"I am a jealous God"
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And evil.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You need to go back and re-read your Jung, if he was covered in any of your university classes. Review his concept of archetypes--motifs that occur in nearly all cultures in nearly all eras, including legends, visual images, rituals, etc. (Or for a more accessible version, see Joseph Campbell's popular series 20 years ago on PBS, or his many books.)
An archetype is an instinct--a belief, behavior, compulsion, visual image, legend, ritual, etc.--that is pre-programmed into our synapses by the evolution of our DNA. (Jung died before genetics became a mature, computerized, science. These are his words translated into contemporary language.)
Many archetypal behaviors can be clearly identified as survival traits in the Paleolithic Era, or even passed down from ancestral species. The instinct to run away from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face, for example, occurs in virtually all animals because one that did not have it would not have survived to reproduce and pass on his genes. A newborn giraffe will scamper clumsily away from a hyena but graze peacefully in the much larger shadow of a wildebeest.
But other behaviors are not so easy to figure out. Surely some of them are tactics for escaping the dangers of a bygone world, which we can no longer imagine. But just as surely, some are accidental relics passed down through genetic bottlenecks or genetic drift. Our species went through two of them: We're all descended from "Mitochondrial Eve," a single woman who lived around 120KYA, and from "Y-Chromosome Adam," a single man who lived around 60KYA, just before our first successful migration out of Africa, after which we became too spread out for genetic drift and bottlenecks to be possible.
As I have noted in several other threads over the years, it's not hard to hypothesize that an irrational belief in the supernatural might have been a survival trait for the species prior to 12KYA, when we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, regarding other bands with suspicion as competitors for scarce resources. Imagine two clan leaders meeting to discuss their mutual suspicion, and discovering to their amazement that they both believed in the same gods!
According to Jung, all of the traditional polytheistic religions have the same pantheon, only the names are changed. Each god seems to be a materialization of a distinct portion of our "spirit" (a word he freely borrows from supernaturalism)--the Hunter, the Parent, the King, the Reveler, the Healer, etc., so these archetypes go deep into our psychological composition.
When the twin technologies of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry) were first discovered (independently in many different times and places, but first in Mesopotamia around 9500BCE), the first food surplus this planet had ever seen came into existence, and it was no longer necessary for clans to compete for food. Furthermore, economies of scale and division of labor made larger farming and herding villages much more productive and prosperous--but they are hard to achieve in a population of a couple of dozen. It suddenly became an advantage for clans to merge and live together in peace.
Yet Homo sapiens is a pack-social species, and like wolves and gorillas we instinctively regard outsiders with suspicion and enmity. It would have been very difficult for us to overcome that, to experiment with an idea that was brand-new and untested.
This is where the shared belief in deities may have broken the ice. If those guys believe in the same gods we do, they can't be all bad, right? Let's try inviting them in so we can have larger herds and crops, and a few of us can be excused from food-production duty and specialize in brewing beer, creating pottery and furniture, making pretty clothes, and composing music.
With our species's uniquely massive forebrain, we were able to override our pack-social instinct and begin living like a herd-social species, in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers like bison. However, 12,000 years is not a very long time for a species with a 15-25 year breeding cycle, only around 600 generations. That's not long enough for evolution to replace the genes that control our behavior with a whole new set. Deep down inside each of us there is still a caveman who regards strangers with suspicion, and every day is a struggle to remind him that the benefits of ignoring that suspicion are worth the risk (small but nonetheless real!) that occasionally a stranger may give in to his own inner caveman and go on a spree of robbery or homicide.
Unfortunately that rich pantheon of the traditional religions was replaced by the Children of Abraham with a pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit: one God as a role model, cramming all of our hopes, dreams, strengths, weaknesses, desires and obligations into a linear scale between "Good" and "Evil." At some point, this ridiculous perversion of our supernatural instincts, having lost some of its archetypal mooring, began to break apart into rival communities, each with its own slightly different version of the monotheistic mythology.
It's ironic that, originally, religion was probably a force for peace, harmony and cooperation, and helped our species survive and prosper; whereas today it is just the opposite: a force for hatred, discrimination and war, which threatens to destroy civilization and take us full circle back into the Stone Age, where our inner caveman can be let loose again.
A simple experiment comes to mind.
If you wore a mask with eyes at the side, would animals not run away as much?
Regarding Jung, didn't he say something along the lines of:
"No person has ever recovered from a psychological illness without undergoing some variety of religious conversion"?
My own view on religious belief is that it is a vital part of what it is to be human.
If science thinks it can just pluck away religious belief without something replacing it, it is wrong.
Human nature abhors a vacuum.
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Well, that's a comprehensive analysis according to Jung, who I confess I have not read...
I never read other philosophy in case it contaminated my own, a condition that is harder than you might think to accomplish.
However I think 600 or so generations since the said genetic founders of the species would, in biological terms, be plenty of time for humans to relinquish thier need of dieties - should it prove un-beneficial. Further, recent analysis of the brain indicates an area comitted to the processing of spiritual stimuli. Now why would Mankind need to have a genetic predisposition to such a thing? There must be some benefit to the species or such a trait would not survive.
