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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 22, 2015 - 05:29pm PT
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That's right Norton. The only thing I would add is that people hoped from the earliest days thought that they could manipulate or negotiate with the gods behind the natural forces, hence sympathetic magic and shamans were the main form of religion before agriculture and the invention of writing.
Even so, many cultures combine the two. The Sherpas say that if you want your children, livestock and potatoes to prosper, you pray to the mountain gods. If you are concerned about your next reincarnation, you pray to the Buddhist gods. In Okinawa, people observed a combination of Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist and indigenous nature religion. In India, they declared the indigenous nature gods to be other or earlier manefestations of the Indo-European Vedic gods. In the West with the Abrahamic religions however, this has always been frowned upon, and practitioners of the old religions were declared pagans, heathens, and witches.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jun 22, 2015 - 06:10pm PT
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An interesting take on dreams harking back to my clinical psych days (15 years) comes from the Gestalt came, who held that if you could correctly unwind/untangle just one dream, you would know all there is to know about a person.
JL
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 22, 2015 - 06:18pm PT
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Um. Is my reading comprehension off?
The reporter claims Dreams are responsible for the belief in God.
To me this says God spoke to man through dreams which inturn gave him his belief.
How do you come to the assumption that Neanderthal man within his monkey see monkey do brain could conjure up in his limited imagination an unseeable all powerful god deity??
Because water fell from the sky or lightning went boom? Even up until say 10,000 yrsago man walking around would be used to rain just as they were used to it getting dark and light again. The only brain power they had was from the direct visual correspondence within his immediate environment. He wouldn't be afraid of Bigfoot if he never saw one. And he obliviously had very little if any iimagination looking at the tools he comprised. They may have not even invented any of their tools. Rather they stole the ideas from other animals?
I think it's a good argument that pre Ancient man DID NOT posses the imagination capable of perceiving an unseeable "god", or anything unseeable.
The one way they could have carried the notion is if infact God did appear to them and then diss appeared in front of their eyes. Or else God spoke to them in their dreams.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 22, 2015 - 08:08pm PT
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if you could correctly unwind/untangle just one dream, you would know all there is to know about a person
There may be some truth to that when you consider how quickly dreams are forgotten, speaking only for myself.
This morning I was woken mid-dream and could clearly remember the voice of a CBC Radio announcer saying, "The next astronaut to be chosen is thought to be Cecilia C. Seesee [Cece?], Canada's longest serving Trinidadian..."
Before that I remember talking to Timmy O'Neil, and some people were complaining that their pruning shears were defective.
from our far-flung correspondent:
The last four days we have been stationed out of Nazareth which has been some adventure and then some. Crazy world this place called The State Of Israel, especially Nazareth. 70 percent Muslim and 29% Christian with one% unknown. Yet it all seems to flow. Unfortunately, by far the dirtiest area we have come across which is surprising considering how many Christian tourists visit here every year.
Obviously we all know what the most opulent joint in Nazareth Town would be, the Christian Church Basilica of the Annunciation. This place, well you know Mary is big news here and so is this Jesus dude so everything revolves around what might have happened and where they might have had dinner and why they might have done something and even when they might have done it. Certainties seem to be a little allusive in my humble opinion. But, when you look around at one bus load after another unloading people who seem to be on a holy pilgrimage of some sort while holding hands and hanging onto (literally) any fence, post, rock or even dirt with heads bowed mumbling some jibber all seems good for business. The Arabs are not dumb, they love it and milk it. What do I think? Good on them.
What does big business get you in the Basilica? Real simple, the more money you donated the bigger the ceramic tile picture you got on the wall and not to mention a private session with a Minister to confess your sins and be resolved of all the terrible things you have done upon others. Man, its no wonder nobody leaves these Christian churches, you can do whatever and still get a paid with a free pass to the afterlife.
Sorry, I have digressed and I might have expressed just a little of my own opinion and not been objective enough.
