(April 21, 2017 at 7:20 am)chimp3 Wrote: Thousands of years ago superstitious people created a god in their own image. Violent, jealous, genocidal, tyrannical, filicidal . They also were capable of caring for each other so they added love to their imaginary Sky Daddy's list of attributes.
In the 21st century we are asked to consider this an objective framework for moral reasoning.
Strange. The more I dwell on this the stranger it is.
It is easy in the west for skeptics to get stuck on the God/s of Abraham in Christianity, Jewish, and Islam, but the truth is tribal polytheism is what even the first of the three the Hebrews, were based on tribal Canaanites.
What I don't like about what gets ignored is that all of antiquity back then lived under ruling families, the Ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, even China and India, everyone lived under local city/states under class rule and everyone mistook their good fortune as coming from a divine place outside human control.
Not even the Greeks and Romans back then should be compared to our modern western governments. They didn't have back then the ability to remove their Caesar through impeachment, they either died, passed down the power to a family member or they got murdered by family or a political rival.
Back in all of antiquity worldwide, even in polytheism, the mortality rate was much higher, life was far harder and for the person who was not at the top it was far more expected to tow the tribal line. One can only argue that there were more tolerant periods depending and less tolerant periods depending.
But the motif of "divine right" is not unique to the gods of Abraham. Royal rule existed everywhere even in India and China and Rome and Greece.
