RE: Agnostics
August 5, 2016 at 3:52 pm
(This post was last modified: August 5, 2016 at 7:41 pm by Whateverist.)
I don't really care what "god" means but I am interested in what it is which led people to believe in what are now referred to as "gods" nearly everywhere and for as long as we've been recognizably human. I'm also interested in what if any formative effect such belief may have played in our development.
Gods as ethereal subjects with thoughts and feelings who bring substantial things into existence seem absurd. In fact, that description of gods strikes me as a primitive attempt by humans to conceptualize what they don't recognize to be an aspect of their own experience. It is the capacity of people to experience themselves as being in a dynamic relationship to a deity which interests me, not how they conceptualize the experience after the fact when they are in their 'right mind'.
Modern religious experience seems to be almost solely involved with the conceptualization of gods, not the direct experience of interacting with them. Even the xtians who participate in speaking in tongues are interacting with what are conceptually held and doctrinally prescribed ways. It isn't what our neolithic forebears experienced, though maybe it taps into that. Don't know.
Gods as ethereal subjects with thoughts and feelings who bring substantial things into existence seem absurd. In fact, that description of gods strikes me as a primitive attempt by humans to conceptualize what they don't recognize to be an aspect of their own experience. It is the capacity of people to experience themselves as being in a dynamic relationship to a deity which interests me, not how they conceptualize the experience after the fact when they are in their 'right mind'.
Modern religious experience seems to be almost solely involved with the conceptualization of gods, not the direct experience of interacting with them. Even the xtians who participate in speaking in tongues are interacting with what are conceptually held and doctrinally prescribed ways. It isn't what our neolithic forebears experienced, though maybe it taps into that. Don't know.