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Norton
Social climber
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Jun 22, 2015 - 08:46pm PT
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That's right Norton. The only thing I would add is that people hoped from the earliest days thought that they could manipulate or negotiate with the gods behind the natural forces, hence sympathetic magic and shamans were the main form of religion before agriculture and the invention of writing.
Jan, I majored in Anthropology in college, wish you would have been one of my teachers
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 22, 2015 - 08:50pm PT
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When I had my first serious reality anomaly through the Art of Dreaming about 40 years ago, I recall my first thought was This is how religion began!. It was a powerful and mysterious experience and still resonates.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 23, 2015 - 07:24am PT
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Norton, thanks. I can tell just from your questions that you have an anthropology background. I did teach a course on the evolution and variety of religious experience. One of my favorites was the cargo cults.
As for blue's remarks, I will say again, humans have ape minds not monkey minds, and it's always tricky to attribute anything to people who have been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. It's even tricky to interpret their artifacts, but we do know that neanderthals had a cult centered around bears and believed in an afterlife at least 100,000 years ago.
Dreams are a fascinating subject which I have mainly explored from the meditation point of view, to discover deeper levels of my unconscious. It takes some training but the mind can be taught to remember dreams and what they reveal is fascinating. There are also many categories of dreams - sorting and filing dreams - especially after doing too much mental work, too much rich food for dinner dreams, teaching dreams (these are the ones that repeat over and over because we just don't get it), dreams involving repressed emotions, and revelatory dreams at different levels which give intellectual or emotional information that were not part of conscious thought before, revelatory dreams where one travels to dimensions not otherwise experienced, and so on.
We all possess our own set of personally meaningful symbols that re-appear in dreams - our own personal movie sets, our own cultural movie sets and more or less universal symbols. When we begin to understand these symbols, they reveal an aspect of our mind just as clever as our intellect, but operating without words. Depending on how much cross cultural or cross religious experience a person has, the same symbol can have very different meanings depending on the context. A serpent in one dream can represent a dangerous person, be an erotic symbol or be a either a negative or positive spiritual symbol. The fun is figuring out which is which.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:48am PT
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Thanks, Lovegas for that big bird video.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 23, 2015 - 03:05pm PT
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suprema, we can't be absolutely sure they believed in an afterlife, but we interpret, based on living peoples of the world, that when men are buried with hunting tools and women with jewelry and cosmetics that they assume they will need them in the afterlife.
As for why they became extinct, there are many hypotheses including the fact that they were less omnivorous than ourselves, had darker skin during the ice age and developed vitamin D deficiency which sapped energy and softened their bones making them less efficient hunters, that they had fewer children because their brains were larger than ours with longer heads and this created problems for upright walking mothers giving birth, that they might have had some other fertility problems we don't know about perhaps caused by malnutrition, that they were killed by Homo sapiens, though there is scant evidence for that. In fact, we really don't know.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 23, 2015 - 03:21pm PT
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Though science is a f*#king snooze fest . . .
Good to see you in fine form - have a good trip!
;>)
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jun 23, 2015 - 07:24pm PT
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I would think it difficult for many civilized religious and spiritual minded people to accept the savage nature of the human species even in this day and age.
Throughout human history, regardless of art, music, architecture, science, and the sophisticated and/or adventurous pursuits of some, mankind as a whole has been a violent lot.
Whether by indoctrination through family and peers, or through guilt and self examination, so many of our number have chosen the path of believing in righteousness and forgiveness through penance and the the value of human soul over that of believing that humans are a renegade and deeply unruly pack of viscous beasts.
Is it through guilt and fear that we allow ourselves to be governed or do we aspire to a higher calling because we have an intrinsic nature to do good? Are the qualities of intregity and compassion something that people can chose for themselves without the threat of retribution by a similar self imposed God based moral code?
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 23, 2015 - 08:38pm PT
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I would think it difficult for many civilized religious and spiritual minded people to accept the savage nature of the human species even in this day and age.
Nope ... I've been saying it all along.
Americans are so fuking violent it's unbelievable and at the same time come off as some peaceful civilized society.
