From Newsgroup: comp.unix.shell
On 15/03/2026 02:39, rbowman wrote:
On Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:35:51 -0700, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
Maybe it amounted to dealing with one deity was simpler than dealing
with many some requiring expensive sacrifices before the deity or their
priests
Well, that was Mohamed's selling point. Arabs wrapping their minds around
the concept of a trinity wasn't going to happen. For that matter many Christians couldn't describe the doctrine in their own words without
falling into one of the classic heresies or the other.
Religious mysticism is a crude attempt at a theory of life the universe
and everything
What was sold to the profane was a stripped down code of behaviour, a
fairy tale and a promise that was uncontestable.
India seems to have done well with polytheism although in some cases it's more serial monotheism. I assume Greece and pre-Christian Rome was
similar; pick your favorite God or Goddess.
The bronze age mind did not have to deal with a humanity that had much
power over anything, so science per se was not much use. Natural forces
were overwhelming in their force and a simple way to pass down hints
and clues in how to deal with them in an oral tradition was to anthropomorphise them into gods and other supernatural intelligences.
When you don't have either antibiotics or a microscope, a demon that
gives you diarrhoea is as useful and plausible as a tiny invisible creature.
In fact, what is the difference?
The mystical Trinity is an echo of the shamanic construction and
observation that in order for there to be a world that we are aware of,
there needs to be something there to be aware of (God the father), and something capable of being aware (the Holy Ghost), and the resultant
awareness (God the son)
It finds echoes in quantum physics today, where God equates to the
quantum probability field, the Holy Ghost as the consciousness that
interacts with it to produce the space-time-energy reality of the
classical world,
Nothing supernatural at all. Just an artifact of how we perceive
reality, that's all.
And nothing much to do with a smart Jew called Moses who went up a
mountain and came back with something only guile cunning and the
invention of writing could do. A pre prepared moral code, literally set
in stone and with the authority of the miraculous (These are not what I
made earlier, honest. I just found em)...a technique later copied by
Brigham Young.
In the end the question of what-the-fuck-is-'here'? and what-the-fuck-are-we-supposed-to-do-about-it? remains fundamentally unresolved, bit civilisation has grown based on beliefs that ensure
people play nice together. More or less.
Although no one is clear as to whether this is a GoodThingrao or not.
--
Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.
Mark Twain
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