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Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasi

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Gnostic Bishop
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Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasi

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Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasion to a better way of life?

Is our love of God and War connected due to being the epitomes of our love of drama?

People tend to do what is rewarding to them. We are a pleasure seeking species. War, as the epitome of drama, is a condition that humankind is forced to suffer because our instincts force us to seek the fittest. To us, that is either a god or a king; or whatever word or name you give to your epitome of whatever type.

Men controlled, by their two main passions, love and war and love of God as an ideal, have used war to seek a male God from the moment men set matriarchy aside 5,000 year ago.

We naturally seek the fittest and to us, that means we are driven to war.

We men are responsible for 5,000 years of advancing God with war.

Granted, we have used war with some skill and advanced society and its wealth, but we have yet to reach the ideals that matriarchy and Goddess rule reached. Not by a long shot. Wealth, when produced by war, is basically gained forcing the citizens to suffer. We lose both income and positive lifestyle, as well as; the more important, human lives.

Men get a fail mark in finding God and cannot do better from what women did before them. I think all real men of honor and duty would confess this reality.

A Gnostic Christian first recognized and coined the saying,” that for men to continue to do the same thing, while expecting a different result, is a sign of insanity”.

Regards,
DL
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Re: Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasi

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Gnostic Bishop wrote:Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasion to a better way of life?
That is an excellent question. Thank you for raising it. I would like to respond against the philosophical framework of cultural evolution, investigating myths as memes. So the first point is to ask, who does the selecting?

In genetic evolution, nature selects. That is the meaning of the concept of natural selection. Genes that are best adapted to their niche prove to be the most durable, stable and fecund, and are selected to reproduce.

The same, or very similar, causal process applies with the memetic selection of culture, including Gods. So, the societies where warrior gods have been selected have by definition lived in places and times where those gods were the most adaptive. Warrior gods came into conflict with gods of peace and defeated them. That conflict is the main theme of the first of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34 – smash the groves of the goddess worshippers.

My view on why violent gods proved adaptive in the iron age (1000BC-0) connects to precession of the equinox, as the main physical driver of long term natural climate change. The 21,000 year climate cycle driven by precession was in fall during the period that the Bible identifies as the fall from grace, from about 4000 BC to 1000 AD, as shown from this orbital diagram. This 5000 year period of precessional fall is defined by the date the perihelion moved through fall, until it reached the December solstice in 1246 AD. This fall period saw the rise of metal and agriculture, with progress in technology providing material abundance to pay for priests and soldiers. The emergence of settled wealth generated conflict, and the gods who were best able to protect societies from war.

In this context, religion acquired a military purpose, unifying society for security and defence. In Israel, a small country surrounded by big empires, the evolving religion of monotheist patriarchal hierarchy wiped out the previous diversity in order to build conformity for defence. The violent volcano storm God Jehovah proved the most adaptive support for national unity.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Is our love of God and War connected due to being the epitomes of our love of drama?
My view is that the previous love of war gods was due to their adaptive value. The social importance of war meant that martial values were prized, including love of drama, conflict, violence, horror, domination, etc. However, now that the world has globalised, this adaptivity of war is gradually becoming redundant and obsolete. It is highly noteworthy that Jesus Christ was a god of peace and love, but was crucified for his troubles, indicating as Isaiah foretold that the world would despise and reject the man of sorrows. That applies equally to a fictional and to a real Jesus.

The Gospel story, in Matthew 24, says the message of the kingdom will be preached to the whole inhabited earth and then the end will come. My view is that the Gnostic authors of the New Testament could see that the world was not yet ready for their message of peace and love, but that this message could grow within the womb of the old war god values, as dogmatic belief, until humanity is ready for a paradigm shift from war to peace as the basis of security. The security paradigm is also linked to a cultural paradigm shift from belief to knowledge as the primary social organising principle.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: People tend to do what is rewarding to them. We are a pleasure seeking species. War, as the epitome of drama, is a condition that humankind is forced to suffer because our instincts force us to seek the fittest. To us, that is either a god or a king; or whatever word or name you give to your epitome of whatever type.
Your comment “our instincts force us to seek the fittest” is unclear. The evolutionary concept ‘fit’ just means ‘adaptive’, not strong or healthy. We should hope that our instincts do drive us toward greater evolutionary fitness, but this is not the case, given the instinctive basis of maladaptive traits such as obesity and sloth.

