gods prototype

[bill4long]

You can take acid tonight and meet the machine elves behind it all.

DMT, not LDS, for "the elves."

[Philo Sofee]

Physics Guy
Although most of the universe seems awfully simple, however, it has rare pockets of enormous complexity. Conceivably the scriptures were culture-appropriate metaphors for their Bronze Age day, but fundamentally they have it all wrong. God would never make a man out of dust the way we make pots from clay. God's idea of the cool way to make human beings is evidently to start with a couple of dozen quantum fields and run through a dozen billion years of hydrogen and gravitational collapse and fusion ignition and planet formation with hot iron dynamo cores for magnetic fields and nucleic acids and mitochondrial symbiotes and and and dot dot dot up to us.

God really seems to love mechanisms. The medieval religious philosophers may conceivably have had culture-appropriate metaphors, too, but they were radically wrong. Nothing real is just defined by its properties, which it has by definition. Everything is made of smaller and simpler things; every event is a process and every thing is a place. What I take from this pattern is that we are naïve to suppose that it ends with our minds, as the ultimate emergent phenomenon. On the contrary, we ourselves are probably also small working parts in something larger than we are.

I can't help it, this kind of stuff absolutely is a fascinating insight! Thanks PG!

[drumdude]

You can take acid tonight and meet the machine elves behind it all.

DMT, not LDS, for "the elves."

I would love to read the experience of Daniel Peterson on DMT. If he really wants to connect to the other side, he should give it a shot.

[Philo Sofee]

DMT, not LDS, for "the elves."

I would love to read the experience of Daniel Peterson on DMT. If he really wants to connect to the other side, he should give it a shot.

He's not worthy of the further light and knowledge Father promised...

[Everybody Wang Chung]

DMT, not LDS, for "the elves."

I would love to read the experience of Daniel Peterson on DMT. If he really wants to connect to the other side, he should give it a shot.

Does Orange Fanta, Cheetos and beef pizza count?

[Philo Sofee]

I would love to read the experience of Daniel Peterson on DMT. If he really wants to connect to the other side, he should give it a shot.

Does Orange Fanta, Cheetos and beef pizza count?

[Kishkumen]

At the end of the day we're mortal and we're going to die. Whatever it takes for the individual to make peace with that I'm all for, as long as it doesn't involve being forced into play acting in their dilemma. I would hope, if there is a god, that would be their preference, too.

I resonate with this perspective.

[bill4long]

Does Orange Fanta, Cheetos and beef pizza count?

Yes. Yes it does.

[huckelberry]

I am still puzzling about (and may be stuck with puzzling only)how Israel moved from divine council family of Gods to monotheism. I find at least a list of possible prototypes which could influence the change.

I first think of natural order as prototype. Then of course governmental authority for order, (royal families) Then heroic power, (that might be more individual) then perhaps natural disorder and conflict. Last there would be death ghosts and visions ( I guess that includes the elves mentioned in this thread)

[Physics Guy]

I wonder how shifting from polytheism toward monotheism relates to moving from tribalism to monarchy. A basic idea seems so obvious that I'm sure I must have read it somewhere long ago. How well it holds up as actual history, I can't say.

The idea is that early chieftains all mixed their claims to political power as we know it with claims to priestly power, which probably didn't seem like separate kinds of power, then. If several tribes interacted culturally while remaining politically separate, the whole community would seem likely to recognize the patron deities of the various tribes as a pantheon of rival divinities. If one line of rulers began to predominate over the neighbouring chieftains, we expect to see a chief god emerge in the pantheon, presiding over the council of lesser gods. If the preeminent dynasty secured exclusive sovereignty over the whole society, the lesser gods would dwindle into oblivion. The supreme dynasty would presumably try to suppress the rival cults, as symbols of the dynasty's former political rivals, but there might have been a natural shift in popular devotion toward the ruling deity's camp, anyway. Everyone likes a winner, and if you're looking for supernatural aid with your troubles in life, why not go straight to the top?

It's probably worth considering, too, though, that monarchies probably didn't emerge as a form of government that persisted for millennia just because it's good to be the king. Assuming that kings remained kings because they had the power to maintain their positions because they were kings seems too circular; some significant amount of public utility must have been part of what kept monarchy going, I think. It's good just to have a king, even if the king is not you, at least as long as the king is not too mean or incompetent.

One decent plan that everyone actually follows is usually better than many brilliant but incompatible plans that don't get implemented because nobody settles on one of them. Getting lots of people to cooperate on something can help a lot to solve problems, but getting lots of people to follow one plan is really hard. The subject of judgement aggregation has unresolved paradoxes even today. Monarchy lets you get a big plan executed, even if it isn't the best big plan, and that's a big deal. Monarchy may not be an ideal system but it has big advantages over tribalism. Moving from tribalism to monarchy is progress. Moving from polytheism towards monotheism probably felt like progress at the time, too.

Unification still seems like progress today, in a lot of ways. Even in science we want a unified theory, one ring to rule them all. Having to have lots of separate ad hoc models for every different phenomenon is self-evident failure. We're sure that reality isn't like that. Hear oh Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.