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Anthropomorphic gods?

Venom

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Is the concept of god at its most basic, most primal form that of a man literally in the sky?

If so, how might have this come about at first?

My personal hypothesis: Anatomically modern humans had been burying their dead for a while. Whenever the "Silverback", so to speak, the lead male of the family died, they would've associated him with good fortune and possibly seen visions of him or in dreams.

How that translates to him being associated with living in the sky, I dunno...
 
I can't think of all that many gods that were men living in the sky. Thor, maybe? Gods and goddesses were more likely to be living in hard to reach areas, such as mountains, sea beds, or dense forests, but not really "up in the sky". Which ones were you thinking of?
 
IIIClovisIII said:
Is the concept of god at its most basic, most primal form that of a man literally in the sky?

If so, how might have this come about at first?
Click to expand...
Human beings are conscious agents, our predators and prey are - to some extent at least - also conscious agents whose behaviour we can therefore predict by imagining what we would do in their position. It was natural (and comforting) to assume that natural phenomena were also the result of conscious agency. "The gods are angry" is the obvious explanation of thunder and lightning, it's also a perfectly adequate one, and it holds out the hope of mollifying those gods in some way and hence taking some control over natural forces which you are completely at the mercy of. It just didn't happen to be the correct explanation.
 
It's my impression that the foundation for our ideas of "gods" evolved from the "animating spirits" that formed primitive Animism.
That would have been (very likely) the first sort of religion, and so far as I know such spirits were essentially formless. They just give everything it's particular "nature".

By the time these spirits began to be thought of as gods, they would indeed have been "anthromophized" as we see in the earliest organized religions.
 
To me it's just a mater of survival of the fittest (or the fit enough).

When homo sapiens lost a family member they cried and went on marching with grief in their hearts, leaving the deceased to rotten or be devoured by carrion eaters.

One "day" a combination of human traits lit on the notion that death wasn't the end of a person. That hardware would decay, but software would move on and change into a new state: the ancestors, depositary of old experience and forgotten deeds, who in turn became the guardians of the proto-tribal family. Religion had emerged.

Burying or cremating them was the way to mourn and show respect. Why went this on and became increasingly elaborated? Because it provided some adaptive edge. The society had evolved into one led by tradition, with the ancestors increasingly being spiritualized and empowered. Old rules that had guaranteed survival wouldn't be broken or forgotten so easily. Each individual's behaviour was no longer exclusively controlled by the mechanics of guilt, which had emerged long before to avoid murder and endogamy. Now, there were spirits watching over you, and they eventually not only saw your acts but read your soul.

As tribes, large tribes, cities, proto-societies emerged, these spiritual beings became more complex, more powerful, more arbitrary and more personal. Kings and gods were born at the same time, cast from the notion of both living chief and dead chief, together with a general motherly spirit representing nature.

It was obvious no much time would pass from the birth of large kingdoms, empires and some sort of international circulation of luxury goods, and later cultural progress, that the notion of few or even just one omnipotent syncretic god would emerge.

The rest is just Darwinian: lots would be willing to die for Allah and fewer to do it for Ahura Mazda then, guess what direction conversions followed and who's the most adored one nowadays? What about Arnaud Amalric and his "kill all of them, God will know his own"? How many Christians and how many Albigens are there today? Not always the last standing "god" is the better one. Aten was just an ephemeral development, but intriguingly enough, its discriminative nature could have served as a model for the ethnic only-god "Jehovah".

It's just Darwin. That's why "they" hate him so much.
 
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"God" came about when humans began equating rain with semen, "Mother Earth" with women and agriculture with procreation. The divine semen falls from the sky, therefore a male God is up there, somewhere.

Seems simple enough.

This signature is intended to irritate people.
 
Beady said:
"God" came about when humans began equating rain with semen, "Mother Earth" with women and agriculture with procreation. The divine semen falls from the sky, therefore a male God is up there, somewhere.

Seems simple enough.

This signature is intended to irritate people.
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Looks more like he is just pissing on us !!!!!
 
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imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

And futhermore, the God of the Gaps:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
 
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IIIClovisIII said:
Is the concept of god at its most basic, most primal form that of a man literally in the sky?

If so, how might have this come about at first?

My personal hypothesis: Anatomically modern humans had been burying their dead for a while. Whenever the "Silverback", so to speak, the lead male of the family died, they would've associated him with good fortune and possibly seen visions of him or in dreams.

How that translates to him being associated with living in the sky, I dunno...
Click to expand...


Perhaps it is about being in a position where he can see everything. Back in the good old days when the Earth was flat, God could be in a central position and see what was going on all over.
 
I just figure that by default all gods are anthropomorphic. If there were a god that did not fail in the face of discovery as they all tend to, it would be so unfathomably strange we would have trouble even identifying it, much less pretending to know what it wants or intends. Even the idea of intention itself is a human one, and a presumption.
 
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