Anthropomorphism.

I've written that word so many times today, it takes the fucking piss. Sometimes when a word comes up that often in an essay and takes a while to type I stick it on copy and paste, but I've been wanging about on the net today copying things left, right and centre so it's probably not a brilliant idea lest I want to end up with this in my essay: "Manchester celebrity spotters: apparently Gok Wan is on Canal Street at the moment." Hmm.

On the subject of anthropomorphism, I really cannot see how the concept of god as a human-formed being came to be. The most common arguments go along the lines of "see that watch, well it's designed innit, so so's the universe because everything needs a designer, and that designer is greater than the designer of the watch, so it's god. Oh, and he's human-formed because he made us in his image." Wat, I say, wat? Are we watch-shaped? Or are we assuming that any deity couldn't have made his people in anything other than his image? That's a bit dense, surely? However, it is the view immediately most obvious to half of theological history so I'd better give it a bit more credit and assume that my brain is dysfunctional or something. Why is it that we feel the need to reinforce our superiority over the rest of the creatures on this planet by giving the one thing apparently superior to ourselves the same shape as us? Had religion come about in this age, and a person had posited the idea of some sort of divine creator (let's ignore all the aspects of theism that make the emergence of this less likely in contemporary times) would we also have given that being a human shape and made him male? To me it seems unlikely. If I talk of some all-powerful being outside of time and space, capable of doing absolutely anything he wants to any race in the universe, I get the picture of some horrifically abstract and bizarre being. Possibly made of blue gas, swirling wrathfully, sucking things into a vortex. The closest I get to anthropomorphism is by describing it using the word "wrathfully". It all makes so little sense to me, but I shall put myself in the mindset of Trogg and imagine that my imagination itself is deficient due to a lack of stimulus. The idea of god as human is completely socially-conditioned - if I talk of the aforementioned creature as God rather than "an all-powerful being outside of time and space" etc etc I do get the immediate picture of some smiling genial white bloke with long brown hair and red robes smiling down on me from a cloud.

What else has gone on today? Not a great deal. I've sat about trying to work out how to write this damn essay without repeating myself constantly, and I do have a very definite plan in my head, I'm just incapable of not being distracted.

I am eating a great deal of food, it's wonderful.

Song of the day: The Long Blondes – Giddy Stratospheres