Well I hate to get into religion, because there goes a week or two of posts and what have we accomplished in the end? On the other hand take any couple weeks, months, or years now, and what have we accomplished? I guess it's like growing a garden, or hunting, or fishing, or cutting firewood. Wait a minute, cutting firewood? I guess that is a north woods kick. It's just something we do for fun. I admit it gets my juices going in the morning, pounding the keys before daylight, kind of clarifying things in my own mind and trying to slip in what I think is a clever turn of phrase every now and then,
The subject of ice cream leaves me cold. My I can turn a phrase can't I?
As does Christianity because the ground is so trodden on that one, though I am curious about Old Dog's Lutheran upbringing. Beagles and I were the rare prots among the mackerel snappers, so just by hanging with those kids we learned quite a bit about all the weird rituals and studies of the True Church, but we know nothing about you sauerkraut snappers. I expect with some sort of committee instead of a pope and with your preachers getting married - always something a little off when the menfolk get together without the womenfolk, women generally have the sense to point out that an idea is crazy that men never figure out by themselves - your religion is probably more reasonable, but thus also more bland.
First of all I want to dismiss the notion of something called god holding all the subatomic powers together. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't. What difference does it make? The only time God comes into play is when he does things, sets a bush on fire, condemns your soul to eternity in flames, then He's cooking. If He's just sitting around watching us with a bemused smile on His face without doing anything, who cares what He's thinking?
My favorite author on the subject of god is Karen Armstrong. She's been a nun, a scholar of Islam, an atheist and currently a believer in the cosmic marshmallow. The book I am thinking of here is A History of God.
Seems to me the first stage is what they call animism, where you believe the plants and the rocks and the wind and whatever around you have spirits, and furthermore that you can appease or piss off these spirits by certain arcane knowledge that is generally only known by the shaman,. I think at this stage religion is a lot like science, things are going on that we can't understand, and maybe we do a little elementary experimentation, on the last hunt we smeared blueberries all over our faces and didn't kill a damn thing, but the hunt before that we smeared raspberries on our faces and came back heavy laden, therefore the spirit of raspberries must be appeased and fuck the spirit of blueberries.
I am not a student of animism, but I think it's pretty similar wherever it rises, and I think it rises everywhere. But there is an amorality about it. If you want this or that done you cast this or that spell, but all the spirits are concerned with is whether you please them or not, whether you do onto others as you would have them do onto you, is not a concern of the spirits.
According to my reading of Armstrong, morality doesn't get mixed up with religion until Judaism. And to me the mixture of morality and God is an odd one. Do we obey God because He is the biggest Dude in the valley? I suppose so, but I don't see how that makes you good, you're just looking out for yourself.
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