Hester’s Blog Post: The Cycle of Religion
“From Within Creation” by Farid De La Ossa
People created gods as explanations of the unknown, and to show their respects and fears of uncontrollable powers. From The Great Hymn to the Aten and Emma Elish to Hesiod’s Theogony and Genesis, and then, to On the Nature of Things, it seems like people were giving out more specific and more reasonable explanations of where everything comes from and will be gone to. However, it could not help me to wonder, is that really more reasonable and closer to the truth, or it is just closer to what we believe right now? Did ancient people really know less than we do today? Are we really giving out the right answer of the question about human creation or we are just doing our best to guess as they do?
When we looked at these five article in a timeline, people worshiped one powerful source in the world at first; then they worshiped the gods of creations, and finally it came to the nature which is closer to the evolution theories we believe today. It looks like an evolution of human believes and we are getting closer the truth. However, can we look at this timeline as a “time-cycle?” In The Great Hymn to the Aten and Emma Elish, people worship sun, salt water and fresh water. These things were the nature surrounded them. Then, in Hesiod’s Theogony and Genesis, there are gods who hold a greater power than one or two powerful elements in the nature. Finally, when it came to On the Nature of Things or even the Big Bang theory we believe today, it, the god, is back to the nature surrounds as. For me, the difference between the time period of Emma Elish and 2016 is the technology we have now. They pray to water because in their time, they can only explore the world by foot. They might think the earth is flat and the sea did not have an edge, and that was the biggest thing they can image. Now, we believe in Big Bang and know that we are living on earth which in just a small “ball” in the universe. It seems foolish to us that people pray to sun which is just a “ball” bigger than the one we are living on. However, isn’t it universe which we adore today is just another nature part that surround us like the sunshine from the sun to the ancient people? We are just giving out the same answer of human creation and worship the same thing – our surrounding in a different way from the ancient people thousands years ago. Maybe one day, someone will find the universe itself cannot explain all of our questions. Then, maybe, a new theory of gods create us will come out, or one of those religions will become the main theory for everyone to study and worship in the world again.
I think you’re raising a very interesting question here.
While we do seem to be advancing our world scientifically, our understanding of the universe is only met by the limits of our brains, anything beyond those barriers is incomprehensible, nevertheless existent . As a theoretical example, lets imagine 2-dimensional beings who come into our world, while they may gain some perspective on how we live in our own existence , the extra dimension that we exist is one that they cannot comprehend. Similarly, while we can imagine the idea of a tesseract, we cannot process the idea of its existence in our world, since our world is euclidean. In fact all of science works this way – every single theory that’s been brought out is only valid under our own understanding of it.
Since we would never be able to reach a true understanding (unless its subjective) of how things came to be – I think it is interesting to imagine ourselves “getting the purpose of it all” simply by being more connected – to ourselves, nature, our humanness. I personally find the interconnections between the physical science (being western philosophy) and eastern philosophy to be incredibly interesting and of course, I have not been able to find an answer as of yet 🙂 The only truth I have been able to find in all this – how I feel.