Why would we invent God?

see below lol

Originally posted by wib
And how exactly is that different from the Christian God? That seems to be one of the follow up questions Son of Saul is asking also.

If you want to know you have to read this article by René Girard.

http://print.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9604/articles/girard.html


It's very tough reading but very rewarding when you've finally come to the point, after rereading the article I can safely tell you, of understanding what he is trying to communicate:

"The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth."

And:

"As soon as we become reconciled to the similarities between violence in the Bible and myths, WE CAN UNDERSTAND HOW THE BIBLE IS NOT MYTHICAL-how the reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in myth."

And:

"The Gospels make the revelation complete. They give to the biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false gods and their violent cultural systems are generated."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


I will select a few quotes which are important in my view to understand the article and the writer, René Girard, a famous French scholar, an anthropologist, working in the United States. However to really understand what René Girard is communicating you have to read the article as a whole and more than one time, I'm afraid. Sorry, but understanding one of the most important messages of the Gospel takes a while.


Quotes from the article:

"From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels' resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith.

"The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth."

"All these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one structure." (Scapegoat-structure. IvanH)

"The Gospels have an immensely powerful reason for their constant reference to these murders, and it concerns two essential and yet strangely neglected words, skandalon and Satan."

"The competing desires intensify as model and obstacle reinforce each other, and an escalation of mimetic rivalry follows; admiration gives way to indignation, jealousy, envy, hatred, and, at last, violence and vengeance. Had Jesus imitated Peter's ambition, the two thereby would have begun competing for the leadership of some politicized "Jesus movement." Sensing the danger, Jesus vehemently interrupts Peter: "Get behind me, Satan, you are a skandalon to me."

"If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose possessive models we find ourselves in endless scandals, for our real model is Satan. A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter."

"This counterforce is, I believe, the mythological scapegoat-the sacrificial victim of myth."

"The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process. Before it begins, Jesus warns his disciples (and especially Peter) that they will be "scandalized" by him (Mark 14:27). This use of skandalizein suggests that the mimetic force at work in the all-against-one violence is the same violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization."

"The role of Satan, the personification of scandals, helps us to understand the mimetic conception of the Gospels. To the question How can Satan cast out Satan? (Mark 3:23), the answer is unanimous victimization. On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided against himself."

"The evangelists give a fleeting but precious example of mythic genesis-of the ordering power of violence, of its ability to found culture."

"As soon as we become reconciled to the similarities between violence in the Bible and myths, WE CAN UNDERSTAND HOW THE BIBLE IS NOT MYTHICAL-how the reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in myth."

"Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers."

"The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder."

"Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self- deception we call mythology. The second way is the road to the truth followed by the Bible."

"Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals. This difference is not merely "moralistic" (as Nietzsche believed) or a matter of subjective choice; it is a question of truth."

"Satan tries to silence Jesus through the very process that Jesus subverts. He has good reasons to believe that his old mimetic trick should still produce, with Jesus as victim, what it has always produced in the past: one more myth of the usual type, a closed system of mythical lies. He has good reasons to believe that the mimetic contagion against Jesus will prove irresistible once again and that the revelation will be squelched."

"Satan's expectations are disappointed. The Gospels do everything that the Bible had done before, rehabilitating a victimized prophet, a wrongly accused victim. But they also universalize this rehabilitation. They show that, since the foundation of the world, the victims of all Passion-like murders have been victims of the same mimetic contagion as Jesus. The Gospels make the revelation complete. They give to the biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false gods and their violent cultural systems are generated. This is the truth missing from mythology, the truth that subverts the violent system of this world. If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology."

"An anthropological analysis enables us to say that, just as the revelation of the Christian victim differs from mythical revelations because it is not rooted in the illusion of the guilty scapegoat, so the Christian Resurrection differs from mythical ones because its witnesses are the people who ultimately overcome the contagion of victimization (such as Peter and Paul), and not the people who surrender to it (such as Herod and Pilate). The Christian Resurrection is indispensable to the purely anthropological revelation of unanimous victimization and to the demythologizing of mythical resurrections."

http://print.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9604/articles/girard.html

Originally posted by frogstomp
The great advantage of the scientific method is that it is unprejudiced: one does not have to believe a given researcher, one can redo the experiment and determine whether his/her results are true or false. The conclusions will hold irrespective of the state of mind, or the religious persuasion, or the state of consciousness of the investigator and/or the ...[text shortened]... f faith required.

