Post by yellowdog on Aug 29, 2016 8:34:53 GMT -6
If you peruse monotheistic religions, their morality and even the religion are all based on humans making mistakes. And in most of these faiths, every mistake is tragically bad and if you are suffering from something then it's always due to a mistake too. So for example when an earnest christian suffers then his first question is, what mistake have I made?
Indeed the morality of the monotheistic faiths of history have always centered on "Do not sin" as opposed to the "do no harm" of most of the pagan religions. From the point of view that I have now this is really problematic. "Do not sin" in effect teaches a worship of God that is not based on love, a lover that cannot make mistakes anymore without causing God's wrath is not able to thrive spiritually. The religions actually recognize this and come up with various solutions, like animal sacrifices, washings, the cross, etc.
As I still identify as a christian, albeit a polytheistic one, Christ for me tried to get people to think about the omnipresent "do not sin" rule in their religion. He postulated God's grace and that we wouldn't have to be perfect to be recipients of God's love.
But still the focus is on sins in much of the christian religion. Christ would have died for our sins and not for us, sins could make you loose your afterlife. Sin replaced the "evil" in what we humans consider in moral questions.
In my view, this leads to all the time be conscious of mistakes you could make and judgment you could face. And instead of going by rules and customs that come from the setup of our conscience, so that causing harm is wrong (and some specifics about what is harmful) and that these rules would support all life and not corner us against God, we are buried in a law of sin and death and actually this is the content of the bible and the Qu'ran und much of the Talmudic books of the Jews.
In a way you cannot have knowledge of God in such a system because every bit of knowledge of God is connected to knowledge of good and evil. This is well described in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. After being able to love and live through every kind of knowledge they had already (exemplified in the story by the many trees of paradise they could eat), they were unable to live and love the knowledge of good and evil.
My question now would be, is there no way to consider this dualism of good and evil a mostly mental problem wherein which we put against evil not just what is prized as good but also all the other virtues? After all evil stands by itself and has no real substance attached to it. Evil is only the absence of other things, of good things. And often an evil is a destroyed or twisted good thing. So therefor in order to free us from evil we must deconstruct it and then heal and regrow and rebuild what had been evil.
The hebrews considered this God's domain and I think that is true, but in polytheism there are many different gods and they are often employing different ways. I mean, yeah you could say Zeus asked for sacrifices and Yahweh asked for sacrifices, so what's the difference? The difference can be seen in approaching different deities about different tasks that have to be done. Zeus again, for example, doesn't have a satan to be mindful of, instead his enemy seems to be more something like strange chaos. Odin's enemy were thoughts of the demise of the gods in a divine apocalypse of fighting and calamity. Manitou feared the desintegration of the natural life, that we become estranged from our home in nature.
I feel a lot of comfort letting for once Zeus fight satan for me. The satanic force can be kept at bay with philosophy more easily than with constant prayer. Because, philosophy realizes that satan possesses no wisdom, his fight is entirely vainglorious and silly, and I'm also observing that so many people are free of satan in our time that practically this weird being does not have as much power as christian thought attributes to him. I know this from my experience too, when I was a kid and a teen and an early twen I almost never thought of satan and felt entirely happy in my life. Then came my droughty years in evangelicalism which had me unpack what I thought was my gift of God but what I got was judgment of sin and that I had to be mindful of satan now too, as if I didn't already have enough problems in my life to be mindful about.
With Zeus the issue is very different. For him an angel who rebels against him is drawn into an adventure - and Zeus would surely awaken a hero to fight! And in fact I am supposed to be a bit heroic too and like all the other heroes, though tragedy visits me sometimes, I will have a life and I know Zeus to be wise to give me the victory and not satan. It's not that I do not call on Jesus in this battle anymore (and I forgot to say, I feel like marked by this thing sometimes, as if this entity we know as satan wants to divert me from living how I want to live). I do call on Jesus and have kept much of the knowledge he had taught me and the salvation from the law of sin and death he had brought. But when it comes to fighting negative spiritual forces Yahweh is too tender and I cannot fight in his sight because that means putting tenderness against cruelity. Zeus instead has the guts to lend some real muscle to the fight and with his keen mind I am able to recognize how I am not fighting for God and having to bring him gifts of victory but instead I am drawing on the support of a God who has a wife, a God who has brothers and sisters, and I can wander through the entire hellenic pantheon and always find someone who has time.