Such bullsh!t.
They slaughter everything in sight due to their heavy bodily consciousness.
Such fuking clueless hypocrites all while lecturing everyone else how to be civilized .....
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:45pm PT
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I would think it difficult for many civilized religious and spiritual minded people to accept the savage nature of the human species even in this day and age.
I thought you meaning the savage nature like we see in much of the animal kingdom? Like the murderous stealing of life we see in birds of prey. If so. I would point at the humans in places like in Africa and Yemen where they Massacre whole villages of men and take the women as sex slaves. That would be the extreme human viciousness. But even in the modern intellectual societies, pick one. We'll still see in every human somewhere in their lifetime between childhood and adulthood the propensity to be rebellious, mean, even evil. It's ingrained in all us, it is a large part of our nature. It's entirely up to the social environment to harness it, or nurture it.
The central focus of the bible is pointing out the fact that man is a vicious animal. And to be a christian is to acknowledge this fact. And as an example God came to earth as a man and spread the message of love and peace. And for this He was savagely, viciously murdered, and became alive again as an example for what we CAN achieve.
His life giving blood was spilled so that we may live again. The spiritual significance is immense. Everyday we all must kill some sorta life when we eat. Wether it be a cow or lettuce, for us to continue living we have to kill other lives. I've only ever seen Christians bless their food and thank God for this process of sacrificing life for the continuation of another life. Maybe other religions do I'm not sure.
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:55pm PT
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His, him and he.
There is more
to it than that,
son.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 23, 2015 - 10:08pm PT
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Every religion I've observed does indeed have a way of praying before meals. Since a lot of them have been vegetarians, they weren't thanking the animal for its sacrifice, (though most hunters and gatherers do), but were in fact just being thankful for the food.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 23, 2015 - 10:09pm PT
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Are the qualities of intregity and compassion something that people can chose for themselves without the threat of retribution by a similar self imposed God based moral code?
I think those could be learned in a couple generations of people anywhere. Grandma would demand it :) Ever see "A Man Called Horse"? The Indian grandma was a hoot. Lol But there are morals that secular society would (never), prolly never come up with, or condone. Like "love your enemy" and we just witnessed the spectacular exhibit of this in So. Carolina when the relatives of the 9 murdered gave the killer their forgiveness, and even invited him to come to bible study. THEIR forgiveness should have allowed him to go free. But the law of the land will want revenge. That's why Gods government and morals won't EVER work here in man's government in a secular world. AND why Christians should keep their morals away from secular politics.
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Jun 23, 2015 - 10:16pm PT
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God's government and morals?
Would that be he?
All credibility is lost
when one has
to use "prolly".
Hipsters these days,
sheesh.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 23, 2015 - 10:16pm PT
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Thanks Jan! I haven't eaten with many other religious.
but were in fact just being thankful for the food.
Would you mind saying which religions? And are they giving Thanks for grate fullness of having food? Or is it like I was taught, to bless the life that was sacrificed that I might live?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 23, 2015 - 10:19pm PT
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Thanks dknow I haven't be n called a hipster in a while :)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 08:08pm PT
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Metaphor? Adaptive reinterpretation? Paraprosdokian? Simple syncretism?
I don't know, but this one's pretty good. It beats Adam and Eve as "life and earth" (courtesy: cardinal theologian george pell), I think...
Let us ALL give thanks to He. :)
.....
Good to hear!
Pamela Sue Martin (personal 70s heart throb) is now a religious science practititoner (in other words, spiritual counselor)...
http://pamelasuemartin.com/body-mind-spirit--psm.html
Basic belief...
the same Spirit (God) is in all things and all people, that our thoughts are creative, and that we co-create our experience of life with our beliefs and thoughts with this Divine energy of Spirit. Most importantly, to the degree that we become conscious of our belief systems, and work to improve our outlook with affirmative prayer, we can positively affect the conditions of our lives. One of the popular slogans of the church is “CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE”.
Cool.
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