I have written a great deal about Christianity and monotheism in this blog. I have posited that humans are a religious animal; that we are the creators of religion and that religion, like all things on this planet, evolves.
RITUAL
In past posts I have explained that religion is not limited to theism; that its most common trait is ritual. Ritual is found in every human activity, from how to do a proper ditch to how to theorize complex mathematical models that explain our universe. As such, reason is built upon a foundation of ritual.
As I write this post, I am aware of the ritual of writing; in particular, the use of English grammar. We don't think of such things as rituals, but in essence they are. Rituals are all about defined disciplines which enable us to understand and make functional whatever it is that we are doing. Religion, therefore, is a traceable element in all human innovation.
THEISM
It is not known when humans first intuited the notion of a divine out-there-other. We know that our prehistoric ancestors were religious because even our distant cousins, the Neanderthal, engaged in some form of burial ritual. Whether they had a developed sense of an out-there-other or a sense that there is more to life than physical existence we cannot be sure, but what is important is to note that the religious impulse had been part of human development since the dawn of human kind.
I would posit that theism is a relatively recent human intuition of, let's say, the last thirty thousand years, give or take ten thousand. Most theistic religions today have their own mythic stories about creation and why we're here. As old as these stories are, they probably are derived from oral traditions dating back only four to six thousand years ago.
How they came to be is lost to us. When these stories were written down some two to three thousand years of being around, they were attributed to the inspiration or revelation of a divine entity. Theism did not start as monotheism. Theism applied the differentiating paradigm found in all religious endeavors. In essence, theism is the outgrowth of the human recognition that there are forces beyond our control; that we are subject to or dependent on them.
POLYTHEISM
Polytheism was initially an expression of this recognition. In its most primitive forms, the forces of nature were assigned divine status. Since these forces appeared animated and dynamic, they could be addressed ritually. Therefore we developed various sun gods, river gods, wind gods, storm gods, all in an effort to understand these forces and to appeal to and/or appease them.
Polytheism became highly evolved over time. The aspect of seeing the out-there-other as a force of nature evolved to examine the forces at play in human nature which were then projected to an out-there-other status; to gods of love, gods of war, gods of the home, gods of planting, gods of harvest, gods of birth, gods of death, gods of wisdom, gods of communication, gods of healing, etc.
Polytheism eventually became, in essence, a way of a society to collectively examine the interplay of human behavior as projected in its narrative about its various gods and goddesses which magnified these human attributes because of the divine status given them. Stories of their exploits, our collective exploits as an observing culture, were formulated to examine our sense of what is and why it is and what will become of us. So true to life were these evolved deities that they were worshiped and celebrated in the hope of appeasing and manipulating forces they represented in our human experiences.
Polytheism included room for the idea of a supreme divinity, one god to rule them all, or the idea of a supreme creative force in which all of life proceeded including the gods and by which all are sustained. This was not strict monotheism, but it opened the door to the concept of a transcendent god or force; something that truly was the out-there-other that stood above and beyond the rest, including other gods and goddesses. Hinduism is perhaps one of the oldest religions on the face of the earth that is a prime example of this, with hundreds of deities, but also the notion of Brahma, the one to which all eventually returns.
MONTHEISM
Strict monotheism, as we know it today, can be traced to its origins in the Middle East, in particular, with the emergence of Judaism in the sixth century BCE during what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. The Bible, particularly the Hebrew Scriptures, are an excellent source to see up close the evolutionary thought process that took place in the development of a strictly monotheistic view. Strict monotheism may be an oxymoron because even in Judaism there exists different aspects of the one God that are treated differently. For example, God is referred to as Elohim or Hashem or Yahweh, although Yahweh was never said and may be rooted in the identity of minor deity area associated with the Kingdom of Judah that was later identified and elevated to the one and only God of Abraham. El, on the other hand, is linked to an ancient Canaanite deity. In Jewish literature, Elohim refers to God's creative aspect, Hashem refers to God's involvement with human affairs. All, however, is part of the unnamed God YHWH. The Hebrew Bible records the idea that there were other gods but that their God had primacy over the rest.
