How and when did ETs replace the gods?
Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.
In the July/August 2017 Biblical Archaeology Review
noted here (below) is an article about the treasures found in ancient Canaan
city of Sidon [Page 20 ff.] by Claude Doumet-Serhal.
I included a
representational image of a Sidonese deity in my previous post:
On page 29 was this:
[In a temple found on site was] “an altar of unhewn stones.
This pile of crude stones evokes Exodus 20:25: ‘But if you make for me an altar
of stone, do not build it of hewn stones; for if you use a chisel upon it, you
profane it.’”
Now most of you know that AA theorists insist that
extraterrestrials (Ancient Aliens or Astronauts) helped humankind to build many
of the structures we find to be stupendous or beyond primitive human ability:
the Egyptian pyramids, the temples of early Middle American cultures (Mayan,
Incan, Olmec, et cetera), Puma Punku in Bolivia, and others.
And since most of the structures are touted as AA conceived
or created structures, they can’t have come from God or the gods; they are
hewn, a key point of the idea that ancient extraterrestrial beings offered
advanced “technology” to help humans construct such refined edifices.
The mention of the dictum from God in Exodus (above) conflicts
with the AA theory of ancient alien intervention, and made me wonder when or
why primitive humans came to believe in and revere God or gods, and when did
ETs take the place of God or the gods in human thinking or religion.
I grabbed a few books from my personal library to refresh my
thinking about when God or the gods appeared, not in mythology but in history:
Primitive Religion by Paul Radin [Dover Publications,
NY, 1937/1957], Man and His Gods by Homer W. Smith (foreward by Albert
Einstein) [Grosett’s Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, NW, 1952], God:
A Brief History: The Human Search for Eternal Truth by John Bowker
[DK Publishing, London, 2002], A History of Religious Ideas (Volume 1)
by Mircea Eliade [University of Chicago Press, 1978], and Our Oriental
Heritage from The Story of Civilization by Will Duranr [Simon and
Schuster, NY, 1954]
Radin provides this
from Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige [Gotha, 1926]:
“From Fear, according to Otto, came awe, the terrible, the
feeling of being overpowered and overwhelmed, crystallizing into what he calls
the tremendum and the majestas; out of a sense of helplessness
and powerlessness, of insignificance, came that creature-feeling so well
described in the Old Testament, and out of the compensation fantasies arose,
finally, the concept of that completely other …” [Page 9]
Smith offers views of the early Greeks [circa 640-500 B.C.]:
“With Thales there began a school of thinkers who were known
as the physiologoi … Thales young companion, Anaximander (611-547 B.C.),
also an astronomer and geometrician, conceived the One, the universal
substance, to be an endless and unlimited mass subject neither to old age nor
decay …” [Page 143]
Bowker writes that [it is] “impossible to know what the
earliest beliefs about God and Goddess were.” [Page 30] but then provides an
encyclopedic survey of God beliefs writing that “The story of God begins with
the story of Goddess…” accenting the Goddess of Willendorf, a small figure of
which was found in Austria and thought to derive from about 19,000 B.C. [Page
32]
Mircea Eliade, the most comprehensive of thinkers on early
man, allows that “Paleanthropians” [Paleolithic mankind], by “their works …
demonstrate the activity of an intelligence that cannot be defined otherwise
than as ‘human’” [page 5] and shamanisn influenced Paleolithic culture and
society, driving from waking dreams, oneiric states. Phantasms and other
aspects of the {Freudian] unconscious, much of that induced by hallucinogenic
ingestion.
Will Durant shows that many early peoples had “no religion
at all.” [Page 56] And “Fear, as Lucretius said, was the first mother of the
gods.” [Page 57]
Some of you have Frazer’s Golden Bough and other
books dealing with the onset of god belief or religion and mythology.
But none tells us, or can, where or when the idea of a supernatural
entity (God) or entities (gods) began.
And now many of us believe that God has “died” or hidden his
Face as I’ve outlined many times using the thought(s) of Richard Elliott
Friedman or Gerald L. Schroeder here.
And this “absence” of God created a lacuna for those who
want or need something beyond them. This is the “metaphysical” essence of the
Alien Astronaut (Ancient Alien) crowd.
Without a God, rather than become atheistic, this group of
fringe UFO addicts, like primitive mankind, created new gods:
extraterrestrials.
So, we can conclude that the AA thrust is as primitive and
irresolute as that of early man’s concepts of God and not to be proclaimed as
verifiable or true, just as the belief in God or gods is tentative for
thoughtful people.
See also:
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, June 19, 2017
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