Judaism, when it began to worship the "only" God, sometimes came into terrain that is very uncanny. Because, instead of getting to this one God whom they also projected to be far away, they cut themselves loose from the many gods who had cared for them earlier. And those of them who had a mind for the Spirit (the substance of everything and everyone, a pantheistic view of God) were too few to bring a solution here. Just look at Abrahams terror dream that he had once, that those who put faith in the One God were in the end having to go through a furnace of fire while great darkness and terror beset them. And even gentle Yahweh who came to bring freedom to the Jews and watch over them and bring them into their own land (which he managed in the Exodus, but I got by a non-biblical imaginative account of it), could not reach the monotheists sometimes to live in peace with the mysteries of religion and worship and develop their gentle sides and their humanity.
Jesus, the son of Yahweh, helps, but even him the monotheists could do no different but to make him an avatar of the vacuum of the one god. Again, there is a more enlightened way of relating to the Spirit where neither Jesus nor his Abba are far away. But this is far from the minds of many christians who read the bible as a lawbook still and watch their belly buttons while every knowledge of other venerable, mighty, faithful and loving deities has disappeared from them. In study I found that in the early 19th century when biblical inerrancy wasn't believed by most yet, the average european and american at least knew about the greek stories and I saw for example that citizens of the US who fought in the civil war often wrote letters home to family and friends that show much literacy and knowledge and acquaintance with the classical religions of the world.
So they have only that, and their mistakes. Do you remember the heroes of the Illiad and Odysee who stood for mankind's efforts and trying grieve for their mistakes? It was an issue, but only a small one when compared to the happiness of finding your wife back at home with the children (Odysee) or celebrating the friendship between men who sailed through life together (The story of the Golden Fleece). In hellenism life always continues and the gods have a life too and looking for sins is not their interest. Instead sins come up from the chaos that our life finds itself in, and Zeus is always looking for friends to fight chaos with wisdom, love and passion.
I hope you liked my little essay. May the gods keep you safe and sound!
Indeed the morality of the monotheistic faiths of history have always centered on "Do not sin" as opposed to the "do no harm" of most of the pagan religions. From the point of view that I have now this is really problematic. "Do not sin" in effect teaches a worship of God that is not based on love, a lover that cannot make mistakes anymore without causing God's wrath is not able to thrive spiritually. The religions actually recognize this and come up with various solutions, like animal sacrifices, washings, the cross, etc.
As I still identify as a christian, albeit a polytheistic one, Christ for me tried to get people to think about the omnipresent "do not sin" rule in their religion. He postulated God's grace and that we wouldn't have to be perfect to be recipients of God's love.
But still the focus is on sins in much of the christian religion. Christ would have died for our sins and not for us, sins could make you loose your afterlife. Sin replaced the "evil" in what we humans consider in moral questions.
In my view, this leads to all the time be conscious of mistakes you could make and judgment you could face. And instead of going by rules and customs that come from the setup of our conscience, so that causing harm is wrong (and some specifics about what is harmful) and that these rules would support all life and not corner us against God, we are buried in a law of sin and death and actually this is the content of the bible and the Qu'ran und much of the Talmudic books of the Jews.
In a way you cannot have knowledge of God in such a system because every bit of knowledge of God is connected to knowledge of good and evil. This is well described in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. After being able to love and live through every kind of knowledge they had already (exemplified in the story by the many trees of paradise they could eat), they were unable to live and love the knowledge of good and evil.
My question now would be, is there no way to consider this dualism of good and evil a mostly mental problem wherein which we put against evil not just what is prized as good but also all the other virtues? After all evil stands by itself and has no real substance attached to it. Evil is only the absence of other things, of good things. And often an evil is a destroyed or twisted good thing. So therefor in order to free us from evil we must deconstruct it and then heal and regrow and rebuild what had been evil.
