I don't dismiss them as myths I dismiss them as being real gods.
They were never intended to be taken as "real gods". They were intended to be taken as representations of a divine reality.
I wish you wouldn't presume to know what I know about ancient myths and what energy I put in, even if you do know all there is to know about all ancient myths because of your tireless efforts. :AMR:
I also wish you wouldn't presume to know which humans I may or may not regard as mentally deficient.
Don't be so sensitive. All I know of you or anyone else, here, are the words I read in your posts. The only assumptions I make are relative to what I've read. I can't respond to you, personally, and I'm not responding to you, personally. I'm just responding to what I read in your posts.
I think the problem is PX that you are being rather unnecessarily generalising, opinionated and judgemental here, perhaps in lieu of having a rational response to my question? Perhaps you should just concede my point instead of bluster and presumptions?
What point is that? I not only concede that mythical representations of God are not likely to be accurate representations of God, I share your understanding and include even my own conceptions of God. And the fact that some people don't understand this is not your's or my problem. It's theirs. But I don't see how this has anything to do with the near universal experiential phenomena of "God". And certainly it doesn't rationally invalidate it, as most atheists usually proclaim.
I have already explained that it must surely be a reasonable possibility at least that all of humanity has simply evolved similar innate mental traits and that one of them might include a sense of the divine, whether or not an actual divinity exists or not. Can you not concede that much at least?
Sure!
If it were a real divine entity that were being sensed then the fact that each culture has developed its own version of belief does not imo suggest a common divine source to me anyway.
Actually, I think it suggests exactly that. We humans seem to universally experience this 'divinity' as a being of some sort. Self-projection probably accounts for some of that, but we're not talking some, we're talking all: and every time. In every culture. From the dawn of human experience. There's always a 'being' or 'beings'. That's a similarity that's a little hard to get around!
I also did not suggest that anyone was fooling themselves, I merely suggested that humans generally may have evolved an innate tendency for religious/godly belief. If anyone is being fooled then it is Darwinian evolution that is doing it.
Being atheist by definition presumes that theists are just 'fooling themselves'. Because I never heard any atheists ever say that they think they must be unable to perceive of God due to
their own inadequacies or deficiencies. Do you know of any?
Then I have decided that what is apparently reality is in fact real, even if the reality is that I am actually a brain in a vat being presented with an illusion.
So have we all, even though all our 'realities' differ from one another. Some, substantially.
If millions of humans were all reporting the same or vaguely similar godly entity then that would indeed be salutary imo, but the opposite seems to be the case, which accounts for all the plethora of gods believed in down the ages.
Actually, it seems to me that all those gods are strikingly similar to each other. Especially in how they seem to look and act like us. But again, I suspect self-projection accounts for much of that.
But it's not just that, it's also that these gods almost universally seem to be presumed responsible for the creation of everything, and often the maintenance of it. And that they interact with us for some special purpose of their own. Also, that they can be appealed to successfully, on occasion.
Like I said, the similarities are far more striking than the differences. And the fact that you deny this, or can't recognize it, I think should tell you something about the blinding bias of your own position.
No, and thankfully these days we have many more ways and scope to examine reality. Else I may well have thought that thunder was my version of a god moving the furniture around, particularly if my local religious know-it-all told me that is what it was. Otherwise I may simply have accepted not knowing instead making up stuff.
But you
haven't accepted not knowing. And you
have just "made stuff up": otherwise you would be simply an agnostic.
I think you have simply misinterpreted what I said PX, since I have constantly advocated curiosity in anything that is actually testable.
Again, I think if you would read these statements more carefully, you would see how absurd they are.
Wasting time navel gazing on the unknowable is what I think you are advocating.
The unknown and unknowable are as real as real can be. And are crucial to figuring out what we can and do know. Science without philosophy is just a pistol in the hands of a monkey.
