Posted: Mar 22, 2016 12:11 pm
I believe there is value to simultaneously recognizing and holding several views at once, as to how and why gods came to be, and what people have done with them.
One of my current favorite ways to view this, is to observe common human problem solving in action. In a very basic way, humans of all kinds, react to unpleasantness, or pain, or whatever else bothers them, by applying some sort of creative reassembly of their ideas of how to live. Sometimes that takes the form of what we call religion.
In turn, once a religion is in place and influencing the lives of those around them, it's common in history to see people switch back and forth from recognizing that the religion was created by people, and forgetting the same.
Further in turn, we can find the 'problem solving' urge, lead to modifications of the religions, for everything from refinement of the beliefs from within the mental world of faith, for the sake of making them internally consistent among other things...to crassly altering them from without the faith, in order to use them to manipulate and control the followers.
And in the middle ground between, there are plenty of seeming instances where those who formulated ideas, clearly did so to try to teach without chaining the students to a local power or to themselves.
It can get very interesting to ferret out motivations, at least to me.
One of my current favorite ways to view this, is to observe common human problem solving in action. In a very basic way, humans of all kinds, react to unpleasantness, or pain, or whatever else bothers them, by applying some sort of creative reassembly of their ideas of how to live. Sometimes that takes the form of what we call religion.
In turn, once a religion is in place and influencing the lives of those around them, it's common in history to see people switch back and forth from recognizing that the religion was created by people, and forgetting the same.
Further in turn, we can find the 'problem solving' urge, lead to modifications of the religions, for everything from refinement of the beliefs from within the mental world of faith, for the sake of making them internally consistent among other things...to crassly altering them from without the faith, in order to use them to manipulate and control the followers.
And in the middle ground between, there are plenty of seeming instances where those who formulated ideas, clearly did so to try to teach without chaining the students to a local power or to themselves.
It can get very interesting to ferret out motivations, at least to me.