Re: Question for the people who believe in god

All-In [29860]

TigerPulse: 100%

Posts: 8837

Joined: 10/31/10

Jun 5, 2022, 5:10 PM

Those are actually really good questions Big and I'll give you an answer from someone who has been multiple forms of believer, and a non-believer, and a maybe-believer in my lifetime.

I've discussed this with others before, so apologies for repeating myself to them. If you'd like extended answers see some of the earlier posts, starting with "Repost by Request" on 4/9, then just make your way up from the bottom of P&Ph forum.

It's a lot of reading but if you are really interested there's some great input from all sorts of folks with all sorts of ideas. It's always helpful to understand what others see and why they see it.

I've found two things common to most people. 1) We all agree there is mystery in the universe, and 2) nobody knows everything. So the question is, what do you do with that mystery? Do you write it off and ignore it, or do you try to understand it with the limited tools we have available...5 senses and a brain.

That's kind of the history of religion in 2 sentences. And though we group those attempted answers into "religions", or as the band RUSH would say, "a ready-guide in some celestial voice", there have actually been as many attempts to answer those mysteries as there have been people that have ever lived.

You can pick a ready-guide that that has already been worked out for you, like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or whatever; you can modify one so that it answers your questions better; or you can make your own answers.

And since we all pretty much agree that no one knows everything, (and in particular anyone else’s personal life experience) who can say anyone is wrong? So all I see are right answers. Right for the people who believe them.

But to your specific questions:

>Do you believe there are or were multiple gods at some point in history?

The short answer - who knows? First, it sort of depends on what your definition of a god is. I can say that the idea of only one god is one of the newer concepts in history. The earliest known monotheistic religion was in Egypt, in about 1300 BCE, and it only lasted 10 years. Then they went back to multiple gods.

Now, about that same time, 1300 to 1200 BCEish, a group of supposed exiles from Egypt possibly carried that idea, or one very much like it, across the Sinai Desert over to Canaan, where it spread over time and quite a few changes to become modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

But the point is that “one god” was not only novel, it was unique at that time. For as long as man had lived before, and in every place he lived, he believed in multiple gods. But that doesn’t fully answer your question, so I’ll pick that up next.

>The bible has a lot of stories and talks about cultures that believed in different gods.

Yes. Not just different ones, but multiple ones. Ones that even challenged Yahweh, the god of the ancient Israelites, to feats of strength and such.

The best answer so multiple gods I have ever heard was from Joseph Campbell, a professor of comparative religion and mythology. George Lucas credited him for the underlying concept in Star Wars of “The Force.”

The Force IS that mystery of the universe. The thing that cannot be fully understood by very limited man. Some might even call it God, and if there is a God, who among us is arrogant enough to say they know the mind of God? The unknown is a part of that conceptual package. If you believe in God, you accept your limitations and acknowledge the unknown is unknowable.

Campbell did a fantastic series of interviews will Bill Moyers called The Power of Myth. Not myth as “fake”, but myth as an attempt to put the unknowable into terms that humans can understand.

Something that we are familiar with in some way. Carl Sagan did the same thing in the very fine movie Contact when the alien appears to Jodi Foster as her father. Something familiar, and comfortable, and relatable, that she could understand.

One of Campbell’s famous works was “The Masks of God.” It’s the same idea. The idea that different people, in different cultures, see the same thing in different ways. I use the analogy of my dad. He was a gentile, loving father to me, a not so gentile but just as loving father to my punk brother, probably a crazy jokester to his friends, a diligent worker to his boss, and faithful and loving spouse to my mom. He was probably a hard-knuckled partier as one point in his life, as well as an s-o-b to some folks if you ask them.

But the point is, one person had all those facets. Why couldn’t a god be the same way? Why couldn’t god say John, YOU are to obey me (Judaism), but Joe, YOU are to believe in me (Christianity), and Jack, YOU are to submit to me (Islam)? My brother and I had different rules; I got to stay up later and had more chores to do, and he got a free ride because he was younger and a whiney little a-hole as a child.

Or there could very well be multiple gods, or “forces” at work in the universe. You think of yourself as one living being, but every cell in your body has a mini-life of its own, depending how you define things. So any religion you may or may not chose may only be right for you, and not someone else. As I said, it only has to be a right and wrong thing if you make it that way.

And the Bible is only one of those ready made guides. Believe it, or don’t, or believe something else. Only you know what answers your questions and brings you peace.

>If there was only one how would it not be obvious which one was real if he was so active?

See answer above.

>Or do you believe these people were worshipping something that wasn't real?

Absolutely not. You simply cannot believe what you do not believe. It’s a psychological limitation. You can’t fool yourself, and why would you even bother? I’ve never met someone who says “I know Shinto is the only real religion but I’m a Buddhist. You believe what you believe and that’s the end of it.

I’m pretty sure every person who ever followed any of them absolutely believed in what they were worshiping. It they didn’t they would have chosen another belief.

To them, it was and is absolutely real. Real in the fullest sense that humans can experience. Granted, we are all limited in our understanding, but no one dies and/or entrusts any afterlife they may have to something they don’t believe in.