The hebrews considered this God's domain and I think that is true, but in polytheism there are many different gods and they are often employing different ways. I mean, yeah you could say Zeus asked for sacrifices and Yahweh asked for sacrifices, so what's the difference? The difference can be seen in approaching different deities about different tasks that have to be done. Zeus again, for example, doesn't have a satan to be mindful of, instead his enemy seems to be more something like strange chaos. Odin's enemy were thoughts of the demise of the gods in a divine apocalypse of fighting and calamity. Manitou feared the desintegration of the natural life, that we become estranged from our home in nature.
I feel a lot of comfort letting for once Zeus fight satan for me. The satanic force can be kept at bay with philosophy more easily than with constant prayer. Because, philosophy realizes that satan possesses no wisdom, his fight is entirely vainglorious and silly, and I'm also observing that so many people are free of satan in our time that practically this weird being does not have as much power as christian thought attributes to him. I know this from my experience too, when I was a kid and a teen and an early twen I almost never thought of satan and felt entirely happy in my life. Then came my droughty years in evangelicalism which had me unpack what I thought was my gift of God but what I got was judgment of sin and that I had to be mindful of satan now too, as if I didn't already have enough problems in my life to be mindful about.
With Zeus the issue is very different. For him an angel who rebels against him is drawn into an adventure - and Zeus would surely awaken a hero to fight! And in fact I am supposed to be a bit heroic too and like all the other heroes, though tragedy visits me sometimes, I will have a life and I know Zeus to be wise to give me the victory and not satan. It's not that I do not call on Jesus in this battle anymore (and I forgot to say, I feel like marked by this thing sometimes, as if this entity we know as satan wants to divert me from living how I want to live). I do call on Jesus and have kept much of the knowledge he had taught me and the salvation from the law of sin and death he had brought. But when it comes to fighting negative spiritual forces Yahweh is too tender and I cannot fight in his sight because that means putting tenderness against cruelity. Zeus instead has the guts to lend some real muscle to the fight and with his keen mind I am able to recognize how I am not fighting for God and having to bring him gifts of victory but instead I am drawing on the support of a God who has a wife, a God who has brothers and sisters, and I can wander through the entire hellenic pantheon and always find someone who has time.
Judaism, when it began to worship the "only" God, sometimes came into terrain that is very uncanny. Because, instead of getting to this one God whom they also projected to be far away, they cut themselves loose from the many gods who had cared for them earlier. And those of them who had a mind for the Spirit (the substance of everything and everyone, a pantheistic view of God) were too few to bring a solution here. Just look at Abrahams terror dream that he had once, that those who put faith in the One God were in the end having to go through a furnace of fire while great darkness and terror beset them. And even gentle Yahweh who came to bring freedom to the Jews and watch over them and bring them into their own land (which he managed in the Exodus, but I got by a non-biblical imaginative account of it), could not reach the monotheists sometimes to live in peace with the mysteries of religion and worship and develop their gentle sides and their humanity.
Jesus, the son of Yahweh, helps, but even him the monotheists could do no different but to make him an avatar of the vacuum of the one god. Again, there is a more enlightened way of relating to the Spirit where neither Jesus nor his Abba are far away. But this is far from the minds of many christians who read the bible as a lawbook still and watch their belly buttons while every knowledge of other venerable, mighty, faithful and loving deities has disappeared from them. In study I found that in the early 19th century when biblical inerrancy wasn't believed by most yet, the average european and american at least knew about the greek stories and I saw for example that citizens of the US who fought in the civil war often wrote letters home to family and friends that show much literacy and knowledge and acquaintance with the classical religions of the world.
So they have only that, and their mistakes. Do you remember the heroes of the Illiad and Odysee who stood for mankind's efforts and trying grieve for their mistakes? It was an issue, but only a small one when compared to the happiness of finding your wife back at home with the children (Odysee) or celebrating the friendship between men who sailed through life together (The story of the Golden Fleece). In hellenism life always continues and the gods have a life too and looking for sins is not their interest. Instead sins come up from the chaos that our life finds itself in, and Zeus is always looking for friends to fight chaos with wisdom, love and passion.
I hope you liked my little essay. May the gods keep you safe and sound!