"Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Recent news relevant to Julian Jaynes's theory of consciousness and the bicameral mind.
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Gororules
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"Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by Gororules »

How do you think this studt relates to Julian's?

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-big-gods- ... rical.html
EEprofessor
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Re: "Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by EEprofessor »

Clearly supportive.
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Re: "Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by Moderator »

Agreed... the many gods during the bicameral period slowly blended and merged into fewer and fewer more powerful gods as consciousness was learned and the voices were suppressed.
EEprofessor
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Re: "Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by EEprofessor »

None of this is any surprise and does not at all refute anything that JJ wrote. I keep an eye on the cuneiform tablet research and they have yet to find one that translates to a conscious result. What is just astonishing is the fact that mainstream science fails to accept the evidence. Then you have clowns like Christof Koch criticizing Jaynes and yet showing nothing in the way of NCC. He has published in many of the highest rated journals and yet has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to show for it. Now that his mentor Crick is dead, his weak foundation of nonsense is catching up with him.
Tanker62
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Re: "Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by Tanker62 »

Yes, it's supportive of JJ's theory for me as well, as it says that gods used to be seen as entities much closer to us, both in terms of proximity and of personality. I'm not an expert of the Polynesian religions mentioned by the author, but I've done a fair lot of reading on the Greek mythology, and it's difficult to imagine the Abrahamic God behaving like Zeus who regularly fathered children with mortal women...
benjamindavidsteele
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Re: "Gods came AFTER the rise of civilizations"?

Post by benjamindavidsteele »

@Tanker62 - "it's difficult to imagine the Abrahamic God behaving like Zeus who regularly fathered children with mortal women..."

Let me make a simple point. Brian J. McVeigh's most recent book, The Psychology of the Bible, covers somethng related to this. He wasn't talking about Zeus, but he mentoined that Yahweh was originally experienced anthropomorphically. Yahweh was, in the earliest accounts, was a physical-like being not all that different from Zeus.

Other scholarship points that ancients didn't necessarily perceive a distinction between these gods. Even among the Jews, there were those who referred to God as Yahweh-Zeus. Such composite names were common, as cultural familiarity and mixing was widespread. The more abstract notion of God as disembodied mind-spirit took a while to develop and be embraced.
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