I'll give you my take on this. God as referred to in strict monotheism started out as a family or tribal god, the God of Abraham. Family deities existed from prehistory. From its family origin it becomes tribal, then regional, and then identified with a particular kingdom. In fact the God of Abraham seems to merge with other identified theistic traits found in other gods at the time. What starts out as a family or paternal god that guides Abraham and his offspring, is at some point found on mountain top, Mt. Horeb by the Biblical character Moses. Why the God of Abraham decided to reveal himself to Moses outside of Egypt is something to ponder, but I have a hypothesis as to why this may be the case. It's revealing that God of Abraham, like most gods of antiquity was associated with geography and resided on mountain tops. Family gods, were for the most part, minor deities that protected the home and its inhabitants. Why God didn't travel with the tribe into Egypt could be the result of several possibilities in ancient thought. Gods did not cross into territories of other gods. In other words, the god of Abraham stopped short of entering the turf of other gods.
If this were true, it would have to be explained away with regard to the establishment of a strict monotheistic view. The fact is there are very little, if any, historical facts to support that there was a Moses, that the tribes of Israel were in any way related, were in Egypt or were enslaved by them or that any of the events that took were mentioned in the first five books of the bible took place. This is not say that the stories that evolved in what we now have as the Holy Bible did not have a historical basis, but rather there is no independent proof beyond these texts that they did.
It has been well established that these stories were derived from oral tradition and were not written down until centuries, if not millennia afterwards their alleged occurrences. In essence, they became what I would refer to as a magnified narrative that loomed large in the social conscience of what would become Judaism. This involved defining a means of getting from point A to point B. Point A is that a god of Abraham, being merely one of many gods and goddesses, becomes at point B the God of Abraham, the one and only God in the entire cosmos.
How did this happen? History can helps us here because during the later part of the Kingdom of Judah, the late eighth or seventh centuries BCE these stories were being written in the small and troubled Kingdom of Judah. They were written after the Kingdom of Israel had been abolished and its inhabitant carted off by the Assyrians and who were either absorbed into that culture or annihilated. It is suspected that much of what is known as the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written well into the second temple period approximately from 300 to 150 BCE.
These written narratives reflect how the Kingdom of Judah was faced with the same possibility of annihilation as the Kingdom of Israel was by any number of emerging empires. While the God of Abraham was likely understood as their primary god, YHWH and the first Temple in Jerusalem recognized as his home, his divine palace on Earth, it housed the deities of allied kingdoms or other local traditions, which would not have been uncommon at the time. A temple was that god's court, if you will. The Psalms and the Book of Job indicate that this thinking was familiar to people of that region at that time.
Two things occurred that would change this. Being made a pawn of more powerful kingdoms who took advantage of Judah's weak position led to social uprising that involved a early form of nationalism and fueled by a xenophobia and a religious fervor that resulted in removing these foreign gods and goddesses, their priest, prophets and prostitutes and establishing that there was only one God, the God of Abraham, as the God of Judah, YHWH. This puritanical movement led to a disastrous outcome for the Kingdom of Judah, but would give rise to one of the world's most enduring religions, Judaism.
One of the reasons I have come to this hypothesis it is based on the fact that in the First Book of Kings and First Chronicles, which likely predate the Torah with regard to any factual information they contain, tend to be an attempt at presenting a chronological depiction the kingdom of Israel and the later divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. It should be noted also that these accounts were written and preserved from a Judaic perspective.
What is missing from these early accounts is that the Feast of the Passover is never mentioned in them. It only shows up in one chapter of the Second Book of Kings and Second Chronicles when this emerging religious nationalism is discussed. The omission of this Feast of all Jewish feasts from much of "historical" accounts of the earlier unified Kingdom of Israel is glaring. This is not to say it was not celebrated, but it certainly wasn't the feast it became during and after the Babylonian Captivity when the Torah was being written and revised.
As such, the Babylonian Captivity becomes the most formative event in the development of Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures. There is little doubt that after the first Temple in Jerusalem was purged of its idolatrous status, that the temple itself was seen as the home, the dwelling place of God. So much faith was invested in this concept, that when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and walked off with its religious vessels and appointments, leaving the Temple in ruins that the Jewish people were left in spiritual turmoil. How could this one and only God, their God abandon them this way?
What is unusual with the Babylonian Captivity is that the Judean captives were not forced to assimilate with non-Judeans as apparently happened when the Kingdom of Israel was conquered. The Babylonian captives were apparently allowed to remain in community with each other. This simple fact led to an intuition about their God. In time, they came to conclusion that God did not abandon them, that God went with them and from that point those writing or rewriting the Hebrew scriptures redacted that intuition into its narrative about the God of Abraham. God became not only transient but transcendent.
