Background: I have always been deeply interested in religion since I told my mom I didn't believe in God as we drove by a church when I was three. Right now I pray and pretend to talk to (an idiosyncratic) God throughout the day. (Specifically, I believe in an unknowable creator of the universe, and I pretend to know him.)

After hearing about it in a college lecture and learning more about it, I diagnosed myself with Geschwind syndrome, something that happens in people with temporal lobe epilepsy, presumably onset in me by a freak seizure while I was either very young or in the womb. I've also identified a few other phenomena that contribute to my personality (schizotypalism, incomplete infantile pruning of neural connection, life long alienation/child neglect, neuro-phenotypes from neanderthal admixture).

This is the mentioned lecture, dealing with the biological underpinnings of religion, if you haven't already seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI

Anyway, my question is: do you have any thoughts on how religion began?

Aside from what is talked about in the lecture (the TL;DW is that schizophrenics are less important in the origin of religion than schizotypal relatives, who are more likely to hallucinate things in a non-maladaptive, context-appropriate way), I've looked a little bit into that tulpa thing, and my conclusion is that some of the people do develop a personality that they can hear talking to them.

What I am thinking lately is that it's the same phenomenon for normal people talking to gods in the past. I don't think people in the past were more likely to schizophrenic, I think normal people can hear god-tulpas, and they did in the past more because:

a.) most people around them would corroborate that supernatural beings talk to humans, like a torch lighting a torch, and b.) their primitive understanding of the universe made it more intuitive to think the voices were external from themselves instead of coming from within.

Also, I recently began reading for the first time in my life and have been doing it for hours every day. Just putting it out there that if you have any books recommendations on the subject (or any other I might be interested in) that'd be cool.