'It was THIS big!' as the Birth of the God Concept
Just had a peculiar thought today regarding how ideas and concepts of God may have developed.
Given that we are highly social creatures and social status is part of how we organise our societies I wondered how far exaggeration plays a role in our early appreciation of the world at large.
So, my idea was that we often aim to impress or entertain others and so over time, as communities grow in size. Tales of a catching a big fish are well known as times of exaggeration and boasting in popular modern culture, so extrapolating back through time where hard evidence of any claim was difficult to judge could it simply be that the concept of God arose through a combination of competitive story telling (one-upmanship) fed into real life boasting to the point where slowly a Higher Being came into fruition.
I am more curious about this behaviour in terms of it being an innate human quality. Is it kind of like having a competitive streak in the realm of abstraction that led to ideas of God and other comparative ideological schemes beyond the Western concept of God?
Anyway, thoughts and ideas on this specific idea welcome. I do not really want to get into other common tropes for how the concept of God arose UNLESS you feel it dovetails into this idea in a curious way.
Thanks
Given that we are highly social creatures and social status is part of how we organise our societies I wondered how far exaggeration plays a role in our early appreciation of the world at large.
So, my idea was that we often aim to impress or entertain others and so over time, as communities grow in size. Tales of a catching a big fish are well known as times of exaggeration and boasting in popular modern culture, so extrapolating back through time where hard evidence of any claim was difficult to judge could it simply be that the concept of God arose through a combination of competitive story telling (one-upmanship) fed into real life boasting to the point where slowly a Higher Being came into fruition.
I am more curious about this behaviour in terms of it being an innate human quality. Is it kind of like having a competitive streak in the realm of abstraction that led to ideas of God and other comparative ideological schemes beyond the Western concept of God?
Anyway, thoughts and ideas on this specific idea welcome. I do not really want to get into other common tropes for how the concept of God arose UNLESS you feel it dovetails into this idea in a curious way.
Thanks
Comments (46)
I think that this would be a possible second step in the process, but I cannot really see it being the principle cause of the creation of a god. They are still doing it today.
Could you give a little more detail about how it might have occurred.
At some point someone would talk about someone with an ability to do something better than anyone else and this concept over time - tied in with storytelling - could develop either a concept of a being powerful in several areas or, with more Eastern thought, a concept of a unifying energy.
It is more or less our seeming natural propensity to imagine beyond the limits of our immediate scope and experience that I am talking about and that this is an advantageous attribute if we wish to impress others. Given that weaving a complex and compelling story in prehistory would have similar effects to evidential facts today I think there is weight to this general lien of thinking.
By this I mean that in modernity people are - in general - accustomed to ideas of Truth and Facts whereas prior to the more substantial development of our rational schemes I think the weight of a story would be as compelling then as Fact and Truths are today in term of believability and general acceptance of a world view.
Do you see what I mean? It sounds like a bit of a simplistic conception at first, but given that we are kind of closed off in our own paradigm of modernity it does take a little bit of bracketing to attempt to conceive of a world where rational thought and concrete ideas of cause and effect had no place in the day-to-day living of human social groups.
It is my understanding that it is an inherent human tendency to personify aspects of our world. Babies are instinctively responsive to human faces and voices and have an inborn moral sense. We name our cars and boats. This is something I have noticed about myself. So, it seems to me it is an easy step to personifying the world itself. I really love the world and I often find myself feeling grateful for what we have been given. That gratitude feels like a natural and reasonable manifestation of our drive to personify. This completely speculative idea strikes me as a better explanation for where gods might have arisen. Wherever they came from, I'm sure the process is much more complex than either of our ways of thinking about it.
Seeing as how early groups of humans were small and nomadic I guess there would be a possibility that story swapping would take place when groups met, If one group had maybe met a skilled hunter and shared their knowledge of him and his prowess it would be like the old game of telephone. As the other group would probable never meet the hunter they would pass along the story about the far away super person and it would change with each knew group repeating it slightly differently and adding things.
It might have worked, but there would still have been a grain of reality at the beginning.
Some scientists believe that modern humans are sort of hardwired to accept, even expect, the existence of a god. But the results of their experiments come from examining the modern brain, so it is not really possible to say whether it is part of the original human template or part of an evolved rewiring over time.
points out that naming things seems to be an intrinsic part of human thought processes, but it seems to me that it is a learned ability. From the very beginning of their lives they are shown things and told the names of those things.
It might just be that the word god was the name given to anything that was unexplainable and originally meant "I don't know".
