>Glenn, that was a facinating discourse. I'm gratified that I asked those
>questions. I'll be thinking about what you wrote. I studied early Old
>Testament history a little. There too evidence indicates concepts didn't
>start with dramatic revelations, just evolving religious tradition. Is
>there any escape from this theme?
Thank you. Here I must confess a bias of mine. I really do not want
religion to be nothing more than an evolving tradition, if by that, we mean
religion itself evolved. While religion may be very old, and has changed, I
would argue that the Bible teaches that religion arose at the creation of
man in a supernatural event.
If the Judeo-Christian system is nothing but the outgrowth of a naturalistic
process whereby man developed a religious belief as his brain became more
complex, then I would say that we are worshipping man-made gods rather than
the transcendant Creator of the universe. Most evolutionary theorists would
say that religion is the primitive attempt to deal with the vicissitudes of
life. But this makes religion a hallucination of our own minds, a
self-delusion or a response to the bogeyman who isn't there. To me this
negates all religions in one fell swoop.
The reason this position is a bias, is that the evidence, can be interpreted
either way: religion evolved over time, or religion was the result of divine
activity, but this happened a long, long time ago.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm