<<Does the monkey want daddy peering over his shoulder as he is stealing someone's bananas? Nooooo. Big daddy isn't a convenient construct if he's going to judge us all the time instead of just smiting leopards.>>
Constructs are by their nature malleable. Really clever monkeys would organize into a religion with a holy book, and appoint a priest, who would twist the words of the book to prove that what Big Daddy really wants is for the whole troop to descend on the next troop, bash their heads, and take their bananas.
Power corrupts, and it corrupts religions as fast as anything else. My own feeling is that Christianity has been in decline, from the standpoint of institutional morality (oxymoron), since the conversion of Constantine.
There's a speculation that if there is no God, we're on our own, which is unacceptable, therefore there must be a God, even if we have to invent one. I'd submit that even if there is a God we're still on our own - whatever God may or may not exist is clearly not about to intervene to save us from each other, or from ourselves.
Interesting speculations, but I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do. Like taking the kids snorkeling, or riding a little plastic boat down a big wild river, or lying on pine needles looking up through the trees. Or a bunch of others, mostly along the same lines. The only advantage of metaphysical speculation is that I can pretend to be working while I'm doing it. So perhaps I'll keep on, for a while. Must be something else to discuss, though. We start to sound like the Ask God thread. Maybe we should ask God if s/he exists. Though I doubt there would be an answer.
Steve
PS one of the things that makes me suspect that God is our own invention is our obsession with applying human characteristics such as gender to a presence which, if it exists at all, is certainly far apart from them. I'm sure of very little about God, but I'm sure God is NOT a bearded older man with a deep, resonant voice. |
