doogles » January 20th, 2019, 1:56 am wrote:Serpent and -1-, you have both implied that notions of a spirit essence being part of a body have not evolved from observation of death in humans and animals, but from some other observations. Curiously, both of you have not supplied any evidence for that, but have claimed authority on the basis of having read it somewhere.
I didn't imply this; I stated it out loud. And, yes, I read it somewhere. I notice you added the spirit of animals, which certainly does not appear in mainstream modern religions.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/animismcurrently on my bookshelf:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2265055.African_Myths_and_Legendshttps://books.google.ca/books/about/Ojibway_Heritage.html?id=sfxSdP3di_YChttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/844522.American_Indian_Myths_and_Legendshttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67863.Animal_Speakhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525578.Gods_Heroes_Classical_Antiquityhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1716119.Who_s_Who_in_Greek_and_Roman_Mythologyand, of course, Bulfinch and the bible, standard modern, because I've given away the big red gilt King James edition.
Other books have come and gone, and while I remember some well enough to link, I don't have them on hand to look up a reference.
If what you say is correct, then the working hypothesis I have for why many isolated groups of people have notions of spiritualism in their cultures, is wrong.
I believe so, yes. And it doesn't stand to reason, given the lifestyle of early peoples. They were not shielded from anything: nothing took place behind closed doors - there were no doors. Death was a presence in their lives before they could speak its name, or their own - it could never have surprised them; it could never have presented as a mystery.
Nor did their spirit need a distant heaven to depart to: they didn't need to escape a life of drudgery and thralldom, like medieval Europeans or other civilized people.
Also, of course, they were not all that isolated; for the most part, hunter-gatherers were either nomadic or migratory: they came in contact with other peoples, traded, intermarried, fought, feasted and told stories. Always, everywhere, people tell stories: they sing and dance stories, wear them in masks and costumes, paint them in caves, scratch them on rocks, hammer them into jewellery, embroider them on clothing, weave them into rugs and baskets, etch them on pottery, carve them in wood. Stories get passed around, modified to fit new geography, changed over time and translated into different tongues.
I set out to search Google under many sets of keywords, but could not find any references to any working hypotheses on the origins of the notion of a body containing a spirit essence (or soul or whatever).
That's because most of the online articles are about - and in the service of - a particular current belief-system, each one having its definition and explanation of the way they interpret spirit or soul. They're not interested in where the notion came from, since they are in possession of a version of that notion that works for them.
This is why I would like you to support your statements with such references. If my working theory is correct, then it explains the prevalence of spiritualism and the variations in the nature of hypotheses about this spiritualism between religions.
So does mine, and I can show you how the early belief systems morphed into and were subsumed by the civilized, organized, authoritarian systems in force today.
Those belief-systems did a whole lot more than describe the departure of the animating essence from a body: they were cultural matrices - still are, for a few isolated tribes: a way of relating to the environment and one another; medicine, law/moral guidance, group identity, history, art and entertainment.
In addition it suggests that religions are a widespread status quo on this planet and that the scientific knowledge of metabolism as the animating energy of living things is really 'The new kid on the block'. In terms of human or humanoid existence, this new-found knowledge is very recent.
I see it, rather, as re-found knowledge. Primitive peoples were a lot more canny and better informed than the Euro-centered world-view credits. Christianity suppressed all knowledge for so long, they had to re-invent curiosity, which they immediately regimented into a Method and took out an exclusive patent on it.
Biochemistry is merely a branch of this until-so-recently-forbidden tree of knowledge. Understanding metabolism (which, btw, a yogi of three thousand years ago could control more effectively than an army of modern doctors) is but one of its many fruits.
It does tend to suggest that spiritualism just may not be the entire basis of animation or life, and along with other scientific discoveries, that religious ideas may not be the best ones to explain our existence.
There, you see, is another question. Why do so many people today think that
existence needs an explanation? To a primitive,
events need explanations (because he wants to avoid them or repeat them or control them); life and being don't (because he already has them): he's far more practical than the philosophers of a later era.
Religious ideas had and have many uses far more compelling than an explanation of why is there something, but they zero in on that one as a distraction.
I can understand that such discoveries could be perceived as a threat to some people with strong religious belief systems. It could explain any tension between Scientific and Religious ideas.
All knowledge is a threat to organized religion. Obviously! It's laid out plain and flat, in the third chapter of Genesis.
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/ Pay especial heed to the switcheroo from Ch1 to Ch 2 and 3. Sloppy editing, that.
Nature-based religions have no such tension, because they're not authoritarian; they don't need to contradict and force you deny the evidence of your eyes.