Firstly, 'God' is not a matter for conceptual thought at all. Of course, you or I might have our 'concepts of God' but what the name signifies or stands for is outside the scope of conceptual thought. As T Clark will no doubt recall, the well-known Taoist aphorism 'the Way that can be named is not the real Way'. Much the same can be said here. It is the reason that the name that became corrupted as 'Yahweh' was originally represented as four Hebrew consonants YHWH that literally could not be spoken, as for the profane to speak the name was to corrupt it (although that interpretation is contested.)
Second point - I'm sure pre-moderns, generally, had a completely different sense of their relationship with the world than do we. The world insofar as it was an expression of the sacred, God or the Gods, was not an 'it' but a 'you' to which we were related in an 'I-you' (or I-thou) sense that we nowadays mainly reserve only for our significant others. I think the sense of the whole cosmos as being personalist was intrinsic to the early religions, as was the sense of awe at the vastness and fruitfulness of nature. Thus is was natural to feel that the cosmos (whicn incidentally means 'an ordered whole') was animated or alive, in a way that is quite alien to us moderns, for whom the vast bulk of the universe comprises lifeless matter. Which is not entirely at odds with the way you have put it, although that lacks, shall we say, a certain gravitas.
It's not uncommon to see human "intelligent" faces and features in nature, particularly the clouds. Imagine a fledging human barely able to communicate other than grunts of pleasure and displeasure, joy and annoyance, etc. Yet he feels and understands. He feels and understands pain and loss of a loved one or companion. Then perhaps he looks up and just so happens to see what looks like a smiling face perhaps resembling said lost companion. He feels reborn, as if placed into an entirely new world, a world that was once horrid and frightening, now hopeful and encouraging.
To a lesser extent, coincidences and "wishful thinking". Say you had an elderly neighbor who loved to bake an extremely rare and odd pie or something she would often come by to deliver who later passed away. Perhaps she was from a town where such a delicacy was common and a friend from the hometown came to visit her, bringing such a pie, and mistook your house for hers and left you that pie at the door. Early superstitious man would consider that an impossibility other than perhaps a gift from a world beyond our own. Probably not the best example but you should be able to get the concept of what I mean.
Edit: Sorry, must've missed that last sentence. So, perhaps like two stone age military generals talking about say, how they destroyed a village. One says, he killed everything in sight and nothing was alive or unburned for miles. The other responds his endeavor was far greater and the land was so destroyed it was uninhabitable and nothing would grow even to this day, etc. To the point the tale gets passed on and the man and his endeavors (whether factual or not) become something of a folk legend on steroids to the point he's attributed to being not even human but far above? Something like that? :chin:
It is an idea had just yesterday so need to look into it more. Not sure how much weight there is to it tbh.
I am well aware of all of this. The thought came to me by thinking about the different approaches/perspectives of religion across the globe. I was basically backtracking in terms of how reason and logic developed in the West compared to the East. The concept of God does seem to latch onto imaginative ideas and dealing with extremes; and it is that that got me thinking about how humans interact and behave. It is a bit of a stretch I know that, but I do not think I have heard of this idea before so threw it out there.
Quoting Outlander
I know this. I am not really here to compete with other theories ... ironically! :D
I guess my main line of thinking here is that humans are kind of new to reason. Applying reasonable explanations by assuming how we see the world is part and parcel of why I started to think like this.
Take for example how God has come to be defined (in Western/Middle Eastern Traditions) as all knowing, all seeing and all powerful. It seems fairly feasible that competing ideas of some act between peoples could result in a gradual process of Good to Better to Best to Ultimate (God). There are fairly clear instances of individuals being given a Deity level status - as mentioned in the East although there is no God in the main tradition of Buddhism it is pretty clear to see that the actual person is given something akin to an Ultimate Status even if not literally conceived of as a God (by most Buddhist sects).
As for animism, I am not really sure that can be called a 'Religion' in the Western sense anymore than Confucianism or Shamanism. The term Religion doe snot translate into Eastern languages really. They adopted the Western concept of Religion - through the God concept. The terms shukyo (Japanese) and zongjiao (Chinese) were created to apply to Western religious traditions. That said, undoubtedly many Eastern traditions have adopted the God concept in part.
Going back to the Middle East it is fairly apparent that cities had traditions that developed into God concepts too. This plays into the competitive concept of state versus state but in a more direct and concrete fashion. By this stage though we are probably way, way past the kind of incremental steps I am talking about that arose through some form of exaggeration for entertainments sake.
