Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

OK, let's go there. But keep it a polite and civil discussion and/or debate at all times, understanding that everyone – meaning anyone – is entitled to his or her opinions and preferences on gods, higher powers and belief systems in general.

That said, this topic is good for starters:
Did God create man, or did man create God?

 

And part B. Does it matter?

 

That which no greater can be conceived.

Posted this on the politics thread, but figured I'd bring it over here, too.
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Jefferson's bible is an interesting exercise.

But I gotta go King James, if only for the poetry.*


*It's further interesting (to me anyway) that the King James bible was being stitched together at the same time Shakespeare was becoming the dominant voice in the culture. Harold Bloom, the literary critic who died the other day, credits Shakespeare with inventing the modes of thought and language we swim in to this day. So the two seem reciprocal to me and inseparable, that bible and those plays, and the way we think of ourselves even now.

 

This was the translation I used before I got practical about how to support myself and thought I was going to be a near eastern/biblical archaeologist:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha

Some day I will buy this translation:

 

If man created God, it brings into question how we arrived at a kind of moral order.

 

I think most paleoanthropologists would posit that 'morals' and 'ethics' arise as an evolutionary benefit to the group.

 

Good story in the current New Yorker about the epic of Gilgamesh, and how it deeply influences and informs and reflects the stories told in the Old Testament.

How to Read “Gilgamesh”

 

Why would any given group arc toward benefit and not destruction? For what purpose is group survival, especially among people? Is the Khmer Rouge counter-evolutionary or something? If lions kill water buffalo and that’s evolution - a morally-neutral event, a matter of fact - what then would be a few murders on the human side?

I should note, among religious topics to discuss, this one gets into the weeds fast. We may as well go straight to climate change and theorize that, if man created God, the survival of the species is best served through random selection for elimination and forced infertility. Science is hard until faced with those prospects, then it backs off and discusses the amorphous “human ingenuity.”

 

Because DNA's only job is to reproduce itself.

Whatever evolutionary outcome assists that imperative, prevails.

 

I am listening to a podcast called Literature and History by Doug Metzger and he discusses that its not only Gilgamesh but a myriad of early Bronze age stories are precursors to the bible. Creation, Noah, Moses, Tower of Babel.

And I can't recommend this book strongly enough, God, A Biography by Jack Miles.

 

The fiction thread.

 

Sort of. Most fiction is at least somewhat believable.