation/identity-marking. Tradition notes tag observed functions per theory; no theory is the house view.

1. Descent / contact / convergence is the master classification — "common origin" is tested per-motif, never assumed.

2. Emic (self-account) and etic (evidence) never merge.

3. Every origin claim: earliest attestation + evidence class, or speculative.

4. A synthesis that can't be explained simply contains a gap → file an open question.