Are they? Seems to me that Xy got along swimmingly for hundreds of years without scriptures...
seems like we are almost living on parallel historical time lines.
you know I actually understand the naturalistic idea of believing in God without the burden of doctrine or text. perhaps by watching the works of God through the movements of the stars, the change of seasons and other nature-phenomena.
however, the major religions of the world have been administrating an organized society by putting the times, challenges, and events of their people on text and by writing how their people maintained their societies in their geographic conditions by writing it down.
these would go for the contemporary middle eastern societies during the biblical times as well. if its for the sake of agriculture and irrigation, the flooding of the Nile, military expeditions, or political debates.
Every major religion, from Hinduism and Buddhism, to Judaism and Christianity, has taken existing challenges and wrote them down on paper.
these are the same people we would call the men of prehistory, who had an a more abstract and natural world view a short few millennia before that.
the same middle eastern men, who would be considered law bearers.
as for your comment on Christianity, if you want to say that for the first centuries, the Christian believers did not adhere to an official canon, it is not accurate. the first Christians held the Jewish Bible as scripture, and that is until the councils decided which of the existing gospels are to be gathered into a canon, and which are to be labled apocrypha.