Anyhow, if you hang around I’m gonna present a wide range of beliefs, over cultures and time, on how people before us and contemporary with us have tried to answer those mysteries in the best possible way they could. Myth, religion, and science are three of the tools we use to understand existence, and each has its own specialty and place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXjnYL2GncU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmSircOd1w4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvHxlI8JZe4

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

Nice to have you in the discussion, Orange. Thanks for stopping by. I haven't read the books you referenced, but there was a keen awareness by man of the celestial movements from way, way back. You find it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. Anywhere there's recorded history, there's evidence of man watching the sky, and the 4 or 5 planets that are visible to the naked eye.

If you've ever had the chance to live in an area dark enough to see, you know the night sky is like watching the same movie over and over (with seasonal adjustments). The ancients noticed that too, and anything that stood out as different, (a comet, etc) they took particular note of.

As a matter of fact, comets and eclipses are incredibly valuable tools in synchronizing dates between various civilizations. It's pretty hard to match/align ancient Chinese history with Egyptian, say, but if both record an eclipse or two, those are hard dates you can tie both histories too, and that makes them extremely valuable.

The ancients also had a very strong correlation of their gods with the planets and sun and stars. I've discussed this tangentially a few times, but it probably merits a dedicated post at some point or another. The Sun, Venus, Mars, Saturn, the constellations, etc, have all been associated with various gods in various cultures all through history.

As to the Exodus specifically, there's been a very difficult time nailing it down as to when, or if, it even occurred as described in the Bible. As with all things religious, faith is required to some extent, because tangible evidence is lacking to some degree.

In an earlier post I mentioned the paradox of the Exodus. The person or people who wrote it knew the land intimately. The detail of their descriptions show that. But when you walk that land, there is little or no evidence of the numbers described ever having passed through. 600,000 is a large city by today's standards, and to have a mobile metropolis roaming for 40 years in the Sinai would have seemingly left some evidence of some kind. Not to say that it didn't happen, just that no evidence of it, outside the Bible, has been found yet.

It may be an exaggeration. 40 appears often as a number simply meaning "a lot." Sort of like "I would walk 500 miles just to be the man who walked 500 miles to be at your door" or, "I'd walk a mile for a Camel. Just a figure of speech.

There's also the issue of Egypt being mum on the subject. Egypt wrote nearly everything down in their history. There are some gaps, and the Exodus might have been a huge embarrassment they glossed over, but to have nothing whatsoever, not even some name calling or griping about it, is kind of unusual.

There is the idea that the Exodus was a national birth mythology. In my last post I mentioned that everybody wants to know where they came from, and so the story is perhaps an aggrandizement of a smaller reality. Say a few thousand people left Egypt willingly, unwillingly, or were maybe even assigned to go to Canaan by the Egyptians themselves as a relocation effort, or to establish an outpost in the area. Both of those events were very common in the ancient world...forced deportation and the construction and development of new cities at the edge of the various empires.

Even the conquest of Canaan is strangely problematic. For instance, the city of Jericho existed, we're pretty sure of that. There is archaeology going on there right now, and has been for almost 100 years, at the spot described in the Bible. But there's no evidence of walls ever crumbling, or of it even being occupied when Joshua came through.

It would be like finding the star fort in Ninety-Six, but all the written records say it was built in WW2. WHAT? The fort is there, but the documentation doesn't match up. Very confusing. One of them has to be right, but which one? That's sort of the problem of the Exodus, and to some extent, Joshua. The people had to come from somewhere, and the places they describe are there, but it doesn't quite jive with what we find in the ground, or with what others around them say, or don't say, in the case of Egypt.

Now, all of this is history that at the biggest level doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the existence of God. That's a matter of faith independent of how humans describe it, in the Bible or in any other text.

I like the episode of Andy Griffith where Opie is describing the silver man who walks in the trees, who jungles and jangles, and who can make smoke come out of his ears. Everyone says Opie is crazy or lying, till they realize he is describing, in the best way he can, a telephone lineman with a silver helmet, jingling tools on his belt, who smokes cigarettes and knows a parlor trick to blow smoke in his hand. I see the man-made elements of religion that way. Describing the indescribable in the best ways we can.

But it does make for an interesting look at why the ancients described things the way they did, and not some other way. For example, almost all of the plagues of Egypt are associated with normal flooding and things you could normally find without divine intervention.

Red water and tides are a common enough microbial event. There's even a football team called the "Crimson Tide" <img border=

">. Frogs aren't out of place near water, nor are lice, bugs, locusts, or even bacterial infections or boils. And waters parting doesn't have to be as dramatic as in a Charleton Heston movie. A simple ford could be considered a parting of the waters. But it's a great story, and worth a closer look at down the line.

In fact, it's stories exactly like that one, real or exaggerated, that makes the Bible such a useful tool in both religion and history.

Question for the people who believe in god

a throwaway account?

To give him fair credit, would you ask

My post history from the early 2000's is not pretty***

But fun.***