Hi Bodvar, Sam and all,
I'm not sure that I am qualified to give any sort of authoratative view
on the similarities and differences between the Jewish god, Christian god
and the god(s) of other religions. However, Bodvar's comments about the
"animism" of the ancients has aroused some interesting thoughts.
I assume that for ancient man, his relationship with the world was very
direct, with no real division between what he considered physical and what
he considered spiritual. As I understand it, his "animistic" spritualism
wassimple and direct: If you seek the "spirit" of the tree, look in the
tree. However, all our cultural baggage causes us to miss that simplicity.
Somehow, man moved away from that simplicity. Whether it was creating
abstract disembodied spirits (gods) or deliberately making synthetic
physical containers for spirits (idols), the effect was to despiritualize
everyday objects, which is pretty how most us view the world today. Once you
have done that, then monotheism has a great appeal. Once the spirit of the
tree is no longer a part of the tree, and the sprit of the rock is removed
from the rock, then there's little to tell one spirit from another! The
monothesistic god thus comes to represent the spirit of ALL THINGS. Either
as monotheism of polytheism, the abstraction of god(s) makes the spiritual
world something essentially subjective, to be largely ignored by scientists
who explore the spiritless physical world. That is pretty much where
Eurasian man has been for the last few thousand years (I don't know much
about the others).
This division between the physical/secular and spiritual/religious is an
ongoing battle with many casualties. Someone brought up the case of Baruch
Spinoza who was an outcast from the orthodox Jewish community of Amsterdam
for his philosophy. Yet, from what I understand, he was really looking to
heal the ancient rift. He regarded all to be God, and God to be all. Thus,
the spiritual and physical worlds should be regarded as one and the same. I
wonder why they came to be split apart in the first place, and suspect that
this ancient divsion has a great deal to do with what Pirsig wrote about.
Jonathan
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