Around 800-200 BCE in all the main regions of the civilized world, people begin to create new ideas about god. Interestingly, they all developed in very similar ways even though they had no real contact with each other. Individual tribal gods of local areas were replaced with the ONE GOD. Many things were happening at this time, power was shifting to the marketplace from the kings and priests which led to a new prosperity. Perhaps the most important thing to develop at this time though was the idea of the INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE. It is not without a certain irony that we develop the idea of one god just when we start figuring out that we are separate individuals. God developed in "a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism". It would seem that the opposite would be true. If we think religious wars are bad now imagine what it would have been like if each of us had our own individual god. So who cares? except that is what the most noted theologians think we are going through now. These are the best of times and the worst of times. We are on the verge of another great change in our view of our place in the universe.
posted by Anne Coe | 6:25 AM
2 Comments:
Actually we developed the idea of one creator god when we tried to bring warring tribes, with different ancestral gods, together into one body of kinship. All over the world prophets told people about a creator god who was more powerful than the tribal gods and who then used this metaphor to create a kinship system of all people (who had formerly hated one another) making them now children of one god, brothers and sisters to one another, with the obligation to love one another as kin. It was a way to create peace. I could go on at length about this, as my disseration was about the transition from tribal law to law of a commonwealth--Mosaic law, the law of Moses. This is as true with Mosaic law as it was with laws that were associated with the Inca Empire. Religion is about a family system. The basis of the family system is the mother-child hierarchy, one characterized by duty and obligations for both the one at the top of the hiearchy and the one at the bottom.
I would say drop this intellectual crap you are reading and use your own mind. It is a better m ind than that of the so called intellectuals.
I was thinking this morning on a drive to be encircled by a group of people who hate my rotton puking guts, that the problem is not just with those at the top of a hierarchy (which, after all implies a ranked relationship--more than one person), but with those at the bottom. Life has often thrust me into positions at the top of the hiearchy, mother, boss, professor. The problem is not just my behavior and whether or not I know how to act at the top (I know about servant leadership, which is defined by duties), but that those at the bottom are not responsive. A hiearchy depends on the one at the top accepting obligations of leadership and the ones at the bottom accepting the obligation to be responsive to that leadership. We need to educate both sides if we are to re-create hierarchies.
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