Yes. Given that FACTS did not exist in the sense they do today this may be even more plausible than it seems. The lack of EVIDENCE (because it did not strictly exist) would allow for the strength and depth of the narrative to take on a life of its own.
In Eastern traditions there are examples of how ideas competed and manifested with varying styles of debate. I am starting to wonder whether these are off shoots of more 'primitive' forms of competitive displays that led to the advent of more rational thought. Meaning, the stories COMPETED first and were QUESTIONED much further on down the line. Of course, all of this would have changed forever with the birth of writing.
I have been of the mindset for a long time that modern religions arose through the use of mnemonics, and now I am starting to think that maybe, much further back, the intent to preserve information came through and due to comparisons between imagined and real stories. EVIDENCE and FACTS themselves began with imaginative interplay and incremental one-upmanship.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=God+
I doubt that the term god or even religion were ever used by our cave dwelling prehistoric ancestors.
But I would bet that they did know the concept of "smarter being" and used it to explain things that they could not. "Ask the shaman the next time you see him, he should know" and when he does not have an answer "I will ask the great shaman the next time I see him" . It must end somewhere so the biggest shaman was made permanently unavailable and became a god.
Why would they question things they did not understand. This is certainly a modern analytic assumption that drives at the heart of why I found the idea fascinating (see my previous reply to Outlander if you didn't read already).
Anyway, need to let this one stew for a while and read a quite a bit more. I might have to dip back into Eliade's book on 'Shamanism' too and see if anything links up with all of this. I would say most of the work is ethnographic rather than ethnological though.
Evidence from psychological and cognitive science studies indicates this is not true. Language, including grammar and naming is a genetically inherited human capability. Obviously, specific words for specific things is learned social knowledge, but the drive to communicate with words is a fundamental part of human nature.
Quoting I like sushi
Shiva, Brahma, Ganesh?
Quoting I like sushi
Are you familiar with Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?" You might find it interesting. Amazon says "Jaynes's still-controversial thesis [is] that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing." His hypothesis strikes me as very far-fetched and his evidence flimsy, although some people give it credence.
Quoting I like sushi
Evidence?
Quoting I like sushi
Quoting I like sushi
Where did this come from? What possible evidence could you have this is true.
Your whole argument is to just restate your premise over and over.
How very charitable of you, Sir. :smirk:
Quoting Outlander
:100: :fire:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism [1]
https://sites.uw.edu/libraryvoices/2024/02/03/pareidolia-the-phenomenon-of-seeing-faces-everywhere/ [2]
Id say that there can be no concept of divinity without a concept of spirituality, and no concept of God devoid of a concept of divinity.
Based on what Ive read you saying, when the term God is interpreted (as you intend in this thread so far) as an all-this-and-that personhood, this then becomes a personification of divinity such that the biggest possible personhood is that of Gods. Note, however, that this very understanding stands in stark contrast to notions such as those of pantheism and panentheism for example wherein everything that we moderners understand by nature will itself be (both macrocosmically and microcosmically, and everything in-between, all of ourselves included) denoted as God with a capital G.
Consider the typical monotheistic view: Divinity is not equivalent to nature, and God is the supreme personhood that dictates both all divinity and nature.
Then consider the typical polytheistic view (which grew out of animism (which, oddly enough, is just a different wording for panpsychism in that both concepts affirm that everything is endowed with anima/psyche, i.e. soul)): the gods - here with a small g - are all at one with, else aspects of, nature (i.e., of logos, or else the anima mundi, and so forth).
These two just mentioned perspectives present diametrically opposite worldviews: the first where divinity ? nature (e.g., such that the super-natural is divided from and hence not nature), and the second where divinity = nature (e.g., such that the super-natural is that aspect, or those aspects, of Nature which consists of Natures upper, or uppermost, layers such as in terms of layers of Heraclitus or else Stoic logos basically translating into the non-mundane/profane aspects of Nature, the latter being where we humans typically (else, always) find ourselves dwelling.)
From this vantage, in further considering the divinity ? nature worldview, one could potentially go from my dad can beat up your dad to my deity can beat up your deity to there is, or else must be, a deity (i.e., a personhood) which is supreme and cannot be beaten by anything other. A bit tongue in cheek maybe, but psychologically believable all the same, I think. This being in relative keeping with the OP.
