Well, I did read that on the internet, to be fair - but it didn't *seem* like a wack-job site. That means it must be true, right? ;-) (You should certainly be able to confirm or deny it if you choose to research, anyway).
Nice quote, but I'm not sure the distinction is that simple. I think I'm fairly literate and completely urban (if not urbane), but I'm much more comfortable with the idea of worshipping a personal deity (even if I haven't, you know, picked one yet) than an abstraction. I liked lil_shepherd's point that gods were someone to talk to; I can't imagine having a conversation with the Rights of Man. Well, I can, but they tend to develop a face and a hand to wave, and the rest follows automatically.
Well, yes; that's a lot like me, too. It's where quite a few characters in my fiction come from, I think. And as I said in my own LJ there are points on which I personally depart from Buddhism; this is one of 'em. And in fact Buddhism isn't quite that rational itself either, it has all sorts of little not-deities-honest kicking about that are very much faces put on concepts. Go read Wikipedia on the topic of Dakini :)
I do find it interesting to think about neo-Paganism as a reaction to exactly that depersonalisation of the world; it is *determinedly* polytheistic in almost all its forms. But I think the point the Buddhist text might be making is that you can't expect gods to be taken seriously at the government level any more - imagine someone standing up before the democratic leadership of the country and saying we needed to save the whales or put up parking meters because Vishnu wanted us to. Bush might be trying to start a crusade for "the Christian way of life", but if he actually outright said it was God's will that America attack Iraq, he'd be impeached on the spot. The will of a god isn't *justification* any more. We have to back it up with facts about why losing the whales or allowing free parking would be bad.
I think it's more than possible that gods started their life as exactly what you describe happening to the Rights of Man - they became a shorthand for a given set of justifications and reasoning that you got explained to you when you learnt about them. But I suspect given human nature that they became independent entities shortly afterwards, and that crusading in their names and so on ultimately had little to do with their original roots in the mind of the average Joe.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 11:53 am (UTC)Nice quote, but I'm not sure the distinction is that simple. I think I'm fairly literate and completely urban (if not urbane), but I'm much more comfortable with the idea of worshipping a personal deity (even if I haven't, you know, picked one yet) than an abstraction. I liked lil_shepherd's point that gods were someone to talk to; I can't imagine having a conversation with the Rights of Man. Well, I can, but they tend to develop a face and a hand to wave, and the rest follows automatically.
Well, yes; that's a lot like me, too. It's where quite a few characters in my fiction come from, I think. And as I said in my own LJ there are points on which I personally depart from Buddhism; this is one of 'em. And in fact Buddhism isn't quite that rational itself either, it has all sorts of little not-deities-honest kicking about that are very much faces put on concepts. Go read Wikipedia on the topic of Dakini :)
I do find it interesting to think about neo-Paganism as a reaction to exactly that depersonalisation of the world; it is *determinedly* polytheistic in almost all its forms. But I think the point the Buddhist text might be making is that you can't expect gods to be taken seriously at the government level any more - imagine someone standing up before the democratic leadership of the country and saying we needed to save the whales or put up parking meters because Vishnu wanted us to. Bush might be trying to start a crusade for "the Christian way of life", but if he actually outright said it was God's will that America attack Iraq, he'd be impeached on the spot. The will of a god isn't *justification* any more. We have to back it up with facts about why losing the whales or allowing free parking would be bad.
I think it's more than possible that gods started their life as exactly what you describe happening to the Rights of Man - they became a shorthand for a given set of justifications and reasoning that you got explained to you when you learnt about them. But I suspect given human nature that they became independent entities shortly afterwards, and that crusading in their names and so on ultimately had little to do with their original roots in the mind of the average Joe.