If God hadn't invented religion, it would have been something very close.

Religion adapts to the people. People rarely adapt to a religion unless it makes sense in the local perceptions of life. Usually people cannot perceive of anything but a localized world causing adaptation of a useful variant of an available religious thought process.

Religion survives rather well functioning as the most powerful socialization device every imagined. If a human group could be found without a concept of "god" perhaps we would have some idea of an alternative to religion. Now, it appears, every society has religion. Ahmen.

Can you create a new major religion? Probably your timing is off for this year, but you have to be as good as the people in the paragraphs below.

Marten Luther, the great German Christian iconoclast, I'd be quite sure, know little, if anything, of Hindu or Shinto and couldn't give his followers any choices other than staying Christian under new interpretations of Christian mythology. In reality, these were warrior societies and I doubt any other religion would allow and control the basic violence, both inside and outside the group. Whether Marten Luther even considered his people were violent is doubtful: his people just were the normal people; And as everyone else would be inferior, the northern European life would be the only type of life acceptable. Would Marten Luther's religion be adaptable to India? I doubt they would have the perception of life to understand the structure and what activity it describes.

Muhammad, too, knew the process for creating a structure. As a trader along the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea, Muhammad was familiar with the monotheistic religions like Judaism and Christianity. Yet how he came up with Islam, a truly remarkable and Godly inspired structure, remains, to this day, extremely impressive.

The area intended, Arab lands from Mecca to the Persian empire at first, is not a wealthy area, although an abundance of sand is available. In the 500's the area was very fractured and basically lawless. When Medina invited Muhammad to tame things - sort of like the Dodge City mythology of the American western movement many centuries later - to a low roar, he had spent many years learning how to solve a situation involving chaos and bring order and knew what the intended demographic required to react properly to his structure.

If you read the history of the area at this time, the wars still continued unabated, many lead by Muhammad himself. The main point: Islam brought a peace to the many different sub-societies in their everyday lives. Muhammad never intended to change the Arabs from warriors to something else.

The use of Islam in other non-Arab countries requires a non-warrior interpretation of the Koran.

Back another 500 years for meetings of the Jesus apostles were deciding: Did you first have to become a Jew to become a Christian. We know now, of course, they decided you didn't have to go through an additional process. Carefully choosing their icons of incredibly lasting value and flexibility while somehow integrating the triad of the  "son, father, and holy spirit", these bunch of Jews carefully crafted a truly remarkable mythology that worked at the time of the Roman Empire and later for the invading warriors of the north nine hundred years later with lasting power into the 21st century.

If you have any comments on Asian or southern hemisphere religions I'd be very happy to hear from you.

All great religions meet the needs of its people, whether intellectual, warrior, or tribal, while doing it in a very entertaining, for the local group, manner. (And here is a good example of local precepts: in some religions music is the tool of the devil, while in others the only way to talk to God is through song. Oh dear, who is right, and should we fight?)