I'm mainly writing this update for Matthew, who has said that he's interested in an idea I spat out of one of my orifices regarding the idea of God possessing human attributes having been preceded by the idea of God as a human-formed entity.
Essentially, I think that the idea of some greater being preceding the precise characteristics of that being makes perfect sense. First and foremost the idea of a deity would have been spread, and as it developed, becoming a more widely held belief and one to base a religion around, certain ideas about what God is would have been attributed to the deity in question.
To use Christianity as an example, God would have started out as far more basic a concept than he is now, what with the Holy Trinity and whatnot. Perhaps he would have been unrecognisable as the current God of classical theism we have now. Rather than imagining some incomprehensible and superior being in the sky, and calling it God in the way that a pagan or mystic might have done, Christianity or its forefathers would have seen God in the same way as the Greeks saw their gods, essentially human-shaped, but by no means all-powerful.
The Greek idea of a god as an imperfect being was a crucial part of any polytheistic religion, which adapted and evolved as their various gods became one (in some cases) as they were made more perfect in order to be the best gods. Almost all polytheistic gods had somewhat human forms; this was easier for the people of the time to imagine and comprehend. Soon these human-shaped figures had to be given more and more divine qualities, those of omnipotence, omnipresent, and so on. While this happened, due to their human shapes and the images created of them as having human shapes, the human shape of God or the gods became engraved upon the collective psyche of the masses, leading them to leave behind certain human qualities such as emotion, intelligence and consciousness in that deity.
The human form preceded these characteristics in the same was as any physical body precedes the non-physical attributes of any thing we begin to imagine or conjure into existence. It is impossible to comprehend emotion without a body, but very easy to imagine body without emotion. Without meaning to venture into Cartesian rationalism, I bring this up only to point out that one requires the other, namely, human qualities require a physical form. Even if God loses his physical form whilst remaining somehow human-shaped, he, according to anthropomorphism, supposedly retains human qualities.
Enough of that, I don't think it makes much sense and I want to go and get drunk and abandon the remainder of my essay till tomorrow.
In other news, my bag is currently resembling a memory test for the deranged. The artefacts within are:
A bag of melted frozen scampi.
A pot of Lucky Charms cereal, split, pouring everywhere.
A beret.
A pair of socks.
A fork.
A fake used sanitary towel.
Some philosophy.
Add in some false teeth, an unspecifiable bone, several large steaks and the gaseous embodiment of the colour green and you've got quite the lunatic satchel. There's a story behind each of these things, the most (only) interesting ones being the sanitary towel and the scampi. The towel is Liz's, she coloured it in with red pen, brown pen and mascara to give it a genuinely lumpy affect and then we put it in various hilarious locations like a housemate's bed, or stuck to the fridge door. I've been carrying it round ever since taking it out at opportune moments. The scampi was a Secret Santa present.
I haven't really got a great deal to say about today other because my life is desperately unexciting. I tried to use the word "unpresent" as a synonym for "absent" in an essay and my brain is turning into a fine mush.
The song of the day will be Yelle – Mal Poli this time. Most of her songs sound lovely and innocent, but are actually quite the reverse. Google some translations if you like this.
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Interesting account. But maybe you're presuming that the idea of God is something that came to people ex nihilo out of some intelectualist consideration.
ReplyDeleteI read a bit of a historical account of religion, and the first people to start talking about a religion of any sort started off with a phenomenon: an emotional experience which their culture later started to interpret as deitys.
The acknowledgment that the deity had human qualities would come here before the suggestion that it looked human. 1 "it feels comforting/scary" 2 "i know, the deity must be caring / vengful / have concern for other beings" 3 "i suppose it would look like us too"
I was reading a Genesis comic book the other day, (a serious one by the way, the author claims to have been as close to the old torah version of Genesis as much as he possibly could) and I found it interesting that the author noted that God has different names in the original text, and one of these names even seems to suggest the translation "mountain god." Also, the nephilhim are mentioned, divine beings that had sex with people and made half-human half-gods, and they were "the heroes of renown". He noted after that that back in the day even Hebrews believed in multiple gods.
ReplyDeleteI think your point mades perfect sense and is easy to understand (if you take it for what it is and try not to go on a tangent). As an atheist I think it's important to keep God as having human qualities as this makes other people closer to realizing that he is not real and most likely to be a part of the "Parent" within all of us and highlight the need for a parent that we all have (lest we become psychotic). (The clinical term for the concept of "Parent" that I'm talking about is called exteropsychic functioning by the way, which I'm not going to explain here because I don't have the time.)
This blog entry is good also because that period pad idea is HILARIOUS and also because you lightly touch into the concept of being and not-being, which I think is a very complex matter but one worth looking into.