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The land before time

     Have you ever wondered what life was like before anything we know today existed?  It is hard to imagine the prehistoric, and the further back you go the harder it gets.  I recently have been listening to some lectures on ancient Mediterranean religions and was fascinated by what religion/ spirituality looked like as far back as the Stone Age.  Essentially as soon as man became man he perceived spirituality and began setting things aside as sacred.  These ideas were basic and related to life processes that they couldn't understand, such as birth and death.  

     Rituals to express their awe and respect for humans entering and exiting this world developed and are interpreted by modern day archeologists as the first evidence of the sacred.  The ancients would bury the dead in a fetal position to replicate birth and bury their dead close by the community so they would have easy access for communal meals that were held to carry on relationships with their dead loved ones.  They seemed to believe that the dead went on living in some fashion and would provide them with tools and other gifts to facilitate their existence in that other world.  As time progressed these rituals became more elaborate such as the embalming and burial process in Egypt.  

     I can't help, but wonder at this rudimentary stage of human development, about 20,000 years ago, what exactly did they believe in?  What did they hope for?  Did they have faith in something or someone?  Why would they take the time to create pomp and circumstance for things that were beyond them.  How did they think they would profit from setting these things aside?

    Perhaps they were merely afraid of everything they couldn't understand, and to a certain extant this is true.  The polytheistic mythologies were often woven around natural events, the sun, stars, night-time and seasons each were eventually came to be represented by at least one God.  Again as time went on these myths became more elaborate and attempted to explain the how and why for the way life was.  However, I often wonder how all of humanity, seemingly independent of each other all arrived at very similar conclusions.  In a broad, overarching way the ancient religions of the world all reflected similar values and similar methodology for worshiping the sacred reality they all perceived.  

     Case in point, human cultures the world over set up temple cultic systems regardless of whether it was Hebrew or Hindu.  These often if not always involved animal sacrifices as well as yearly festivals.  Celebrations of fertility are rampant, the idea that there are such things as deities is standard and connections between death, life and sexual reproduction are commonplace.  

     How did everyone get the same general idea about what religion should look like?  What I would like to think is that somewhere deep in the human psyche there is the ability to perceive the divine and the patterns we see is mankind universally coming to this understanding.  Call me crazy, but certainly looks like they arrived at this understanding on their own.  I think humanity began to glimpse what God had built into the very fabric of Creation. 

     I find the concept of humanity as a whole perceiving a spiritual dimension to be truly awe inspiring.  Now I'm fully aware that it was by no means "pure and undefiled religion" and was convoluted and twisted along the way devolving into worship of everything under the sun, but it was religion.  

So my ultimate question is can we derive any meaning from the ancients religious longings.  Is there some fundamental religious truths that we as human being were/are automatically able to sense in the world around us.  Some food for thought at any rate.

I just read the the stuff

    

     I grew up in a conservative Christian household, I don't use the f-word very often, but it very accurately describes my upbringing, Fundamentalist.  Now I don't thnk there is anything inherently bad in that word, but in this day and age it amounts to relegating you to the dark ages.  

    I want to make it very clear from the beginning that I'm not on a warpath against the way I was raised or against my family who raised me in the way that they thought was right.  Like any child who grows up, leaves home and encounters new ideas, theology, world views and information I have naturally changed and altered my ideas from those of my family.  So this is me just documenting what I have found in my journey.

     One of the things about a fundamentalist Christian mindset is that you take the idea of sheltering very seriously, in a very real way your job is make sure that worldly ideas do not find much of an audience.  This is a task that every parent in some way is trying to fulfill, even the most non-religious parent tries to shelter their children from something at least until they reach a certain age.  So the end result if the parent is successful there are some things their children have never heard about.  One of the things I was never been exposed to was scriptural criticism.  

     I'll be honest when I started hearing about how there are different and conflicting accounts in the Bible, debates about when the Bible was written and who had the most say in the editing process, and  how it contained literature that was best read figuratively I wanted to retreat back into my naïveté.  However as I have eased myself into this scary, foreign place of Biblical criticism I have found much that has enriched my understanding of the book that I grew up reading.  