I suffer from clinical depression, and PTSD. Every now and then I have a psychotic episode. Strangely, I become quite spiritually sensitive during such times. So much so I got banned from the PCF forum for accusing them of an athiest conspiracy! Luckily the Mods here are not nearly so anal, and I can generally speak my mind.
I dont think it is spirituality that is dysfunctional, but our failiure to interpret it for modern times.
I never read other philosophy in case it contaminated my own, a condition that is harder than you might think to accomplish.
However I think 600 or so generations since the said genetic founders of the species would, in biological terms, be plenty of time for humans to relinquish thier need of dieties - should it prove un-beneficial. Further, recent analysis of the brain indicates an area comitted to the processing of spiritual stimuli. Now why would Mankind need to have a genetic predisposition to such a thing? There must be some benefit to the species or such a trait would not survive.
I suffer from clinical depression, and PTSD. Every now and then I have a psychotic episode. Strangely, I become quite spiritually sensitive during such times. So much so I got banned from the PCF forum for accusing them of an athiest conspiracy! Luckily the Mods here are not nearly so anal, and I can generally speak my mind.
I dont think it is spirituality that is dysfunctional, but our failiure to interpret it for modern times.
I never studied it oficially. I have very clear ideas of my own that have seen me through many debates. I didn't want to be unduly influenced by other philosophies whilst refining my own. Now that I am secure, I am more open to the standards.
What I mean by that is Kant, Soccrates, Jung Neitz and the rest. Maybe there are no standards, maybe a poor term. The usual suspects, perhaps..
I don't know if it would have made any differnce or made me a better philospher, but I'm always learning - every day.
I don't know if it would have made any differnce or made me a better philospher, but I'm always learning - every day.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I agree with you that religiosity does seem to be pretty much a cultural universal among human beings.
I'd guess that the origins of human religiosity extend well back into the paleolithic stone age, perhaps to even before anatomically modern humans appeared. Neanderthals apparently practiced ritual burials and even Homo erectus seem to have sometimes collected human skulls.
While all known human cultures display some form of religiosity, the forms and objects of that religiosity are all over the map. People have detected supernatural potency in pretty much every imaginable object at some time or another. Spirits and Gods have taken an almost inexhaustible variety of names and forms.
So my speculation is that what's happening probably isn't that all human cultures are reacting to mysterious contact from some single deity, or even from multiple distinct deities. I'm more inclined to think that there are processes in human cognition that tend to give rise to our religiosity, perhaps as a secondary consequence of some more practical function.
As I wrote earlier (post #15 in this thread), I think that it's our human social instincts that cause most people to be most comfortable when they are thinking of abstractions as if they were human personalities. Doing so allows them to think of natural events in terms of purposes and intentions, and it makes it much easier to become emotionally engaged. If anything, that tendency to personalize abstractions was probably even greater in prehistoric times.
Even in the 5000 years or so of recorded history, we see a distinct movement from early personalistic mythology through the advent of more abstract philosophy, to contemporary culture with its emphasis on science, mathematics and technology. The role of abstractions in leading-edge human thinking has been steadily expanding, a tendency that's conceivably associated with an accompanying decline in general religiosity.
lol
if you think citing Jung's ideas on archetypes are sufficient to establish how they are irrevocably established in our synapses, it might pay for you to (re)attend some university classes ...
*~PriNcesS~*
Registered Member
"rather, it could be that we are separated parts and parcels of god, hence we both draw from the same quality but have vastly different quantity."
Agree! it does give you chilllssss when you think about it though."artificial sense of self"
could you be more specific? *artificial sense of self*?
"killing doesn't attract a criminal element for him"
so why does he permit some horrible accident to happen (the kind that meant to take your life I mean) and a person falls into coma for days,hours... or they brain dead but then suddenly they come out of it? did God simply changed his mind about calling a life back to him ?
ahhhh but philosophy is open to interpretation and requires some participation from the observer...otherwise it would be science and not philosophy. But yah, i hold no undue fascinations with it in the slightest.
Balls.
You don't think science requires participants/ observers?
You don't think science is subject to interpretation?
ahhhh, but does it "require" it?
Of course it doesn't.
Philosophy demands it. Otherwise it is not philosophy or just perhaps bad philosophy. But, alas, good or bad is open to interpretation.
I would say that such a god can not be perfect. So what then ?
Later you point out that "if god made man in his image".
Think about that for a minute. God makes man in his image, then god looks like man. So now we have a god that looks like man who is jealous and angry.
That is man projecting his view of a god based on what he knows, himself.
Man created god in his image not the other way around.
There is probably no better example of that being the case than the statement "god made man in his image".
Otherwise and for those that have a different god, what image would you have of a god ? Can they be male or female, do they need both. The whole idea gets very slippery and ends up being just a voice in ones head.
Other ideas of god(s) were of animalistic or natural phenomena. So every idea of god to date is what we know, can see etc.
IOW, we create the idea.