Up until that point, gods did not move. If a kingdom was defeated it was either because the god of that kingdom was defeated or the god of that kingdom abandoned it and sided with enemy. This was not the sense the Jews in captivity had of their god. Somehow their god came with them, and around that reflective intuition a new narrative arose that we now have in the Hebrew Scriptures where a god became God.
So in writing the narrative of Judaism, these scholars developed and relayed the story of the God of Abraham telling Abram to travel and the God of Moses, identified as the God of Abraham, would cross geographic boundaries to join him and Aaron in Egypt to deliver his people and bring them back to the Promised Land. This is perhaps one of the most powerful stories ever told that has literally shaped historical events because of its metaphorical implications and inspiration; particularly in the United States.
The stories of the Hebrew Scriptures may not be historically accurate or even factual but they encapsulate an imaginative intuition; a memorialized narrative regarding the establishment of Judaism which has endured since then. The notion of a transcendent God who can be anywhere and everywhere became a major step in religious evolution, which would be retained with the emergence of Judaism's progeny, Christianity and Islam.
ATHEISM
Atheism is the youngest of the theistic traditions. Atheism cannot be separated from theism; in that, atheism is a denial of a being(s) called God or gods, but atheism cannot deny the concept of "god." One cannot deny what does not exist. To deny the concept of god is to establish the existence of god as a concept. Conceptually, God exists and there is no functional way to get around that fact. Having said that, however, I must point out that atheism has greatly contributed to our understanding of religion; what it is, what it isn't, and to its weaknesses and contributions to social development. I don't know that atheists would appreciate that complement, but I feel it is true. I wouldn't be writing this blog if it weren't for atheists.
Like all religious efforts, atheism is seeking to establish what is right and true. Atheism is largely centered around a humanology; that attempts to answer from the viewpoint of human intellect and the various sciences the questions that have been long addressed by the various theologies of theism. Atheism opens us to the fact that humans are capable, in themselves, of those things we have largely, over the millennia; particularly in the West, attributed to the realm of God. The most important of which is the ability to love another human being or groups of human beings we don't know - to care about them - to understand that what happens to them effects the whole of humanity; that our emotions, intellect, and imaginative ability to utilize them is what makes us who we are, human; that there is a moral responsibility in being purely human with no need to have a hereafter or worry about a divine judgement or to view our origins as flawed and sin-ridden.
We've acquired these very human abilities to insure our survival and the survival of the environment in which we live. Whether these insight evolved from a theistic tradition, which is likely, it does not negate the fact that, if so, they are sustainable as a pure human endeavor. This fact, I believe, has had a profound impact on theism, itself. The scientific world cannot be ignored without risking damage to life on this planet. Any theistic belief that is centered on denying science is, in my opinion, dangerous, fundamentally anti-human, and doomed to irrelevancy.
Atheism, as a branch of theism, however, struggles with the impulse to be religious, to give expression to its atheology and its humanology beyond its intellectual aspects. It struggles with finding a ritual aspect, an all important albeit understated and underappreciated part of being human, in facing certain life events that help humans deal with them emotionally and which are so much a part of theistic traditions which continue to give to billions of people a ritual expression of the emotions, including a large majority of the unaffiliated.
Some atheist search for meaningful religious communities centered around their mutual understanding in the human capacity to be loving and accepting without the need of an out-there-other, and in looking for meaningful ways to express the human experience of birth, life, commitment to one another, sickness and death in liturgies to replace the theistic traditions that have existed since the dawn of religious theism
As such, atheism, like theism embodies a variety of ideological beliefs regarding who we are what is meaningful in life. There is, in my opinion, some effort on the part of atheists to write a new religious narrative regarding life on this planet, that has been going on for the past three centuries.
HUMANISM
Humanism in the East can be traced back to India and China roughly from the sixteenth century to the eleventh century BCE, and in the West to around the first century CE. Humanism like theism is varied, but generally speaking humanism is a philosophy that promotes a rational, empirical understanding of human experience that is not dependent on a particular theistic doctrine. As such humanism is closely related to atheism, but I will contend that humanism is a natural outcropping of theism.
In future posts, I will present the my thoughts on what may be an emerging religious singularity, a convergence of theistic and humanistic ideology. I will do this by looking at the humanistic elements of the theistic religion I know best, Christianity.
Until then, stay faithful.