To be fit we must struggle against instinct. Christianity fits in this struggle in an interesting way, with its core message of love for enemies. The Gospel indicates that the mentality of war is a path of destruction, and humanity needs to identify and shift to a new paradigm to avoid destruction, which in modern terms means social collapse and potentially even human extinction as a species.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Men controlled, by their two main passions, love and war and love of God as an ideal, have used war to seek a male God from the moment men set matriarchy aside 5,000 year ago.
The destruction of local matrifocal belief systems was a gradual process, overall linked to the shift from stone to metal as primary technologies. The scale of society that metal enables involves a hierarchical organisation that can readily squash any local independent culture.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: We naturally seek the fittest and to us, that means we are driven to war.
Again, the concept of ‘fittest’ has to be distinguished from what people believe. When people are deluded, their belief is by definition unfit in the long term, even though their delusion can deliver short term immediate advantage. The reason for this is that by definition, adaptivity means in accord with the natural context. A delusion is a false belief, so cannot align with the real natural context, even if it seems to align successfully to prevailing opinion.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: We men are responsible for 5,000 years of advancing God with war.
The binary metaphysics of ‘women good, men bad’ is far too simplistic. Women also benefited, at least in economic terms, from patriarchal martial culture, even though at the cost of their social power and equality. Many women have been staunch defenders of patriarchal religion.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Granted, we have used war with some skill and advanced society and its wealth, but we have yet to reach the ideals that matriarchy and Goddess rule reached. Not by a long shot. Wealth, when produced by war, is basically gained forcing the citizens to suffer. We lose both income and positive lifestyle, as well as; the more important, human lives.
Idealising the stone age has its problems, as Steven Pinker has documented in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, on the decline of violence. I personally agree with your implication that stone age life had far higher quality than imagined in common stereotypes. For example it is likely that small autonomous communities were better able to maintain gender equality, and had better happiness and work-life balance than modern societies.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Men get a fail mark in finding God and cannot do better from what women did before them. I think all real men of honor and duty would confess this reality.
The Yahwist war god was adaptive for Old Testament times. The problem is the effort to continue this model among Christians, even though Jesus insisted in the Sermon on the Mount that the old covenant of revenge had to be replaced by a new covenant of love.
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Re: Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasi

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Robert Tulip wrote:[
quote="Gnostic Bishop"]Why do we select warrior gods who can only grow their religions by violence, --- instead of persuasion to a better way of life?
That is an excellent question. Thank you for raising it. I would like to respond against the philosophical framework of cultural evolution, investigating myths as memes. So the first point is to ask, who does the selecting?
Thanks and I am pleased you found it worthy of a reply.

Seems like the vast majority of us as most of us who claim to be religious have selected a God od war. Chosen might be the wrong word as we mostly inherited our Gods for tradition and culture without really choosing at all. A brain dead sheeple trait you might say.
In genetic evolution, nature selects. That is the meaning of the concept of natural selection. Genes that are best adapted to their niche prove to be the most durable, stable and fecund, and are selected to reproduce.


True bit we do not let our Gods evplve much, although we have brought Yahweh to heel along with his Christians.
The same, or very similar, causal process applies with the memetic selection of culture, including Gods. So, the societies where warrior gods have been selected have by definition lived in places and times where those gods were the most adaptive. Warrior gods came into conflict with gods of peace and defeated them. That conflict is the main theme of the first of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34 – smash the groves of the goddess worshippers.
Indeed. It is hard for the Gods of love to have their sheeple tying to love the enemy
who is trying to kill them.
My view of why violent gods proved adaptive in the iron age (1000BC-0) connects to precession of the equinox, as the main physical driver of long term natural climate change. The 21,000 year climate cycle driven by precession was in fall during the period that the Bible identifies as the fall from grace, from about 4000 BC to 1000 AD, as shown from this orbital diagram. This 5000 year period of precessional fall is defined by the date the perihelion moved through fall, until it reached the December solstice in 1246 AD. This fall period saw the rise of metal and agriculture, with progress in technology providing material abundance to pay for priests and soldiers. The emergence of settled wealth generated conflict, and the gods who were best able to protect societies from war.
Interesting.
In this context, religion acquired a military purpose, unifying society for security and defence. In Israel, a small country surrounded by big empires, the evolving religion of monotheist patriarchal hierarchy wiped out the previous diversity in order to build conformity for defence. The violent volcano storm God Jehovah proved the most adaptive support for national unity.
No argument so far.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Is our love of God and War connected due to being the epitomes of our love of drama?
My view is that the previous love of war gods was due to their adaptive value. The social importance of war meant that martial values were prized, including love of drama, conflict, violence, horror, domination, etc. However, now that the world has globalised, this adaptivity of war is gradually becoming redundant and obsolete.


