I neglected to talk about how the gods were being symbolically fed, and it was people who were actually eating the meat except for some offal that was burned on the altar. But who actually gets to eat the meat isn't all that germane to the question of what the god is, what sacrifice means.
It's pretty clear that what gods are has evolved over time - lots of formerly carnivorous gods in India have become vegetarian, for instance. And ancestor worship in China consists of putting out tiny symbolic servings of whatever the humans are eating. Monotheism has really dramatically altered the definition of its single God because you can no longer blame bad stuff on those other gods that our god protects us from if we follow the rules and feed it enough.
There's a really fascinating blog "Is that in the bible" that looks at specific stories and shows how they've been concreted from disparate, contradictory versions of the story. A recent entry looked at the Flood, and how the source material had a hostile god and a friendly god, but when that got put in the Torah it turned into a single god that one minute wants to kill everybody and another minute wants to save humanity. That's here: https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2021/04/07/noahs-flood-competing-visions-of-a-mesopotamian-tradition/
"Does god love human beings" is a very vexed question if you insist on revereing the entire corpus of sacred texts, because the answer varied over the centuries during which those texts were being compiled and varied even more if you took into account older sources that the compilers included without thorough editing. If you're willing to say many of the texts reflect a distant era that had a very different understanding of the relationship between gods and humanity, and worship evolves as human culture evolved, etc, etc, it gets a lot easier.
Armstrong is one of those writers where I have just about all of their books. I just wish she would broaden her horizons to include Africa and the Americas before colonialism.
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Date: 2021-07-13 11:33 am (UTC)It's pretty clear that what gods are has evolved over time - lots of formerly carnivorous gods in India have become vegetarian, for instance. And ancestor worship in China consists of putting out tiny symbolic servings of whatever the humans are eating. Monotheism has really dramatically altered the definition of its single God because you can no longer blame bad stuff on those other gods that our god protects us from if we follow the rules and feed it enough.
There's a really fascinating blog "Is that in the bible" that looks at specific stories and shows how they've been concreted from disparate, contradictory versions of the story. A recent entry looked at the Flood, and how the source material had a hostile god and a friendly god, but when that got put in the Torah it turned into a single god that one minute wants to kill everybody and another minute wants to save humanity. That's here: https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2021/04/07/noahs-flood-competing-visions-of-a-mesopotamian-tradition/
"Does god love human beings" is a very vexed question if you insist on revereing the entire corpus of sacred texts, because the answer varied over the centuries during which those texts were being compiled and varied even more if you took into account older sources that the compilers included without thorough editing. If you're willing to say many of the texts reflect a distant era that had a very different understanding of the relationship between gods and humanity, and worship evolves as human culture evolved, etc, etc, it gets a lot easier.
Armstrong is one of those writers where I have just about all of their books. I just wish she would broaden her horizons to include Africa and the Americas before colonialism.