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Is God a silverback?

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DWill

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Re: Is God a silverback?

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I was reacting to this statement about the polytheistic religions: "a pure monotheistic faith seems to have preceded a superstitious, degraded, ineffective, and unreasonable system of beliefs later subscribed to." Those latter are still ancient beliefs, not modern, and I'm not ready to share in Custance's evaluation of them. Still, you've opened up a new area for me. What it suggests is that in most instances, cultural diversification and population growth were accompanied by a multiplying of deities. That is to be expected, I suppose. Of main interest, next, are the few exceptions where this might not have happened, or where monotheism made a return after a period of polytheism. But you're saying that in the case of the early Israelites, there never was such an return, that the polytheism God warns of is not a "going back to," but a temptation to dabble in the modern innovations of the neighbors. Interesting.
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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Flann 5 wrote: I'm not using assumptions Geo, on the case for original monotheism but rather the findings of ethnologists. http://www.custance.org/Library/Volume4 ... pter1.html Bad link here. Google, "Primitive Monotheism A Cunstance."
I believe the link is this:

http://custance.org/Library/Volume4/Par ... ction.html

Custance is first and foremost a Christian apologist who "explores the relationship between Science and Scripture while remaining faithful to the established facts of Science and the revealed truths of Scripture. We are scientifically sound and biblically based." This is a highly dubious starting point, in my opinion.

http://www.custance.org/

But, as DWill says, the idea that the Bible is warning against a perversion of monotheism is certainly interesting. And it could very well be that the model posited by James Frazer and most modern scholars (magical thinking --> polytheism --> monotheism) doesn't apply to all cultures all of the time. Indeed, I learned a new word today: "henotheistic" which is the belief in and worship of a single god while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities. Clearly, this is a case of the real world being far more complex than our simplistic labels of monotheism and polytheism allow. Early cultures do engage in magical thinking dominated by the belief that all forces in nature are controlled by spirits. Possibly, this is not really polytheism, per se. But almost all cultures worship a sky deity of some sort which usually manifests itself as a creator. I'm only dabbling in this stuff, but it seems perfectly logical that the sky deity would eventually become dominant over other deities (and spirits) and eventually turned into the one god.

I learned another word, and that is "Urmonotheismus" or "primitive monotheism" which is defined as "the hypothesis of a monotheistic Urreligion, from which non-monotheistic religions degenerated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urmonotheismus

According to Charles H. Long, who is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, "primitive monotheism" has been "largely rejected" by contemporary scholars. See this passage:
The apparent similarity in form between the supreme sky deities of primitive cultures and the single godheads of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism has led some Western students of religion to speak of a "primitive monotheism." By this they were suggesting a devolution of religion rather than the more rationalistic evolution of religion from Polytheism, through henotheism (the presence of several gods, but with one dominant), to Monotheism. The most avid proponent of the primitive monotheism was Wilhelm Schmidt, an Austrian Roman Catholic priest who was also an ethnologist. In his view the original sacred form was a creator - god of the sky. This original and first revelation of deity was lost or obscured by the attention evoked by other lesser sacred beings, and throughout the history of human culture this original creator - sky - god has been rediscovered or remembered in the monotheistic religions. This position has been largely rejected by contemporary scholars.
http://mb-soft.com/believe/txo/primitiv.htm

(This article by Long doesn't seem to be religious at all, but it's on a religious web site. Not sure what's going on here. I also get sort of lost in Long's discussion about the sacred and profane towards the end of the article.)

I daresay, this is probably becoming a battle of web links. I will always favor rationalist explanations and Flann will favor Scripture-based explanations and never the twain shall meet. But it has been interesting nonetheless.
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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geo wrote:it could very well be that the model posited by James Frazer and most modern scholars (magical thinking --> polytheism --> monotheism) doesn't apply to all cultures all of the time.... almost all cultures worship a sky deity of some sort which usually manifests itself as a creator. I'm only dabbling in this stuff, but it seems perfectly logical that the sky deity would eventually become dominant over other deities (and spirits) and eventually turned into the one god. I learned another word, and that is "Urmonotheismus" or "primitive monotheism" which is defined as "the hypothesis of a monotheistic Urreligion, from which non-monotheistic religions degenerated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urmonotheismus
According to Charles H. Long, who is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, "primitive monotheism" has been "largely rejected" by contemporary scholars. http://mb-soft.com/believe/txo/primitiv.htm
The sky father Jehovah has an interesting etymology, illustrating the cultural evolution of the monotheist meme.

Vedic Dyaus Pita
Greek Zeus Patera
Roman Jupiter
Latin Deus Pater
English God the Father
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DWill

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Re: Is God a silverback?