On large wars, I agree but the insidious insurgency terrorism is proving to be a costly battle for the West.
It is highly noteworthy that Jesus Christ was a god of peace and love, but was crucified for his troubles, indicating as Isaiah foretold that the world would despise and reject the man of sorrows. That applies equally to a fictional and to a real Jesus.


I agree, even though I do not see the biblical Jesus as particularly peaceful. I come to bring war and not peace is one of the lines put in his mouth.

I do see more than one Jesus in scripture and the Gnostic one preaches freedom from religion more than freedom of religion. Then again, Gnostics are known for hating all religions and political systems are they are all wanting sheeple instead of thinking people.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: People tend to do what is rewarding to them. We are a pleasure seeking species. War, as the epitome of drama, is a condition that humankind is forced to suffer because our instincts force us to seek the fittest. To us, that is either a god or a king; or whatever word or name you give to your epitome of whatever type.
Your comment “our instincts force us to seek the fittest” is unclear. The evolutionary concept ‘fit’ just means ‘adaptive’, not strong or healthy. We should hope that our instincts do drive us toward greater evolutionary fitness, but this is not the case, given the instinctive basis of maladaptive traits such as obesity and sloth.


We like to be fat and lazy. We are pleasure seekers. But for rule, the fittest is not necessarily the strongest and today fittest likely means brightest and the ability to push ideas forward.
To be fit we must struggle against instinct.


I disagree. Our instinct default to cooperation and that is the safest course for survival.
Christianity fits in this struggle in an interesting way, with its core message of love for enemies.


While the Inquisitions play on. I see their love your enemy as a garbage saying as they do no9t live it at all.
The Gospel indicates that the mentality of war is a path of destruction, and humanity needs to identify and shift to a new paradigm to avoid destruction, which in modern terms means social collapse and potentially even human extinction as a species.
Yet Christianity and Islam both ignored their peaceful scripture for their warring ones.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Men controlled, by their two main passions, love and war and love of God as an ideal, have used war to seek a male God from the moment men set matriarchy aside 5,000 year ago.
The destruction of local matrifocal belief systems was a gradual process, overall linked to the shift from stone to metal as primary technologies. The scale of society that metal enables involves a hierarchical organisation that can readily squash any local independent culture.
I agree.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: We naturally seek the fittest and to us, that means we are driven to war.
Again, the concept of ‘fittest’ has to be distinguished from what people believe. When people are deluded, their belief is by definition unfit in the long term, even though their delusion can deliver short term immediate advantage. The reason for this is that by definition, adaptivity means in accord with the natural context. A delusion is a false belief, so cannot align with the real natural context, even if it seems to align successfully to prevailing opinion.
True but our conditions have not really changed in 5,000 years other than modernisation of our technology.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: We men are responsible for 5,000 years of advancing God with war.
The binary metaphysics of ‘women good, men bad’ is far too simplistic. Women also benefited, at least in economic terms, from patriarchal martial culture, even though at the cost of their social power and equality. Many women have been staunch defenders of patriarchal religion.
True to a small point. But never enough to quiet the female irritation at being second class. At least not for the last couple of hundred years.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Granted, we have used war with some skill and advanced society and its wealth, but we have yet to reach the ideals that matriarchy and Goddess rule reached. Not by a long shot. Wealth, when produced by war, is basically gained forcing the citizens to suffer. We lose both income and positive lifestyle, as well as; the more important, human lives.
Idealising the stone age has its problems, as Steven Pinker has documented in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, on the decline of violence. I personally agree with your implication that stone age life had far higher quality than imagined in common stereotypes. For example it is likely that small autonomous communities were better able to maintain gender equality, and had better happiness and work-life balance than modern societies.
I believe as you do on this.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Men get a fail mark in finding God and cannot do better from what women did before them. I think all real men of honor and duty would confess this reality.
The Yahwist war god was adaptive for Old Testament times. The problem is the effort to continue this model among Christians, even though Jesus insisted in the Sermon on the Mount that the old covenant of revenge had to be replaced by a new covenant of love.
[/quote]

Christians do not really follow what Jesus taught and the hate they show to gays and women is a prime indicator of how they ignore Jesus.

Regards
DL
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