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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40716)	6/17/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I know you feel that way. I think the airplane worshippers, do, too. I think the behaviors I describe have quite a lot to do with quite a few worshippers. Your 'God,' or state of worshipfulness, may differ from others, though. But of course they... (No need to write it out; you know what comes next.) I can't help wondering what it is that you give the name 'God' to, and why you give it that name instead of the name 'Ralph'? Granted that you see the cosmos as a very grand thing, do you take the next step and derive ethical intuitions from this perception, and give the name 'God' to an association you have with it, and proceed to 'worship' it? And how do you jump from one step to the next? and do you do it because it 'feels' right, which is, of course, what I suspect is standardly the case? (In my prior post I hypothesized about what might be the origin of such feelings-of-rightness.)

To: Ilaine who wrote (40716)	6/18/1999 1:52:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 108807

Magical thinking is one thing. God is quite another. Is it? Magic often requires a ritual of some sort to achieve a desired end. In that context, what would you call prayer, or behaviors like lighting candles and crossing yourself? Why did the Old Testament God demand sacrifices? And what is more reminiscent of magic than the story of Jesus' death and resurrection in the context of any number of early Greek mystical beliefs that antedated Jesus by at least a thousand years? Frazer's The Golden Bough is a good source of information on those beliefs and practices, and if you haven't read it, may I suggest Mary Renault's The King Must Die? In my opinion, religion is nothing more than highly codified superstition and magic. Only by virtue of the antiquity of the belief is it elevated to anything more. That's why members of traditional religions get away with dismissing newly arisen beliefs as cults. But yesterday's cult is tomorrow's main stream religion. TTFN, CTC