Still, this tends to overlook the diametrically opposite worldview of God wherein God = Cosmic Divinity = Nature. (A perspective that can be found in many non-Abrahamic worldviews as well as in Abrahamic ones, with at least certain forms of Kabbalism as example of the latter). In this worldview of God = Nature the following childhood paradox of God loses its validity, for it fully translates into: If Nature is all-powerful, can Nature create a rock that is too heave for Nature to lift? Youll maybe note that in this understanding, God = Nature per se holds no personhood and cannot be personified as something that can lift a rock (as though the rock were something other than itself). In this latter worldview, then, the gods (again, with a small g) maybe could each lift their own share of rocks, but no individual god equates to the cosmic totality of being which in this worldview is pantheistic God/Nature.
I could think of yet other interpretations of God (maybe in keeping with what stated) but I yet find these two just mentioned quite pertinent at the very least to Western history. And lets not forget that monotheism evolved out of polytheistic cultures, with henotheism as an in-between.
Yes. It ALL sounds tongue in cheek :) It is simple yet possibly a key instrument in so many factors including the development of Reason itself perhaps?
Quoting javra
And the latter are not part of the predominant Western tradition as mentioned. Hence why I stated there is no Primary equivalent in Eastern traditions (note: I use the term 'traditions' rather than 'religions'). Brahma is an especially concept that really does not fit into the Western conceptions of God.
I should perhaps have outlined the Monotheistic nature of Western/Middle Eastern traditions shifting dramatically away from pantheisms and birthing the concept of God as an amalgam of 'ideas' under the hood of a singular form.
Quoting javra
This outlines the modern Eastern and Western differences. Underneath though I guess I am suggesting personification or not we are viewing the slow and steady progress of human intellect toying with higher concepts and occasionally becoming seduced by them to greater or lesser degrees, with greater or lesser focus on this or that cosmological concern (life, death, morality, harmony, justice, nature etc.,.).
Note: I have always been more in favour of a plurality of forms than one almighty. But there is certainly power in the application of one ruling concept.
Here is an excerpt from Philosophies of Religion, Timothy Knepper talking about the elements from which Hinduism arose:
I think this kind of encapsulates the idea of a kind of Theological Olympics. It is also fairly obvious to note that through Western traditions, although conflict existed, science and philosophy are massively influenced by theological discourse as they are by Confucian ethics wholly separated from the God concept (mono- or pan-). The South Asian scheme seems to sit between the two both geographically and in terms of its attention to ethical concerns and deities.
Why would they not? Why did he not move when I kicked him? Why does my belly hurt after I ate that dead bird I found yesterday? Simple questions that helped them to survive are analytic.
Our concepts of cause and effect are modern concepts. It is foolish to assume otherwise given that even in Newtons time people thought his ability to plot out the motion of a ball to be magic.
Quoting Sir2u
No they are not. Meaning they are not simple questions they only look simple to us who know better. I imagine you might ask in the same light why would someone not clean their hands before tending to someone else's wound ... because there was no germ theory. Again, another instance of something we see as 'obvious' yet did not arise until long after the rise of the modern sciences.
The ability to metabolize alcohol that is in the genes of most Europeans is not present in those of many Asians, so they are not good at boozing. This genetic adaption in the Europeans was a process that happened over time, supposed because of their use of brewing their drinks instead of boiling the water to purify it. Is it possible that there is a language gene?
Not all scientist agree that language is innate in humans but say that the ability to learn many things is, from this point of view it would be a learned ability like walking or swimming. We are born with the ability to learn to do many things but they are not in themselves intrinsic.
Many parts of the body are adapted to do specific things, like the vocal cords for instance. Some say that we have vocal cords so that we can speak, but if that was so then I could have chats with my dogs.
Learning to speak is something we do as a child, but yes we do need all of the parts of, including the mental processes, to be able to do it.
Personally I think that the need to communicate is intrinsic and the ability to learn things is as well. But I am still not sure about language being hard wired, but I am not a scientist.
A thought, if language was hard wired would that mean that there are some specific genes that control this function? As with the alcohol gene, would it be a racial, cultural, societal, ethnic adaption? What would happen if it was a specific gene that was tied to the ancestors of a baby and that baby was brought up by a completely different environment?
And the funny thing is that some people still insist on using human science as a bookmark for knowledge when we don't even have a complete picture of how we work?
Who knows, it might be true. :wink:
Is this question being asked on the assumption that there is no actual god, and that god like a garden gnome was purely fabricated for some small individual purpose or simple pleasure?
