Eternity (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 19:08 (4015 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Yes indeed, the imagination is a great aid to opening up new insights. Some folk would even say that's how all the different gods came into being in the first place.-DAVID: Karen Armstrong would disagree. She thinks we are built to be religious from the beginning. And humans in the Western world followed a progression from many gods to one God, as thought matured, and from a fierce God, to a loving God to a mysterious God as one went from the OT to the NT to the Quran. Even the stone-age native Americans had one God.The East ignoring the Hindu crowd of gods, settled on a more mysterious set of structures for their approach to devinity. But everyone except atheists and agnostics join in.-I wonder what you mean by "thought matured". You adhere to the Western way of thought, with your emphasis on monotheism, and yet atheism and agnosticism are widespread in the Western world, and you have told us that 90% of scientists are that way inclined. Maturity, then? No doubt "thought" changes as conditions change, science solves more and more of Nature's apparent mysteries (ugh, ugh, fancy all those folk bowing down to the sun, eh?), and reason rips apart the vast fabric of hocus-pocus that envelops so many of our religions. But you are right that worship of some kind seems to permeate most societies. The question is whether all of them have latched on to some kind of universal truth, or the self-conscious human mind simply needs explanations of the inexplicable, as well as the hope that some greater power (even if it is terrifying) might help us to overcome the dangers and insecurities of life on Earth.