Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 1:46 pm
That's an interesting point, except for me it's dauntingly large. The relationship between religion and politics must be too big a topic even for a fat book, let alone a thread. If anyone does undertake a book within the topic, just figuring out how to carve out a book-length subtopic is going to be a hard job. I reckon there will be frustratingly many stray threads that you'll just have to ignore for lack of space even though they could be important.
True. It's essentially asking that the entire discipline of anthropology be laid out in such detail anyone could follow it from beginning to end without disagreement. That said, if we accept the level of detail required to get that kind of agreement is unavailable, and instead accept a level of detail required to frame the premise for further discussion, maybe we can do something with it that is appropriate.
To do that, we may want to look at one god rather than all of humanity. And where better than the one with which we're most familiar, the Judeo-Christian god?
Before going that far, it's important to acknowledge the evolutionary nature of cultural constructs. They aren't designed in the way past folks often assumed creation demanded a perfect design from a perfect creator. Instead, culture is the product of pressure, failure, change, and successes that are constantly being exerted. The the word meme originated from this concept, and it's valuable here to see transitions in theology being integral to transitions in the culture in fundamental ways. Rather than as scaffolding or skin, the changes in one were emergent and essential to change in the other. Attempts, probably not directly intentional, to expand the size of a human group from that of directly related kin, to groups of distantly related folks, to groups that lack shared genetics required changes in their economic behavior, changes in how they collected and consumed resources, and how they defined their identity as a group. Something starts to fail due to pressure? Cultural evolution doesn't need to wait for a new generation of better adapted genes to make it through that filter. They just need an idea and buy in from elements of the group good enough to allow members of the group to succeed and other groups to adopt those cultural constructs to make it through the filter and replace any that failed to do so.
Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 1:46 pm
If your concept of God is of a tribal deity, then a tribal ruler who represents that god on Earth is kind of automatically doing a good job in representing the god just by wielding power over the tribe and successful competing with other tribes. As states got bigger, I guess it made sense for the gods to get bigger. A God bigger than any one tribe was a better support for the legitimacy of a multi-tribal confederacy.
The cultures, plural, we think of as the people of the Bible have gifted us with the evolution of their beliefs kept as clues in the changes of their combined and curated scripture. We're lucky that the apparent editors of the books that became the Torah weren't willing to offend and replace references to El, the Canaanite deity, with Yahwey the war-god. Instead they packaged both up in retellings of their mythology. And in those retellings we see how the evolution of their beliefs likely moved from truly pantheistic to having a chosen war-god who blessed their conquests, to their struggles of faith during their own subjugations, to their relation to the Persian zoroastrian belief that the Hebrew god was one of many who was fortunately on the right side of the conflict between good and evil. But the new post-exile Israelite national identity had evolved as well from centuries of attempts to maintain an identity that demanded they reframe their own beliefs to be their god being the only true god, and their misfortunes being the result of not having kept faith with their one true god. This necessary identity that allowed them to survive the return to Palestine also drove revolts under Greek and Roman rule, with the result their identity as a people lost a geographic center so they made it a scriptural one that still claimed a right to that lost geography. We lost the northern kingdom to myth because th Assyrians were successful in replacing the culture of their conquered foes so we get the imagined stories of the God of Israel who is the one true God having maintained their integrity in some protected geography just waiting to be discovered or reconnected in God's own time.
At the same time, the jewish cult of Jesus had no issues editing away the evolution of their own god beliefs through the years as they found unbelievable success through becoming the right cultural addition for the Roman imperial transition and replaced the tolerant polytheism of Roman with what became a more demanding monotheism. Trinitarianism? Whew, good save but we can't have successful statecraft built on modalism. The structural evolution of Christianity as sect to religion-of-state affected both the beliefs of said Christians as said beliefs affected the nature of the state. Whether that was in the forms of the Holy Roman Empire or that of the Byzantine, their many offshoots of varied success, and countless forgotten failures, it's not difficult to see that as the identity of the nations that called upon the faith for portions of that identity did so out of a symbiotic need more so than either being able to stand alone. The kings relied on their divine chosen status to maintain power, the church relied on this relationship to assert their own, the people relied on the origins of said power to act as check against abuses so egregious that the kings who failed to honor them were replaced. The structural integrity of the whole only survives through mutual support.
The Magna Carta and the Enlightenment are products of other new pressures that asserted times needed to change as merchants and economics of national interest pulled power away from the throne rooms and into the counting rooms, and as the ability to expand with the discovery of a new world stretched the ability of said structures to maintain power through a common identity and associated rule. Human rights, god-given, began to replace divine rights of chosen monarchs, and with that came a different form of theology. There is no coincidence that the Gutenberg Bible, the Reformation, and the age of exploration overlap as they do.
The American Experiment further made demands of the past idea of who God is and what their relationship is with humanity. It was formed out of peoples seeking to escape the old beliefs and old structures, and then as the movements became the establishment here, new experiments and new beliefs fought to survive in the ever increasing pluralism demanded of a nation that lacked a shared original geography.
There's a reason that the biggest threats to democracy today come from Christian Nationalism and those who feel America is losing its way as a so-called Christian Nation. They believe America, a nation-state, was built on a religious identity with divine favor. Threats to that WASP-y identity in many forms given the label "leftist" or "liberal" aren't difficult to see as being essentially non-white, non-protestant, non-Anglo-European incursions into the assumed belief about who we are as a nation.