Thread: The claim that Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion is incorrect. First of all, Hinduism is more accurately described not as a religion in the same sense as Christianity, Judaism or Islam, but rather an umbrella term for the belief systems, cults, and philosophies...

...of India that do not reject the authority of the Vedas. Even this fails to truly encompass Hinduism, as most folk forms of Hinduism care little about the Vedas at all.
If you study Hinduism you will quickly realise how mind bogglingly vague the term is, and how diverse...

...that which it stands for is.
However what is important to realise is that the philosophies, rituals, devotions, mythology etc that can be identified with modern forms of Hinduism derive from the post-Buddhist era. The India that Siddharta Gautama was born into in was...

...one of societal and religious upheaval. The established religious order was that of the Brahmins, the priestly caste, who officiated religious ceremonies and passed down the Vedic hymns orally amongst their lineages.

The Vedic religion was centred on the worship of Indira and the fire god Agni. Fire sacrifices, ritual dances, and soma drink (probably a type of hallucinogen), the chanting of hymns etc, were the norm in the developing urban areas where urbanisation and centralised...

...political order was becoming more established, alongside rural animism (worship of guardian deities associated with nature spirits). During the 5th and 7th centuries BC, this order was beginning to break down in light of critiques based on the Upanishads.

Reform movements started to crop up, and people began living as hermits in the forests, travelling as beggars etc. Many of these movements were later absorbed back into what would become popular Indian religion, but others gradually separated themselves...

...(ie Buddhism and Jainism) even though they were seen as internal affairs. These movements facilitated sweeping changes in the Vedic religion, as devotionalism to various and new deities began to grow, civil rulers drew up law codes, and various schools of philosophy...

...sprung up that looked back to the Upanishads as the gold standard, but also to the newer religious expressions. Between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD, the Hindu synthesis occurred, where all these factors came together among the groups who didn’t reject the Vedas.

It is in this time that we see the origin of devotions to deities like Krishna, and also the creation of core Hindu texts like the Mahabharata (and therefore the Gita), the Ramayana, various newer Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra, etc, while the Buddhists, Jains etc diverged further.

It is only from here on that we can find a recognisable religio-cultural milieus comparable to modern Hinduism. What came before (Brahmin-dominated fire sacrifice etc) was subsumed into and adapted to exist within the new paradigm(s).

2000 years ago Agni was the second most important Indian divinity, at the very heart of the most central act of worship back then. Nowadays, Agni has been subsumed into other deities, or otherwise lingers on only as an internalised reality and a few Hindu festivals and rituals...

...but it is nothing like what came before. In conclusion, Hinduism is not the world’s oldest religion.
Those who claim it is do so either repeating what they’ve heard, or to support their agenda, or because they see more continuity with the Vedic period than there was.