Deuteronomy 5:9 (ESV)
9 You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
Deuteronomy 24:16 (ESV) "Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.
Interesting that the verse you cited Deuteronomy 24:16 appears in the same book as a verse parallel to Exodus 20:5 that I cited, that is Deuteronomy 5:9. What does that mean?
Does “visiting iniquity of the fathers on the children” exclude capital punishment? Apparently it is “the Lord your God” who visits iniquity on the children, whereas the Hebrew authorities are commanded not to put them to death.
The letter of the law is on the first rung of Origen’s three-tiered hermeneutic. That level is literal and historical.
I don’t suppose that the literal-historical level is all there is to interpretation. But I don’t ignore it either.
The Judeo-Christian scriptures are polysemic. They have not only one meaning but point in different directions and therefore may mean something that is unconscious or at least not conscious in all its aspects like myths and dreams.
Hermeneutics is an elusive science. The word is derived from Hermes a trickster god and in practice it often reflects his character. He was not only the messenger of Zeus, he was also the patron of liars and thieves.
The duality of natural and supernatural is the result of Enlightenment philosophical reflection on Newtonian physics.
I don’t think humans invented the gods. The gods are psychic realities of the collective unconscious manifest in dreams, and other spontaneous mental images.
Perhaps the scope of your knowledge is greater than mine. I’ve read some hermeneutics, but I can’t say I know “most of” it. Please educate me.
I would submit that dreams are a natural human phenomena. Humans didn’t invent their dreams anymore than they invented their feet. Humans did not invent the archetypes which are imaged in dreams and upon which the mythology of the gods are based. This is the view analytical psychology the theory and the method I am entertaining.
Right. I see the gods as representations of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. So they’re still knocking around although we don’t usually call them gods anymore. We’re more apt to call them hallucinations than visions. Organized religions take these spontaneous imaginal experiences and make them the basis of a formal institution. But even that kind of social behavior is rooted in the instincts enso is not purely an invented contraption. Anyway this theory is opposed to the rationalist theory that people simply invented religion for this or that reason. Rather I see religion as primarily instinct based and rooted in the evolution of the human species.
Regards
DL
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Right. I see the gods as representations of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. So they’re still knocking around although we don’t usually call them gods anymore. We’re more apt to call them hallucinations than visions. Organized religions take these spontaneous imaginal experiences and make them the basis of a formal institution. But even that kind of social behavior is rooted in the instincts enso is not purely an invented contraption. Anyway this theory is opposed to the rationalist serious. People simply invented religion for this or that reason. Rather I see it as instinctual and rooted in the evolution of the human species.
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It is when you consider religions as tribal units.
Yes. It seems that the various religions are tribal in the exoteric aspect. In the esoteric aspect the various religions are more alike, and this may represent a unitary experiential core. That is the thesis of the perennial philosophy AKA perennial wisdom that I am entertaining.