RE: Why, God? Why?!
February 13, 2018 at 4:43 pm
(This post was last modified: February 13, 2018 at 6:32 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(February 13, 2018 at 4:12 pm)Khemikal Wrote: As a minor quip..it's meaningless to talk about "God" in a singular sense or insist that it must have specific attributes x to be acceptable -as- a god. There were goddesses. There were gods who were born. There were limited gods. There were causally ineffective gods. There were gods who existed as foils. There were gods who had no authority over men or who were incapable of enforcing whatever presumptions of authority they had. Gods were not always the "best qualities of men"..and some seemed to exist as explicit comments to the contrary. Some god's weren't anthropomorphized in the slightest. Further, there were communities that had no gods or had a novel interpretation of what a god was, fundamentally.
None of the attributes ascribed to any of them were necessary for the set, and the set itself was not a necessity. All of their attributes..however, were narrative necessities in the transmission of culture, and those attributes change even when the god in question doesn't....entirely predicate -on- a changing culture in the set of the faithful. People get hung up on the just-so stories of gods..and while these were absolutely ignorant attempts to explain natural phenomena or a state of affairs..the larger story of gods is a brilliant expose on humanity and the human condition. The judeo-christian faiths are, likely, the terminus of this narrative tradition. Representing the worst and most removed representation of gods as they pertain to their original subject. This is a consequence of the ever retreating veil of ignorance, of our finding better ways to express the concepts that gods were originally leveraged in elaboration of.
It's a story about us, not them, or why creeks run downhill.
I wholly agree, but I was merely responding to a question put to modern-day theists. Because it was aimed at them, the question was put to them on their terms. People get hung up on just-so interpretations because there is a lot of "God is just-so" thinking out there. A bit of myopia transpires when you consider how gods were created in the formation of cultural myths and then relate that to the god concept of modern theists.
It's interesting to consider religion for its myth value, and then see what became of these myths through history. They were invented to give form to the inexplicable movements of the human psyche, at least according to some like Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung. But it also seems that the metamorphosis that occured in Judeo-Christianity also happened in some form the world over-- to many different religions. Hinduism was very mythical in its expression... then along came Buddhism which shaped it into a more rational and practical tool. The Chinese had similar myths that were replaced by Confucian and Taoist thought-- again, moving from mythological to rational and practical (while still retaining a mystical element). The same could be said of Islam, and maybe Socrates was such a rational figure for the Greeks/western culture.
IDK, it's just something I've thought about before... not a line of thinking I've developed to any extent. I'm sure that someone somewhere has probably thought of world religion and mythology on these terms, though. This change in the form of religion might explain the inherent myopia in speaking of gods this way.