How did current religions start?

Hall, a freemason philosopher covers a degree of this in the Secret Teachings of All Ages:

www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/

The book is written in the 1920's and has some issues with quoting sources along with the absence of research development from the past 100 years. However with those premises giving context to his work it is worth a one time read...at minimum.

The issues of religion comes from a need for ritual within the human condition, with the ritual providing a means through which perception to transformed. The ritual, under religion, is an objective psychological tool that quite literally gives dimension to our understanding and perspective by directing it's angle of awareness.

In this manner an inherent geometry occurs within the human psyche in regards to the "spiritual experience" as much of the abstract intuitive/emotional elements take on a formless nature through the means in which they are directed. In simpler terms a ritual can be equated to a riverbed with the experience being the flow of the water. Experiences, under these terms are actualized through the ritual.

Regardless of the means or manner of the ritual, we can observe that is not just created by the human element but the prophets themselves. Those from which we gain a religious revelation are always human. Humanity seems to reveal not just the nature of God but itself through the act of prophecy and religious interpretation. In this manner that act of interpretting God's will takes on the role of forming a covenant with God, whether we intend to or not, by applying specific boundaries through which we interact.

As extensions, or images of the Creator, we replicate certain characteristics in this case the act of measurement where we apply various boundaries to reality in an effort to either maintain and/or form it. In these respects morality, through the act of measurement, takes on a role of maintaining/forming a reality that works congruently with the creation God has made. In these respects, humanity takes on the role of steward as a proxy of God where he forms the realities by which he/she is judged by.

Further we form the judgements from which we are judged as the systems of ritual and furthermore acts/perspective inevitably give structure to who we are...for good or bad. This mirrors the intradimensional nature of the Creater as that which forms itself through an act of self-reflection and whose judgements are just due to this mirroring nature.

lamburk  knowed it!

Wikipedia has fake buddhism. Buddha was a prince, from central asian, of scythian/saka tribes. And he was far too racist. He derived his ancestry directly from the manu smriti and vedas, and then, changed his name from siddhartha to gautam, because, he came to know that his origins are from sage gautama. Here, we can see, buddha or siddharatha, actually was trying to revive the racial ancestry of the aryan order.

He was not a social reformer, contrary to popular belief, he was more of racist person, and even asked the princess and ruling classes females to take progenies from superior overlords. This is real buddha.

www.hinduhumanrights.info/buddha-the-great-caste-reformist/

The Buddha also didn’t believe in gender equality. For long he refused to recruit buddha11women into his monastic order, saying that nuns would shorten its life-span by five hundred years. At long last he relented when his mother was widowed and other relatives, nobly-born Kshatriyas like the Buddha himself, insisted. Nepotism wasn’t alien to him either. But he made this institution of female monastics conditional upon the acceptance that even the most seasoned nun was subordinate to even the dullest and most junior monk. Some Theravada countries have even re-abolished the women’s monastic order, and it is only under Western feminist influence that Thailand is gradually reaccepting nuns.

What everyone sees in the name of any of the eastern philosophy are cock tailed versions, sugar coated, not the facts.

buddhism, in indian subcontinent was revived when britishers came here, because, they wanted to get rid of themselves from the oppression of the elites and ruling classes, and majority of these people were the slaves.

And because, they are not educated people, they created their own version, as social reformer's etc. 

However, when buddhism was anihilated  from subcontinent, because, many of the mongloid tribes and plebians started making it as a state patronage, the brahmans of those era created brahmanism, which is crypto buddhism. In short, the brhamanism which got developed is extension of buddhism, but, named as advaita philosophy etc.

The pontiffs of these philosophers, who are authority on advaita, dvaita and authentic monastic tradition, know everything in detail, though they don't let the common masses know about these things.

The Buddha too may have conceived of his personal practice as restored-Vedic and more Vedic than the “decadent” formalism around him. “Back to the roots” is of all ages, and it may have affected the Buddha as well. What speaks in favour of this thesis is that the Buddha himself, far from being a revolutionary, appealed to the “ancient way” which he himself trod, and which “the Buddhas of the past” had also trodden.

After Vedic tradition got carried away into what he deemed non-essentials, he intended to restore what he conceived as the original Vedic spirit. After all, the anti-Vedicism and anti-Brahmanism now routinely attributed to him, are largely in the eye of the modern beholder. Though later Brahmin-born Buddhist thinkers polemicized against Brahmin institutions and the idolizing of the Veda, the Buddha himself didn’t mind attributing to the Vedic gods Indra and Brahma his recognition as the Buddha and his mission to teach. His disciples took the worship of the Vedic gods as far as Japan.

All the information in Wikipedia, at least the facets I observed are sourced.  What are your sources?