Xenophanes' Protest Against Anthropomorphic Religion

Do we have any fans of Xenophanes on this board?

Check out the video, and I’m hoping that we can start up a discussion.

Basically, he criticized the Greek myths of the time.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwUZQ6DAd8k[/youtube]

From within your logic, you crash immediately into the Platonic, especially early Stoa schools as recorded in Arius Didymus “Stoic Ethics”, that the universe is created by the deposition of matter (well,not matter, but I’m not explaining the Timeaus on this forum, too many non reading schitzos who will get confused on that tangent, but matter is good rnoughbof a word here) relativistic one area to another, and settlements, such as city-states to one another, and within cities, people… and what determined the rise and fall of the quality of matter was the vices and virtues of a people, which could be engendered or decay over time.

Mere anthropomorphic characteristics of divinity isn’t inherently wrong, a president is far more than the man, he is a full administration, but we identify him with a man, actually less so, with the distinguishing characteristics of a man. The Greeks used to mock their highest leaders in their comedy, calling them onion headed in one setting, yet near God like in the next, and yet in a completely different set he was merely a administrator, and in another a shopper in the streets, exposed to mundane experiences.

Our ability to sense and comprehend does determine our ability to diagnose and engadge with the world, but not how the world responds. We may mock as fallacy that Gods would be shaped like men, but this recognition doesn’t disprove it by any means, that gods can be shaped like humans.

We may very well be in a star trek universe, where the humanoid firm, while not ensuring consciousness, is a seemingly necessary precurser to it for the vast majority of species, and that while it isn’t always certain Humanoid= Intelligent, that one can almost always expect the two to be present together. If man is the most intelligent, by “virtues” of hands and “bipedalism”, then we certainly can’t rule out the possibility that Gods likewise are bipedal or use hands, or furthermore, that they would craft a environmental apex species along the lines of themselves, just not as rarified. This seems perfectly reasonable, we after all do this as android builders and computer programmers, the android fits the basic idea of the body, while computers match the logic produces by the mind for human needs.

Essentially, we would be part of a larger ecology.

This is one of the pitfalls of logical fallacies. You can assert that Gods do not look like men by showing that the thought follows a supersillious form of thinking, full of common sense contradictions, and yet another mode of mind in conjunction makes it sensible and compatible with sound reasoning. You can’t just prove why statements may be wrong, but also consider circumstance in how it can be true. You’ll find the expanse under which the ancient world reacted to this was far larger than the rejection of the old testament or the triumph in the new testiment over it, that the world approached it from a wide range of angles, some very much still in play in the modern philosophy if the world today. Axioms can be riducled, but they made sense circumstantially, and those circumstances are always reasonable. The drive for scientific unity through skepticism and methodology will find axioms, stripped from their circumstances, constantly rise up and fall, in successive eras, that a age most certain will rip old ideas up as worthless, while later eras revisit them, realizing they were indeed compatible with a more modern thought and are mist compatible with the best of reasoning, they just were misunderstood in the successive eras between. Axioms and fallacies are always of the mind, but never the sum of our functions, given limited consciousness. We aren’t all we can be in any given moment, thinking every thought. Blind spots emerge. The early stoics could explain this by the geography of vices and virtues, of specialization and understanding.