@LeakyNun The king of Salem, who was also a priest of God Most High. At least, that's who Genesis 14:18 says he is.
@LeakyNun But he certainly gave a pretty strong impression on several occasions that he was God, or pretty close to it. And he didn't reject people's worship when they offered it to him.
@LeakyNun If you want to know the Swedenborgian view, which is what I would give you, then you can certainly ask that question here.
@LeakyNun As to the general principle of Christus Victor, that "the work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil," yes. That is central to Swedenborg's theory of atonement. On many of the details of the "classical" Christus Victor view, though, Swedenborg has a different view of how Christ accomplished that victory.
I would say that Swedenborg's doctrine of atonement is in the Christus Victor family, whereas Swedenborg decidedly rejects satisfaction theory, including the Protestant penal substitution version. And the moral influence view is built into Swedenborg's theory, but not the whole of it.
@LeakyNun It's old news that Jewish monotheism developed out of polytheism. The Bible itself provides that progression, with Abraham coming from polytheistic roots. And if those later editors were really as good as this author/narrator seems to think, they did an awfully poor job of editing out the Israelites' early polytheism and henotheism.
Whether that transition occurred at the time of Abraham or at the time of the Babylonian captivity doesn't really matter that much. Whether there is one God or many gods is not dependent upon humans' histories and cultural histories. And it's not dependent upon whether the Bible gives an accurate picture of the emergence of monotheism out of polytheism.
The author/narrator is basically saying, "Omigod, God didn't happen the way the Bible says He did! There must be no God!!!!" That's a silly and irrational conclusion.
@LeakyNun It's also old news that the early chapters of Genesis are based on early myths. Their structure, style, and content fairly shouts it out. Swedenborg said 250 years ago that the first 10-11 chapters of the Bible were never meant to be taken literally, but were stories written primarily for their symbolic or metaphorical ("correspondential," in his terms) meaning.
If Genesis 1 was based on a pre-existing Babylonian creation myth, so what? It was adapted to the purposes of the Hebrew narrative and story.
This stuff all sounds very ominous to people whose primary exposure has been to rather one-dimensional, literal interpretations of the Bible. But for those of us who view the Bible from a more spiritual and metaphorical perspective, there's not much substance to it. My general reaction to the video is, "So what?"
@LeeWoofenden to me it is more like "omigod the God I am worshipping is just one out of the many gods in Canaan; if history turned out a but differently, I would be worshipping Asherah instead of Jehovah"
The whole video seems to be based on the idea that humans invented and developed God. But if there actually is a God who created the universe, that's nonsense.
@LeakyNun Who cares? For those who worshiped Jehovah, he served as their "real God." For those who worshiped Asherah, she served as their "real God."
We humans are rather dense. None of us can really comprehend God as God is in God's self. We can only come to some rude conception of God, and that is the being we worship. And God accepts our worship if we are sincerely intending to give honor to a higher being who is our source, ruler, lawgiver, etc.
@LeakyNun As I've said to you before (I think), I doubt that humans by themselves would ever come up with the idea of God. But we can certainly have a distorted picture of God. And if that constitutes "inventing gods," the sure, we can take a true concept and turn it into a distorted and falsified one.
@LeakyNun Only if we already have the concept of a god in our heads. And really, I doubt we can come up with anything brand new ourselves at all. We gain information, a store of data so to speak, and we build our conceptions on that basis.
Do I think the ancient conceptions of Jehovah or Asherah were accurate conceptions of God? No. They were very crude and partial. But they were how "God" got filtered through the minds of those particular cultures based on their lives, their conception of the universe, and their experiences.
@LeakyNun Sure. I don't think Homer was under any illusion that what he wrote was an accurate literal history of actual historical events. He was a poet and storyteller. A weaver of myths with mythical significance. We might as well ask whether Herman Melville really believed that a guy named Ahab spent his whole life chasing a white whale.
People whose faith is shattered when they discover that everything written in the Bible didn't happen literally as described had a very shallow faith and understanding of the Bible.
@LeakyNun You can believe that if you want. But it has no particular bearing on whether there actually is a God.
@LeeWoofenden I'm not arguing whether there is a God, but I'm saying that most of the gods are made up instead of some distorted conception of the real God
@LeakyNun Further, if God created humans in God's image as Genesis says, then wouldn't it make sense that humans would conceptualize their gods as human?
@LeakyNun No. Because if humans are based on God, and God created humans, then humans would naturally have a tendency to think of God as being like a super-powerful human.
What do you think it means to be created "in the image and likeness of God"?
We humans are doing our darnedest to create computers in our own image. We study how the human brain does things, and try to get computers to do that, too. If later, a computer became sentient, and said, "Wow, humans are a lot like me! I must have created them!" that would make no more sense than atheists saying that God is like humans because humans created God.
The idea that we can think dispassionately devoid of any emotion is a myth in the negative sense of that word. Everything we think about is driven by love, feeling, emotion. We don't ask questions or argue about things that "mean nothing" to us.
@LeakyNun So if your question is, "Did we invent gods?" then sure we did, from my perspective. There actually is no being that fits our description of Jehovah or Ashera. Those came to the human mind as derivations from things we knew about. One was God. Another was war (Jehovah). Another was fertility (Ashera). Without those elements already in our awareness, we would not have "invented" those gods.