same site

That's why science and religion are different animals

The great advantage of the scientific method is that it is unprejudiced: one does not have to believe a given researcher, one can redo the experiment and determine whether his/her results are true or false. The conclusions will hold irrespective of the state of mind, or the religious persuasion, or the state of consciousness of the investigator and/or the subject of the investigation. Faith, defined as belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, does not determine whether a scientific theory is adopted or discarded.

http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node6.html

There are many types of ``pseudo-scientific'' theories which wrap themselves in a mantle of apparent experimental evidence but that, when examined closely, are nothing but statements of faith. The argument , cited by some creationists, that science is just another kind of faith is a philosophic stance which ignores the trans-cultural nature of science. Science's theory of gravity explains why both creationists and scientists don't float off the earth. All you have to do is jump to verify this theory - no leap of faith required.

same site

That's why science and religion are different animals

"Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers"


How does this square with the Midianite Massacre and the many other atrocities done at God's command in the Old Testament?

Originally posted by Coletti
Woof!

That's the pot calling the kettle black.

Calling his dogma medieval to imply it's wrong is fallacious. The age of the dogma has no bearing on the validity. And your belief in the advances of mankind through science is a dogmatic faith in the concept of evolutionary progress. The question is, Rewind, does the evidence support your dogma. I think you dogma doesn't hunt.

I'm thinking he's referring to St. Anselm.

Go read up.

Then speak.

Originally posted by Darfius
This is what we in the logical world call a strawman.

Burn, baby, burn!

What precisely is the strawman, Darfius? I don't even see an assertion being made
and ripped apart.

Nemesio

Originally posted by no1marauder
"Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers"


How does this square with the Midianite Massacre and the many other atrocities done at God's command in the Old Testament?

Please read the whole article.

Originally posted by bbarr
Perhaps it is an evolutionary mechanism useful for preventing free-riding, which thereby allows us to solve prisoner's dilemma type collective action problems. The concept of God would be like an internalized panopticon.

Civilizing order? A bit of Foucault? Maybe.

I think god(s) serve(s) a couple of purposes.

1) By anthropomorphizing the entity, we can come up with human reasons for the random, seemingly callous events in our world.

2) If this god is just and all-seeing, then wrongs that go unpunished here on Earth can be set right after death.

3) If this god also implies an eternal conscious existence, then god belief provides a self-defense mechanism against the awareness of our own mortality.

4) Eventually, once uniform god-belief become rooted in groups of humans, it provided an additional element for common identity. This proved useful for establishing order.

Originally posted by ivanhoe

Please read the whole article.

OK, I read the article and I will admit that it is a powerful theological rationale for why the "story" of Jesus differs from prior, similar "myths". However, I still don't see how the article explains the dichtomy between the words of Jesus and the atrocities committed supposedly at His command in the Old Testament like the Midianite Massacre. I was particulary struck by this statement:

In myth, violent death is always justified

In my discussions of the Midianite Massacre with Darfius, he strongly justified the violent deaths of even defenseless infants. I know you don't agree with much of what Darfius says, but still the question remains: how can the New Testament message be reconciled with the mass murders committed at God's command in the Old Testament?

Originally posted by no1marauder
OK, I read the article and I will admit that it is a powerful theological rationale for why the "story" of Jesus differs from prior, similar "myths". However, I still don't see how the article explains the dichtomy between the words of Jesus and the atrocities committed supposedly at His command in the Old Testament like the Midianite Massacre. I wa ...[text shortened]... nt message be reconciled with the mass murders committed at God's command in the Old Testament?

.... beats me.

If Man did not create God, rather the other way around, what was God doing in the 13 or 14 billion years between the Creation and the time we shuffled on to the Scene? Waiting?

Originally posted by KneverKnight
If Man did not create God, rather the other way around, what was God doing in the 13 or 14 billion years between the Creation and the time we shuffled on to the Scene? Waiting?

Why do you think he invented solitaire? 😉

Originally posted by KneverKnight
If Man did not create God, rather the other way around, what was God doing in the 13 or 14 billion years between the Creation and the time we shuffled on to the Scene? Waiting?

Why do you persist in projecting time (a creation) onto God? I find it telling that you cannot do such a simple thing as postulate a God outside of time.

Originally posted by ivanhoe

.... beats me.

I don't want to read too much into a two word, rather cryptic comment but does this mean that you do not believe that the parts of the Old Testament where God orders the slaughter of innocents is accurate? Specifically, do you believe that such passages were rationalizations by the ancient Israelites for their own barbaric practices which were not ordered by God (Jesus) and are fundamentally incompatible with Jesus' message in the Gospels?