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Like geo, I learned a new word, panentheism, or a belief system centered on a creator god who exists separately from nature, but who at the same time is suffused throughout all things. Much native American belief is religion is said to be of this type, and interestingly William Wordsworth's early philosophy has a lot in common with it, too:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (from "Tintern Abbey")

If, as Custance says, we should argue from the known to the unknown, we should consider panetheistic religion featuring the Great Spirit to be a possible model for the original religion of the peoples who settled in the New World 12,000-14,000 years ago. There is a similarity here to monotheism, but clearly much that is different from biblical monotheism. Native American religion does not appear to be polytheistic in the sense of other gods also being worshiped, but the divinity of all things is not a Jewish or Christian concept as far as I know. However, I don't think we can rule out pantheism in other early cultures, either, though the evidence would be hard to come up with.

I noted that pantheists talk of a Fall of Man, similarly to Christians, but this fall is away from unity with nature, not from obedience to the one God. Robert was representing a related view recently on the Tribe thread, though I haven't heard him say he's a pantheist.
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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DWill wrote: I noted that pantheists talk of a Fall of Man, similarly to Christians, but this fall is away from unity with nature, not from obedience to the one God. Robert was representing a related view recently on the Tribe thread, though I haven't heard him say he's a pantheist.
DWill wrote:Mono- predating polytheism was a surprise to me, too, but then I reflected that the Fall is central to this type of theology. Since Adam and Eve were monotheists, it follows that drifting away from worship of the one God had to be a result of their disobedience, as was every other current ill of humankind.
The Biblical view of the world seems myopic in the sense that it ignores the hundreds of thousands of years that came before our invention of the written word. Eons of time in which pre-literate humans lived and struggled and drew meaning from myths and stars. Many cultures invented creation myths and flood myths long before the proto-Christian mysticism was born. Each culture puts its own spin and reinvents the old myths to make them more relevant to their own time.

As you mention here, the fall of man in Christian theology borrows a very common motif that there was once a Golden Age or a time of perfection on earth from which we have fallen. The Greeks, for example, imagined five distinct ages, starting with Gold, and followed by Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. The idea of a Golden Age was reinvigorated by poets of the 18th century, who refashioned it in pastoral themes, glorifying the once perfect and glorious pastoral age of long past. I think it's human nature to believe that we have fallen from a previous "golden" state. Each generation believes previous generations were a better time to live, that we are in a state of decline. Many of us imagine the New World to have been a perfect world before whites came to conquer. A kind of grass-is-always-greener mentality seems to be hard-wired into our brains.

And, if you're still following my tangent, I just thought of another word that I learned a few years ago—"hiraeth"—actually a Welsh word that describes a nostalgic sadness, lamenting of loss.

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Re: Is God a silverback?

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DWill wrote:Like geo, I learned a new word, panentheism, or a belief system centered on a creator god who exists separately from nature, but who at the same time is suffused throughout all things.
Panentheism is a very important concept in understanding theology, because it expresses the key orthodox religious idea that God is separate from the universe, but still omnipresent, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. I think of it in economic terms, seeing the panentheist theory as an exogenous God, while pantheism considers God to be endogenous to nature. Other related terms are extrinsic and intrinsic, or external and internal.
DWill wrote:Much native American belief is religion is said to be of this type, and interestingly William Wordsworth's early philosophy has a lot in common with it, too:
I regard indigenous spirituality as pantheist. Panentheism evolved as a Jewish response to polytheism and nature worship, with the Bible argument that God is manifest in His creation but is separate from it. This was a key stratagem in the rejection of sun worship, explaining Jehovah as completely beyond all created things. Wordsworth is more associated with pantheism, or so I thought. A side note, the term “creature” reflects the panentheist idea of an external God, while “organism” is more suited to a pantheist scientific view.
DWill wrote: A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (from "Tintern Abbey")
These lines are better read as pantheist.
DWill wrote: If, as Custance says, we should argue from the known to the unknown, we should consider panetheistic religion featuring the Great Spirit to be a possible model for the original religion of the peoples who settled in the New World 12,000-14,000 years ago.
I don’t agree with that argument. It looks like a way to shoehorn pantheist cultures into the distinctively Abrahamic theory of an external God.
DWill wrote:There is a similarity here to monotheism, but clearly much that is different from biblical monotheism. Native American religion does not appear to be polytheistic in the sense of other gods also being worshiped, but the divinity of all things is not a Jewish or Christian concept as far as I know. However, I don't think we can rule out pantheism in other early cultures, either, though the evidence would be hard to come up with.
St Paul speaks of God being known as all in all. There are many ideas in the Bible which look pantheist, but the general editorial censorship and interpretation has put a panentheist gloss over the text, which just involves some small tweaking in many cases. Explicit pantheism is anathema to Judeo-Christian tradition, since as in the work of Spinoza pantheism is seen as atheist.
DWill wrote: I noted that pantheists talk of a Fall of Man, similarly to Christians, but this fall is away from unity with nature, not from obedience to the one God. Robert was representing a related view recently on the Tribe thread, though I haven't heard him say he's a pantheist.
Yes, I do consider myself a pantheist. Panentheism is an utterly implausible and degraded hypothesis, postulating a personal entity outside the immensity of our universe against all evidence. In scientific terms pantheism is far more probable and possible than the imaginary fantasy of the Christian myth of God.

