RE: Ask a Catholic
August 22, 2015 at 11:41 pm
(This post was last modified: August 22, 2015 at 11:43 pm by Whateverist.)
(August 22, 2015 at 7:17 pm)pocaracas Wrote:(August 22, 2015 at 6:57 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:
Sorry, my bad.
I'm afraid I can't be of much more assistance; this is not my field of expertise.
Awww... buggers!
Anyway... the point I wanted to drive home was that there probably weren't enough generations to account for all those peoples... and all the disparity in beliefs.
I say "probably", because we're left without an answer as to how many generations there were.
And if that is so, then either the OT is way off... or Luke was way off...
But Luke researched everything he wrote thoroughly, right? So he couldn't be wrong...
We can always broaden the scope of this question.
Considering all we know about human evolution and history; knowledge acquired through archaeology, linguistics, biology, anthropology, etc...; as is accepted by the catholic church, and considering the tales in the OT are fiction and mainly for rough guidance, then - if there has ever only been one single god, how did people come up with polytheism far before monotheism?
Not to mention that they came up with shamanism well before polytheism ("The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic", in wiki)
I guess what I'm asking is more - how come mankind had to invent tons of entities, before the actual real one deity deigned itself to confirm its existence to a few select chosen people in a particularly theologically active time and region of the globe?
So much so that there had to be a commandment to prevent people from worshiping those other gods.... that didn't work.
I think the simplest answer is that there is no one, actual God that historically did all that is claimed. Rather, there is a god sized hole in the human psyche which looks for and sees evidence of the unseen. And it has done so always and everywhere. It accomplishes nothing seeking to make historical sense of whatever is written in the babble. It is simply one of many expressions of the god hole, no more or less special than any of the others.
Personally I see no harm and admit curiosity as to what good might come of a serious examination of all the religious traditions with the sole purpose of understanding the tendency of our species to produce gods.