     

     Now that I have eased my recovering fundamentalist self into this area of study, the ideas make perfect sense.  An important principle in any historical study is that history rarely gives you what you expect from it.  The unified narrative that we commonly hear from any part of history is almost never that simple, we should expect no different from a historical study of the Bible.  Now that is an important distinction to make, this is a historical exploration of the Bible not a theological one.  Not that one doesn't have serious ramifications for the other, it most certainly does.  I have been seriously challenged by a historical reading of Genesis, but that's a subject for another blog.  The point is and this applies to any area of history, especially ancient history; there is a difference between the theological narrative we commonly understand and what the physical evidence we possess can support.  This is true for copies of the scripture that we possess and archeological evidence for things like the worldwide flood and the Exodus.  Those are also topics for another blogpost.  

     So I have shared an overview of my journey and I hope that has been helpful, I'm still a recovering fundamentalist and honestly a lot of what I see still scares me, but I see a path now that involves grappling and understanding the facts instead of ignoring them.  That is what I find to be the most exciting, I want to know the real story behind the Bible because that will help me make the most informed interpretations.  I don't intend on being a full blown Biblical scholar, but I certainly intend on becoming an informed student of both the theological and historical Bible

Is Christian Conservatism Passé?

     I recently completed a "Great Courses" lecture series on the roots of conservatism as a political movement.  If you aren't familiar with the Great Courses I would highly recommend them.  

     What I took from the lecture series, which covered conservatism in both the UK and America was a detectable pattern in the ways that we propose, respond and react to change.  Conservatism as defined by the lecture series was essentially resistance to change and the preservation of the past or of the status quo.  However since change is inevitable, conservatism is put in the position of having to adapt and choose the option which accommodates the required change while best preserving the original intent of the law or statute.  This is ordinarily the pattern, a problem is perceived, a progressive or unorthodox solution is proposed and a battle ensues with the conservatives digging in their heels  trying to preserve what they see as the traditional and historically honored way of doing things.  The outcome is usually not completely to either sides liking and the process continues.  Occasionally, however conservatives buck that trend, realize that they cannot maintain their current position and choose to innovate, instead proposing the changes themselves.  

     Now the point of all this that we see these same trend I described above in religion as well.  Every generation has its hot button issues, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, evolution or the veracity of the Bible, all these are well contested today.  The issues of yesterday may be less familiar, women working outside the home, giving women the vote, giving the vote to people of various skin colors, rabid anti-Catholicism and I could go on.  These issues are quite passé, we don't give them a second thought as religious people even though they were each huge religious issues in their day.  These problems were resolved only in the past century and yet we today don't question whether everyone should vote or whether women can work outside the home.  These questions were argued, hotly debated and eventually a solution with a consensus of opinion was reached, then we moved on.  We take so much for granted today in regards to what our culture looks like and we don't always remember that what we take for granted was once considered radical and we forget the generations of Conservatives who believed civilization would collapse if everyone could vote and women could work.  

     I don't mean to say that we should give up since change is inevitable, but I do say that the historical context should give us pause and push us towards exploring new solutions to the issues that we face.   We look back in embarrassment at our conservative predecessors who promoted racism and sexism in the belief that they were preserving the best of our nations traditions.  I also don't mean to convey that todays issue are all comparable to the racism that was built into our cultural institutions, but today we consider the equality of the races to be a no-brainer and it certainly wasn't thought to be so at the time.  Equality of any sort was considered to be dangerous in the 19th century and only radicals and socialists proposed those sorts of ideas.  Once again the lessons of history should teach us that just because an idea is radical, new and unorthodox we shouldn't reject it out of hand, because it may be tomorrow's conservatism.  

     A generation from now our hard fought issues that we lived and died over will have acquired a solution and social consensus, quite possibly very different from what we can see from our current vantage point.  If you could take anything from this blog  I hope it would be that as Solomom says there is nothing new under the sun and it's all been done before.  It is part of nature to conserve that which is most familiar to us, but we don't have the luxury of only having our own generation to think about.  Yes that's right, we need to think of the next generation and how they will treat our attempts of conservation.  Believe it or not the future is theirs not ours and we owe it to them to treat the future with care not dogma