Dear Jonathan,
What an excellent post! Perhaps, the one true God, of whom monotheistic
believers profess is, in fact, the communion and congress of all spirits.
When I think of it in this fashion, the rift seems to vanish.
Regards,
The Bard
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan B. Marder <jonathan.marder@newmail.net>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: MD Why do they hate us/Patronising attitudes.
> 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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