origin of worship?

by cptkirk 6 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cptkirk

  when you take an honest look at life, it's pretty pathetic. the fact that it exists at all. the law of nature is kill or be killed....if you're a fish, you've got predator sharks looking to eat you. if you're a zebra, you got tigers ready to eat you. human beings are only starting to really gain any strength via technology, and even that (in the grand scheme) is still a bit futile.

  if you roll back human advancement, and try to put yourself in the shoes of the first intelligent humans...can you imagine what they were thinking once they became conscious? hey look a blood-thirsty t-rex just ate my family and my entire village. oh i fell, i broke my leg and then i starved to death, darn. isn't it only logical to expect that these people's first thoughts probably veered towards worship? they realized everything was dumb (in terms of life, ie. they, the humans, were the smartest show in town, and that wasn't saying much). the stars are blowing up in supernovas, hell a meteor may of just wiped out half a continent...and they say it's a miracle, how can i possibly live among all of this? there must be something greater than i that oversaw my being conceived. so they started to worship....worship started off absolutely ridiculous, then gradually evolved into mostly ridiculous. in terms of what was being worshipped and how it was being worshipped.

  maybe god does exist, and he's just an extreme right wing libertarian ...knowing this life is just some sort of bizarre transition.

  it's funny i left my television on, i can't even see the screen, but i'm hearing it as a i type, and it's talking about prophecies of disaster. with everything afore mentioned, isn't prophecy about disaster tantamount to prophecy about the sun rising in the east?
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  tec

  I don't think its logical for humans to have conceived of a god/gods/goddess/spirits/whatever... without something to base their belief upon first. Some sort of evidence that led them to conceive or acknowledge of such a thing. I don't think its logical for a purely natural species to conceive of something spiritual or 'supernatural'.

  (though I don't think there is any such thing as supernatural... we just call things we don't yet understand as something 'super' natural. But once we understand it, we classify it as natural)

  Peace,

  Tammy
• 

  Azazel

  All i know is that i dont know enough.

  Az
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  arko_n9ne

  There were cargo cults that explained how people came to worship.

  In World War 2, US troops stationed on pacific islands used to have cargo crates full of supplies air dropped to them. These supplies not only helped the troops but the island natives as well. We paid them in clothing and food to be our guides.
  The islanders believed ancient spirits must have favored the americans and brought them this cargo. This concept was strengthened when the troops left the island and the cargo stopped coming.
  So the natives would build replicas of the army bases out of wood and leaves (like Gilligan's Island) and re-enact what the troops would do, from running drills to marching, all in the hopes the spirits would favor them and deliver the cargo.

  much like most religions, when the cargo didn't come, the worshippers wisened up and did other things.

  Worship happened because man was not bright enough to comprehend what he saw happening. When lightning struck, their minds created a deity that was angry. When that lightning created fire, a benevolent spirit became responsible. Look at the purposing of the greek, roman, and egyptian gods. Each god was responsible for some aspect of their modern life.

  We can look at the tribal russians back at turn-of-the-century 1900's. In Tunguski, a meteor (spaceship, alien nuke, whatever) set off an explosion with a yield one third the size of Czar Bomba. The crater can be seen from Google Earth. The nomads in the region didn't know what chemicals or atoms were. They literally had no word or concept of science, so they attributed it to magic.

  For all our credit, humans really don't have a history of being wise AND intelligent at the same time.
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  cptkirk

  yea that is exactly what i was thinking, and i know i heard that story about ww2 before also. it's just one big empirical diorama.
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  punkofnice

  I wonder if worship is a comfort zone?

  Belief in god = someone in control = someone in control = we're safe.

  I think the truth is much more frightening = no one is in control, the world is without a pilot let alone a joy stick! = We're knackered!

  Just thinking out loud.
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  cptkirk

  yea, the great irony being that it actually takes more faith to live w/o god than w/ god. or more ignorance.