Bronze age pervert skriver:
Paglia said once that the real novelty of the one God was that he spoke the world into existence. How different this was from all other creation myths! All pagans knew the world was eternal, and that its present condition was a result of cycles of birth, rebirth, regeneration, copulation: the Japanese even have myths about gods shitting on fields to make them fertile! How proper, it makes many other things about Japanese culture easier to understand. Monotheism, even of the intellectual or deist variety, and especially that variaty, makes all kinds of claims too about the lawfulness of matter or nature, about intelligent design and the like. It's actually much closer to the science that claims to disprove it, than to the original paganism of all mankind. So much of this story makes time a line and makes matter conditional on a deity or a creator that lives outside it: the creation of matter out of nothing, the creation of your soul out of nothing. Matter is dead, in some ways homogenous, and its meaning is "divine" only in the sense that it reveals the creation of the external deity, or even better, just the laws he made to govern it. It seems and feels wrong, or runs against the immediate perception of the world, so it requires faith, a concept unknown to ancient pagans of all kinds. For this reason the Romans considered Christians and Jews to be no different from atheists.
Paglia said once that the real novelty of the one God was that he spoke the world into existence. How different this was from all other creation myths! All pagans knew the world was eternal, and that its present condition was a result of cycles of birth, rebirth, regeneration, copulation: the Japanese even have myths about gods shitting on fields to make them fertile! How proper, it makes many other things about Japanese culture easier to understand. Monotheism, even of the intellectual or deist variety, and especially that variaty, makes all kinds of claims too about the lawfulness of matter or nature, about intelligent design and the like. It's actually much closer to the science that claims to disprove it, than to the original paganism of all mankind. So much of this story makes time a line and makes matter conditional on a deity or a creator that lives outside it: the creation of matter out of nothing, the creation of your soul out of nothing. Matter is dead, in some ways homogenous, and its meaning is "divine" only in the sense that it reveals the creation of the external deity, or even better, just the laws he made to govern it. It seems and feels wrong, or runs against the immediate perception of the world, so it requires faith, a concept unknown to ancient pagans of all kinds. For this reason the Romans considered Christians and Jews to be no different from atheists.
RSS Feed
