Having studied quite a few of the world’s religions, I’d have to say that, in a lot of cases, it’s a map-territory error writ large.
If you take the major religions that have survived for thousands of years and extrapolate out their teachings to their logical conclusions, and ruthlessly chop out the contradictions, it seems an awful lot like “God” could be defined as “Whatever it is that defines the fundamental nature of life, the universe, and everything.”
The ancients tended to think of it as a sapient, thinking, possibly living being. Because that’s the machinery that our brains have for comprehending and predicting insanely complex phenomena. Thor, god of thunder, may not be “real” in the same way that modern physics’ equations are, but if thinking about it that way keeps you from standing in an open field waving your sword at the clouds in defiance during major storms then it’s still a useful model.
The problem comes in when people start thinking that because it’s modeled as a human, it must be just like a human and then twist themselves into knots trying to deal with the moral implications of that along with trying to bargain or placate with sacrifices that a human would appreciate rather than with what is actually necessary to make the change they want.
And further compounds when people turn “we’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour and consequences over generations and have concluded that the master of the universe is rewarding/punishing us” into “God has spoken and this may never be questioned again.”
Most of the old religious rules make pretty decent sense when you pick them apart and figure out, based on what life was like at the time and place, what they were intended to protect against. They’re not irrelevant in the modern world, it’s just that our understanding has grown and our technology has changed and, in many places we now have better solutions to the problems.
And yet… If you plant multiple crops in the same garden plot you’ll still often end up with strange and undesirable results, leaving bodily wastes lying around on the surface is still a bad idea, and farmers still have a strong need for harvest insurance.
The amount the ancients managed to figure out while barely having a written language, minimal mathematics, and no statistics is darned impressive. And honest study of them can be useful because there are patterns to human society and behaviour in there which persist to this day.
It’s the people who take ancient morality plays, wash them through several translations, strip them of their cultural context, and then cherry-pick phrases out of them to justify whatever conclusion they’ve already written in at the bottom of the page that are the real problem. But then, they’re the problem whether their source is an ancient tome or fresh, new data.
Having studied quite a few of the world’s religions, I’d have to say that, in a lot of cases, it’s a map-territory error writ large.
If you take the major religions that have survived for thousands of years and extrapolate out their teachings to their logical conclusions, and ruthlessly chop out the contradictions, it seems an awful lot like “God” could be defined as “Whatever it is that defines the fundamental nature of life, the universe, and everything.”
The ancients tended to think of it as a sapient, thinking, possibly living being. Because that’s the machinery that our brains have for comprehending and predicting insanely complex phenomena. Thor, god of thunder, may not be “real” in the same way that modern physics’ equations are, but if thinking about it that way keeps you from standing in an open field waving your sword at the clouds in defiance during major storms then it’s still a useful model.
The problem comes in when people start thinking that because it’s modeled as a human, it must be just like a human and then twist themselves into knots trying to deal with the moral implications of that along with trying to bargain or placate with sacrifices that a human would appreciate rather than with what is actually necessary to make the change they want.
And further compounds when people turn “we’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour and consequences over generations and have concluded that the master of the universe is rewarding/punishing us” into “God has spoken and this may never be questioned again.”
Most of the old religious rules make pretty decent sense when you pick them apart and figure out, based on what life was like at the time and place, what they were intended to protect against. They’re not irrelevant in the modern world, it’s just that our understanding has grown and our technology has changed and, in many places we now have better solutions to the problems.
And yet… If you plant multiple crops in the same garden plot you’ll still often end up with strange and undesirable results, leaving bodily wastes lying around on the surface is still a bad idea, and farmers still have a strong need for harvest insurance.
The amount the ancients managed to figure out while barely having a written language, minimal mathematics, and no statistics is darned impressive. And honest study of them can be useful because there are patterns to human society and behaviour in there which persist to this day.
It’s the people who take ancient morality plays, wash them through several translations, strip them of their cultural context, and then cherry-pick phrases out of them to justify whatever conclusion they’ve already written in at the bottom of the page that are the real problem. But then, they’re the problem whether their source is an ancient tome or fresh, new data.