To tie things up...
Societies and their development are negatively affected by the loss of cultural foundations and ideologies of a belief system through its need to survive and cultural diffusion, which leads to belief systems becoming something they were never intended to be by the founders. The rules of the religion are known throughout ancient communities as laws that each must follow. These expectations were derived from the culture’s views on what was most important in life. For an example, people who practiced ancestor worship in ancient China believed that honoring your deceased family members was crucial for the living’s good fortunes and success. Taoism also reflected its ancient culture’s views by its great emphasis on nature and living in harmony with it. In ancient India, Hinduism compiled the society’s views on social relationships with the economic duties of certain castes by determining a person’s occupation and whom they would associated, with based upon their ranking in the caste system. But while belief systems at their forming mirrored their society’s core values, they were forced to change to maintain followers to give life to their ideals. Between cultural diffusion between societies and events unforeseen by the founders inside the civilizations themselves, belief systems either had to change or be lost. Belief systems like ancestor worship were able to combine their traditions with other religions, such as Taoism and Confucianism, to survive. But this led to the degrading of important aspects to ancestor worship such as their rituals. Like Hinduism, ancestor worship was forced to make the rituals—which served as a reminder to the people of the strong filial piety they stood for—less vital the practice of the religion as a whole. This was not what the founders intended to happen to their belief systems. Most religions were meant to the “lens” through which people viewed the world and made their decisions. For the societies these religions supported, the mixing or drastic change to the belief system decreased its value in comparison with others (because many of them had the same ideals) and thus decreasing its influential capability in the people’s lives. Also, the more a belief system changes, the more sects branch off of it in accordance or disagreement with these changes that create a less unified, stable belief system (like the many sects of Taoism). Although this is predominantly bad in most religions, there are a few exceptions. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were all able to grow substantially since their founding, adapt to a wide variety of cultures as they spread, and still maintain their over-all core beliefs from their beginnings while having differing sects. The reason they were able to minimize their amount of change in relation to most other belief systems lies in their enormous sizes and their unique (at the time, and now predominant today) belief in one God, instead of many, who controlled all life and aspects of the world, who cared for their people’s fate, and who were all-forgiving, loving, and who would watch over you personally. But what must be remembered is that belief systems in which change over time for a society is a positive thing are rare. The fate of many societies is that their belief systems adapt to current times so much that they cease to uphold the people’s original, core ideals that made up the society in the first place. Eventually belief systems fade away, to be replaced by another belief system, adopted from another society, with ideals that were never the people’s own.