Because being an atheist, you naturally believe that there is no God, so humans must have invented even the idea of God.
And that colors your thinking about the whole subject.
But I don't think the human mind is capable of coming up with anything that is truly new. We can only take things we already knew about and build upon them.
From my perspective, everything we know has always existed in the mind of God. All we do is bring them into material expression at various times and places depending on our knowledge, culture, circumstances, and so on.
@LeakyNun I don't expect to establish my point with you because you reject the primary premise on which my view of things rest. I have no illusions that I'll be able to argue you into believing in God. But without believing in God, you cannot accept the things I believe to be true.
At this point, you can only examine it as a specimen.
@LeakyNun If there is a God as I conceive of God, then everything in creation is in some way contained within the being of God. Even things that are a distortion of what's in God still owe their existence to the original elements of God of which they are a distortion. So if you believe in God, there is "nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9) in the sense that we cannot actually have a truly original idea. It had to come from somewhere, and ultimately, it had to come from God.
Meanwhile, those who believe there is no God are required to think that humans made up gods because otherwise there would be no explanation for our conceiving of something that doesn't actually exist.
@LeakyNun It is for those who believe in God. It means that everything we have comes from God, and is not really ours, but is something God gives us. And that is a key tenet of belief for Swedenborgians, at least, and would, I think, be generally accepted by many theists.
@LeakyNun And more to the point, what you said here is not what I was saying anyway. I didn't say we have to have a concept of God to do all X. I said we have to have a concept of God to invent a god.
@LeakyNun Once again, I didn't say you have to have a concept of God to write a poem. I said, rather, that ultimately the content of your poem came from God.
@LeakyNun Because, in my view, we can't actually invent anything that has no prior sources. And I don't see any prior sources in nature for a concept of God.
I should say in nature alone.
Thus circling right back to my original argument and belief that if there were no God, I don't believe humans would ever come up with the idea.
@LeakyNun Computers use things we discovered in nature, and things we emulated from human physiology, etc., to put together something "new." But the basic elements of a computer already existed in nature. We just created an electromechanical version of it. And we're working on a quantum version of it.
Because now we have a concept of quantum mechanics.
@LeakyNun So gods must have, I believed, been developed from something we already knew about, not just made up out of whole cloth. And I think the most reasonable thing for them to develop from is an actual God: an actual supernatural phenomenon from which we got the idea of gods.
To use another example, for me the most reasonable explanation of near-death experiences is that there is an actual spiritual realm, and people who have NDEs briefly experience that realm. But for atheists, that cannot be a valid explanation because they don't believe in any spiritual realm. So "hallucinations of an oxygen-deprived brain" becomes the preferred explanation.
Atheists cannot seriously contemplate the God-and-afterlife explanation because if it were true, then they would be wrong about the non-existence of God.
And people have a strong motivation to defend and protect their own beliefs.
So atheists simply rule out any explanation that includes a belief in God and a spiritual realm as a necessary part of that explanation. It is not even put on the list of possible explanations to investigate.
@LeakyNun Most of them, I suspect, prefer that explanation because they've been fed a load of crap about who God is and what God is like.
And they've seen people who believe in God behaving very badly.
I have a lot of sympathy for atheists. I expect that's what I'd be if I'd been brought up with the garbage that passes for religious belief in most quarters today.
I attribute the fact that I'm not an atheist to the fact that I was brought up Swedenborgian and not Baptist.
I'm saying that you can't counter arguments made by atheists by "you just hate god", because that's a red herring and that shows you haven't looked into their arguments
I know atheists hate to be psychoanalyzed. Who doesn't? But just because they hate it, that doesn't mean there are no psychological reasons for their beliefs. Atheists generally think people believe in God because those people are idiots. That's a form of psychoanalysis. So if you can dish it out, you'd better be able to take it.
Atheists are not immune to the realities of human psychology.
And we humans believe all sorts of thing that have very little to do with rationality, even though we nearly always clothe whatever we believe in a garment of rationality.
So the idea that atheists believe what they do for purely rational reasons holds no particular water for me.
@LeakyNun A particular place where the people were stupid and superstitious.
@LeakyNun It doesn't matter if they're ex-Christian or ex-any other religion. We're all basically ex-religious because religion and a belief in God used to be effectively universal in human culture.
@LeeWoofenden I mean, the atheists you encounter are that way because your country is full of Christians. Go to a country where most people are atheists and they may not even think about religion at all, let alone having a explanation of why someone believes in god.
@LeakyNun Very relevant. The culture has largely rejected a religion. They're not atheists in some vacuum. They're atheists departing from a specific religious heritage.
And that religious heritage was part and parcel of multiple bloodbaths in Europe.
@LeakyNun You're the one who brought up this "hate God" thing. I never said atheists hate God. Though some of 'em do make a pretty good show of it. ;-)
And I should have added earlier that there are some atheists who are atheists because they don't want any @#$% God getting in the way of their (sick) fun.
@LeakyNun And I'm talking about how I would counter your "hate God" thing with "hate false and destructive conceptions of God."
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