When you abstract, you make a universal. When you make a universal, you now see something else besides the particular. You see particulars and abstractions or universals.
So I wouldnt say you need competitiveness or exaggeration to come up with the idea of god. God shows up when you abstract the abstraction and universalize making universals. God is the universal mind like a mind makes the universal everything else.
In other words, by simply being a human and simply forming abstractions, forming an abstraction of a universal mind seems inevitable.
Thunder and lightening are the hand of Thor or Zeus - from thunder and lightening we abstract the idea of power over and above human control and survival, the abstract of idea of life and death itself (a universal like biology)and then seeing that some people do survive such powerful, uncontrolled experiences, we abstract the idea of a person behind such power so we can give an account of why some survive the thunderstorm and others do not. Hence Thor.
One can universalize the abstract idea of love and build a god.
Or the universal idea of intelligence and build a creator.
Or the universal idea of balance and build a whole religion or set of practices.
Applying modern ideas to cavemen is not really helpful. Do you really think that cause and effect was not understood by these prehistoric ancestors of ours? If that were true I very much doubt that humans could have reached the point were we are having this discussion.
Self preservation is based on analyzing situations I believe. For example: Joe walked into the fast river and was never seen again, I wont go into the river if it is fast. Fred threw a rock at his missus and she wont wake and there is no more nooky,I will not throw rocks at my missus. But yes, unexplainable things are the same as magic to the uneducated mind.
Quoting I like sushi
They were simple questions, the answers though were not simple. But they tried to find answers to them which I believe meant that they analyzed the information available and acted upon it to survive. Once again you are confusing modern ideas and principles with caveman mentality. Just because they did not get all of the answers correct does ot mean that they did not try to do the best with the knowledge available.
And there are still people that do not wash their hands after having a shit. :worry:
Well, this is what I am saying you are doing ... so we are kind of stuck aren't we :D
Quoting Sir2u
Yes. But you can agree they did not have demarcated logical principles or scientific method. No Evidence, Facts or concept of Causation in the way we do. I mean, this can been shown with people today to some degree (and even seen on this forum from time to time).
Quoting Fire Ologist
I would not say 'simple pleasure' as the social interactions between people is highly complex. Maybe it was trivial to some and not to others. We can see how with the advent of civilization that people were curious enough to write about narratives and look beyond the surface. A kind of artistic 'critical analysis', a dissemination of taste, played out publicly.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The one-upmanship is just what we do. I am not saying it is I am suggesting maybe it could be a bigger factor than we realise in social groups where Evidence and Facts are absent (in the modern sense) and that the aesthetics of the situation play are much harder role in the development of ideas leading to formal reasoning.
By this, I take it that you mean that they did not have a formal or adequate education. I can maybe agree that it is true that they were incapable of stating or writing their logical processes, but again the very fact that humanity exists denies their ignorance of cause and effect. Therefore they must have used evidence or known information to reach the conclusions they came up with.
Do you really need to kick a rock twice to know it hurts? Well I guess some do, but for most of us the pain would be enough to stop us from repeating the action.
Oh. So the issue is purely psychological. All evidence for god is hallucinatory or fraud.
You are saying humans have psychological drive (for some unknown reason) to reach the highest high and brag about it to other humans.
This is trueQuoting Sir2u
I don't disagree with this. I like to think I'm open minded, but I find the evidence for the innate nature of language convincing. I also am not a cognitive scientist or psycholinguist.
Quoting Sir2u
As I understand it, there are genes which have an influence on language, but it's not an absolute connection. People without the genes or with damaged versions may still be able to use language correctly. People with the genes may have language difficulties.
Quoting Sir2u
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The fact that scientific knowledge is not complete is no reason not to use what we have.
Granting that I"m properly understanding this quote, I don't identify the conceptual drift toward monotheism(s) with the key instrument to the development of reason. Instead, I tend to identify monotheistic notions of God with the average human impetus, or desire, for some authority that overshadows all others. This, in turn, can either lead to authoritarianism, if not despotic yearnings and practices, which I view as bad/unethical/etc. or else toward egalitarian universals of being: with "natural laws" quickly here coming to mind as one version of this (be they found in materialisms or in monotheisms or else in spiritualities such as the Logos of the Stoics ... the latter, quite obviously, standing at a stark crossroad to most monotheistic worldviews wherein a superlative personhood as absolute authority is championed from which the logos ("the word") stems).