Panentheism is better explained as a product of psychology and politics than of physics, whereas with Einstein, pantheism is the view that best agrees with scientific knowledge, seeing divine order in nature.

The theory of the fall from grace in the Bible is best understood as a fall from pantheism into panentheism, from a gracious wisdom into a brutal political hierarchy that requires a priest-king to explain the magical mystery of how divinity is separate from life and nature. The nature philosophy inherent in pantheism is why the Bible explains that the state of grace occurs when we are part of the tree of life. Genesis defines the fall as the banishment of humans from the tree of life, and Revelation says the redemption of humanity will involve the return of the tree of life. This big myth is central to restoring scientific credibility and relevance for religion.

The silverback theory can therefore best be understood as a throwback in human evolution, from an earlier human wisdom of pantheism, allowing freedom and diversity, into a state of corruption where God is a big man, modelled on the king. The monotheist structure reflects the earlier primate adaptive attitude of the gorilla, and rejects some key homo sapien adaptations that emerge from language as the evolutionary basis of group selection in human success. Monotheism ironically reflects a world where the sword is mightier than the pen, because it subordinates the church to the state, exercising military control of worship.

Pantheism is not a silverback theology, but is much more democratic and free. The emergence of patriarchal monarchy out of primitive tribal democracy involved a social evolution to enable the larger security apparatus of empire, but this also meant a simplification and subordination of spiritual identity within a monolithic social unity. Pantheism allows diverse local visions, whereas panentheism is much more suited to the mentality of institutional social control which so strongly characterises a situation where metal-based war requires enforcement of patriarchal unity.
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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This "theory" is all very stupid and something only naive new atheism could possibly be interested in.

I reject the juvenileness of new atheism. It is propositionaless, fallacious, and equivocation.
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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ant wrote:This "theory" is all very stupid and something only naive new atheism could possibly be interested in.
It's very silly and hardly worth addressing at all. Dawkins featured Barash's thesis on his website as it jives with his horrible god of the O.T. view. Never mind that Christians have responded to these distortions.
If anyone can take a human life it's the creator of life and the biblical view is that death is not the end as the atheist worldview supposes.

Infants that die have an eternal future and any critique of Christianity must encompass all aspects of that revelation, and not impose their atheistic assumptions on it.

In any case I don't see these critics having anything of this kind to say about Planned Parenthood with it's callous contempt for babies in the womb.

Why not? Maybe they don't know it's history in eugenics and racism and the seamless transformation from these same founders to the present day entity.
No problem with tax dollars going there I suppose. The American black community are well aware of these things and many don't buy the liberal line.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAF2GPT_79Q
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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Flann 5 wrote:It's very silly and hardly worth addressing at all. Dawkins featured Barash's thesis on his website as it jives with his horrible god of the O.T. view. Never mind that Christians have responded to these distortions.
I've looked for Barash's essay, but can't find it. The link from Dawkins' web site is not working. Neither is Landroid's original link.

But from the very limited summary of the article, I can guess that Barash is suggesting that the patriarchal vision of God in the Old Testament reflects male-dominated primate society and also in the patriarchal society from which these old texts were written. In other words, God was seen as an overbearing alpha male figure because that's who had the power in ancient times. Am I in the ball park? What aspect of this do you disagree with, Flann?
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Re: Is God a silverback?

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Flann 5 wrote:
ant wrote:This "theory" is all very stupid and something only naive new atheism could possibly be interested in.
It's very silly and hardly worth addressing at all. Dawkins featured Barash's thesis on his website as it jives with his horrible god of the O.T. view. Never mind that Christians have responded to these distortions.
If anyone can take a human life it's the creator of life and the biblical view is that death is not the end as the atheist worldview supposes.

Infants that die have an eternal future and any critique of Christianity must encompass all aspects of that revelation, and not impose their atheistic assumptions on it.

In any case I don't see these critics having anything of this kind to say about Planned Parenthood with it's callous contempt for babies in the womb.

Why not? Maybe they don't know it's history in eugenics and racism and the seamless transformation from these same founders to the present day entity.
No problem with tax dollars going there I suppose. The American black community are well aware of these things and many don't buy the liberal line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAF2GPT_79Q

Dawkins is an admitted agnostic when it's convenient for him, but a staunch atheist when promoting book to the dumber new atheists who are actually nothing more than a social media cult.

What has been lost in all this is the actual meaning and intent of science and a non existent understanding of definitions and distinctions (Ie proof and evidence, methodology, etc).

No one in their right mind, who insists their worldview simply includes disbelief in a deity would be so obsessed with the mere notion of a God.

This meme exposes deep psycho-socio insecurities and illness.
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