In short, I disagree that the development of reason is to be associated with the "ultimate personhood" issue. (Whether one to any extent agrees or disagrees with it, Buddhism is certainly entwined with a vast amount of reasoning, for example, and there is no ultimate personhood in it.)
Quoting I like sushi
I can get this, though I find it overlooks the yet quite persisting perspective of "Nature worship" to be found in a significant quantity of Western traditions (with various forms of Neo-paganism as one blatant example). A Buddhist or Hindu, for example, does not engage in the same trains of thought as do Westerners when it comes to this, such that Buddhism and Hinduism can at best only be described as forms of Nature-worship only from the vantage of Westerner's projections. This much like they could all be declared as "pagans" by some monotheists.
To this effect, having read Eliade's "Shamanism" some time ago, you'll find the notion of nature-worship quite well alighted to the concept of shamanism, for example. And shamanism, though nowadays in some cases extended to Eastern traditions - say, for one example, by addressing the original Buddha as a shaman of the East - is well enough rooted in Western practices and perspectives: shamanism historically stemmed from Siberia with enough affirming it to originate from traditions along the Caucasus Mountains, and from the latter we get the term "Caucasian" which, at least in the USA, is often used to strictly denote white people of European decent.)
At pith, Nature as something deserving of worship is deeply rooted in Western traditions (with Western notions of Gaia and of Pan as just two examples of this), rather than in Eastern traditions. And although a relative minority nowadays, we all intuitively know that tree-hugges are nature-worshipers. And while the perspective isn't commonly professed, a far greater quantity of people in the West hold affinities to such nature-worshiping perspectives.
Quoting I like sushi
Again, contemplating the strictly Western notions of (non-monotheistic) Logos, as one example, is to itself be addressing "higher concepts" that concern the cosmological concerns you specify. No superlative personhood required.
Quoting I like sushi
Yet in nature-worship perspectives there doesn't occur the conviction that "there can be only one (at the expense of all others)", this as the competitions of the Olympics might insinuate. The only "one" here would then be Nature itself - the one uni-verse or else one cosmos - as well as, potentially, some either explicitly or implicitly held notion similar to (if not identical to) what in Platonism and Neoplatonism is addressed as the Good, which, again, can only be singular. Yet nature-worshiping traditions of Western origin (mostly of the West's past yet some still persisting to the present) they yet are.
Edit: I in all this neglected to explicitly addresses the traditions of Native American (First Nation) Indians. Which, although not directly descending from the Caucasus Mountains via Europe, are all nature-worshiping perspective distinct from typical Eastern views all the same.
I am saying something more like the 'one-upmanship' led to progress in Reason. As you rightly point out both Western and Eastern traditions have a history of debate (as I outlined).
Quoting javra
The concerns of each tradition are quite different for sure. The God concept is a primary issue for Western traditions but not at all for Eastern.
Quoting javra
To be fair Eliade makes it pretty clear he is talking about Shamanism not shamanism - as in not the true name associated with Siberia but a global phenomenon.
Quoting javra
I think I see where you are slightly misunderstanding what I am saying. This is why I tried to steer clear of one particular example. The story is the competitive element here NOT the personhood. In the Western tradition clearly personhood has been a primary mover in the development of theological thinking, but elsewhere it was certainly not that big of a concern at all.
Really? Who disagrees? How so? Seems a strange thing to dispute, but likely it is the concept of 'language' they are using. Some linguists are quite happy to state that bees have a 'language' while others are not.
It is clear enough that if something moves we read social attributes into it. This has been shown again and again with non-lingual babies having emotional reacts to images of shapes 'attacking' other shapes.
I am looking very specifically at what I am proposing here. Not really interested in other ideas related to God/Religion unless they can be combined with what I am talking about.
Seeing Faces and Seeing Object As Sentient is interesting but I do not see how it relates to what I am saying directly?
Quoting T Clark
Quoting I like sushi
I have a strong intuition (wishful thinking?) there is an innate human nature. As I have always seen it, innate language is the strongest instance of that. I've read a bit about other ways of seeing things, but after this discussion I thought I should dig deeper. This is from "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher. His seems like a pretty even-handed and non-polemical take on the issue.
Quoting Guy Deutscher - The Unfolding of Language
Yes, true, thanks of the embellishment. Yet the term "shamanism" - rather than witch-doctor or medicine-man for example - does originate in the Siberian region. From best recollections: This together with the interpretation of the shaman initially leaving the village where he becomes a type of outcast, then there being ripped to shreds by the spirits and deities till all that is left is his bones, wherein he is considered to be dead yet still spiritually living, then needing to reassemble himself as a living person (a time and phase traditionally termed "special" insanity), then after having healed himself (and presumably the spirits that surround) reentering the village as a bona fide shaman. Certain Australian Aboriginal mythoi can be likened to hold similar general accounts but here they will be a multifaceted singular jewel remaining rather than the bone (upon which the flesh and skin is attached). One can find a similar enough mythos in the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris - who was cut into innumerable pieces and then reassembled by the goddess Isis. If find all such accounts - which, as Eliade illustrates, can be quite global - to symbolically describe ego-death and one of its potential aftermaths. All the same, shamanism as previously just described is, tmbk, specific in its origins to the Siberian region. I'd gladly accept being corrected on this, though.
[Edit: JC's wanderings about in the desert and the Buddha's near starvation under a tree could each likewise be likened to a type of such shamanistic experience, else of ego-death - such that, for one example, the individual in each case was tempted in a plethora of ways away from "enlightenment" by the spirits that surrounded. And after their enlightenment/revelation/personal-apocalypse (i.e., unveiling of truth) they then walked back into their respective village, so to speak. But I nevertheless have a very hard time in then addressing either individual as "shaman" ... this largely due to the connotations the term tends to hold. At any rate, since I was already opining ... :smile: ]
Quoting I like sushi
I'm by no means one to shy away from or else deny the role of competition in the evolution of ideas. Still, to be concise about things, I do find that there often occurs a bifurcation when it comes to competition: on one hand there is competition for the benefit of one's ego (which often is unconcerned for underlying truths, say akin to ancient sophistry) and on the other there is competition for the benefit of greater understanding of truths, if not of Truth with a capital "T" (which often deems the welfare of one's ego to be of a secondary importance, if even that much). Empirical scientists of today all compete, for a more concrete example, but while some compete for the sake of status or financial profit, in short for greater "power-over" (and thereby sometimes twist if not fabricate truths :cough: those who deny global warming :cough:) all those with sincere interest in their profession compete cooperatively for the sake of better uncovering truths, this for the sake of obtaining a type of "power-with" (such as in relation to the scientific community at large, if not for the sincere benefit, and hence increased power, of all humanity). It to me seems to only be in this second sense that anyone can in any way be competing with their own selves for optimal discovery (pushing themselves harder, so to speak, toward this end).
To the extent this generalized (and I grant, likely oversimplified) perspective is granted, I then doubt that egotists' sophistic competition for new ideas can lead to improved reasoning anywhere near as much as the sincere hunt for the truth(s) that await to be found, both physical and metaphysical. The very same overall dichotomy I'd then ascribe to humanity's history of conceptualizations regarding divinity, or spirituality, or god/s. Some emerged out of competitions for power-over others and yet others emerged out of competing views, competitions to this extent, for what is genuinely true - such that truth (and thereby awareness of what is real) becomes the prize that is to be won (and not an ego's greater power-over that which is other which bolsters one's magnitude of egoism). And, of course, there then can be rivalry galore between these two overall ambitions and resulting forms of respective competition.
In short, I don't find that all notions of divinity, spirituality, and god/s are there strictly due to oneupmanship - which, if true, would entail that all such accounts are strictly about granting some egos more power over other egos and that none of these concepts were in any way obtained via sincere inquiries into what is true and thereby real. Most interpretations of Buddhism, as one example, don't in any way strike me as being about oneupmanship - but, instead, as addressing being about as egoless as is possible.
I guess it is good to have some controversy in areas that seem obviously true. I do have my own way of viewing language and by 'language' I mean something that is probably not the same as how many others use the term. So, yeah, disagreements will arise due to use of the term probably.
I cannot really disagree here either. I probably am just more curious about it having a bigger effect than we would initially think.
Before any search for truth I think this is a likely candidate that helped develop an initial search for the truth.
As a kind of counter argument to what I am thinking, I am aware that we are born with certain rational faculties. I read this several years ago. Maybe someone else will find it interesting enough to read too:
The Scientist in the Crib
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlXj9cBTpVU&t=901s
I tried! I will keep trying :D Not sure if it makes anything I am talking about more clear OR less clear?
I've taken the time to watch the first six minutes and "embellishment" comes to mind as a pertinent word for what you are getting at.
And I would say yes, I think the human tendency towards embellishment has played a large role in the development of religious claims. I think we naturally develop subconscious recognition of the sorts of things that make stories more interesting, and this subconscious recognition tends to influence our storytelling whether we are conscious of it or not.
It seems plausible that in a culture without an understanding of a scientific method, and consequently with less recognition of the negative aspects of the human tendency to embellish, embellishment plays a particularly large role in the way beliefs get propagated.
Bart Ehrman's book, How Jesus Became God, goes into this with regards to the development of Christian beliefs.
Thanks for reference. Doubt I will be able to find a copy of that book though. Does he make any cross-references with other religious traditions?
:lol:
If I was prone to losing the will to live in response to people struggling to articulate their thoughts, I'd have murdered myself a long time ago.
However, at the moment, the desire to maintain my social status as a responsible adult in the eyes of my coworkers is interfering with me watching more.
:grin: :up:
Most of the commentary in this thread seems mutually compatible and complimentary to your idea here.
Gods are definitely inflated and deflated by human rivalry/competition. The divine right of kings is an example of leveraged belief to secure/conserve power. One invokes the bigger fish of spirit as a representative of official sanction.
[quote=wiki: Divine right of kings]"The doctrine asserts that a monarch is not accountable to any earthly authority (such as a parliament or the Pope) because their right to rule is derived from divine authority."[/quote]
One can imagine the endless stories that serve to secure or depose one who enjoys the blessings/curses of a high status positions. If gods are not born from politics per se, they certainly evolve through it.
In Mandrills, sexual competition between males results in a hormone feedback cycle. Successful males gain a phenotype change. The troop leader is adorned by a phenotypic aura of color and shape, which serves as a signal to all others. Now throw story telling into the mix. His color might be a sign of his divine right as a king. If he may potentially be deposed by a rival, there is "always another Mandrill" to take his place. One may fantasize about the other (if fantasy is possible) and dream of all kinds of unsettling surreal exaggerations. These stories generate from all tellers, all dreamers, and are shaped by desire and fear. Mutually recognized/affirmed status between unequal members might favor the perpetuation of a shared story from shared desire. A rival might seek to subvert consensus belief for personal advantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_BRofevrCw&t=1s
Have FINALLY managed to get a copy of his book too :)
such as sickness and say, lightning.
A common theory. Maybe there is something in this, but I am not convinced it is as big a deal as some make out. We know for a fact that stories were told to pas on knowledge and that mnemonics with fantastical beings helped retain such memories. For this reason I think the heart of the matter of the God concept is due to a break in the means of passing on knowledge and/or uninitiated people misconstruing the stories - basically mistaking the map for the landscape.
Still seems like a reductive conclusion, in light of the cool responses in this thread. Are you just saying the God concept is just another meme, like everything else that might replicate through a game of telephone? It's very Dawkinish/Dennetish. The misconstrual is at times intentional, the flourish of a will to subordinate, teach or delight others, like telling your kids a fat man in a red suit delivers gifts globally to deserving children on Christmas Eve (because your parents did it to you).
Suppose we look into the heavens and see our cultural constellations as gods, with narrative exploits attached to them. We've connected the dots of known stars in familiar patterns as a shared mnemonic/coordinating device for potential navigation. Imbuing those patterns with a godly/sacred significance, story, might serve useful functions from an evolutionary point of view.
We are still sharing consensus dreams (myths) insofar as our maps can never fully close in upon the landscape.
Circles don't exist either, just like the gods. They are just another mathematical meme or organizing principle in a game of telephone. Ok...
There is a lot more to mnemonic techniques that people realise because literacy changed things and the internet more so.
In this thread I was speculating about another possible factor. The oneupmanship is more or less an idea that could have also had a wider effect on theological and ethical discussions. If I am looking at a particular point where it was most significant I guess it would be pre axial revolution maybe? Because theological debate did not really exist - I mean it as a significant factor as possible precursor to true theological discourse.
It is speculative, but not blindly. Make sense?
Javra's distinction of "power over" versus "power with" in terms of competition and collaboration is appropriate. There is just as much room for the evolution of gods/God within mundane collaborative activities, like in the simple retelling of a story which the audience curates through feedback. I suppose you could say wanting to appeal to an audience is a kind of one upmanship of the self, even when there is no direct competitor involved. If everyone has heard the same old story a hundred times before, acceptable novelty might be encouraged.
The capacity to dream up supernormal stimuli and automatic conceptual fusions also may furnish the first abstract ontological dualism (spirit versus matter). The gods may just as well fall out of the dream world, if it is taken as evidence of a whole hidden world-in-itself.