Posted by ant on August 06, 19102 at 03:09:59:
In Reply to: Mother, Father, or both? posted by Chris Geiger on August 06, 19102 at 00:45:40:
It isn't so much that that the Church was "set up" in any particular way, and it isn't that Christians were assimilating pagan practices necessarily. All it means is that all the motifs of religion have been the same since time out of mind. They are products of the human psyche, things that people have always needed to work out in some way.
Nothing about Christianity is entirely new. The Garden, the god torn asunder, death and rebirth, all these things have existed in some form in every mythology and religion in history. They are universal themes that the human race has stored in their collective consciousness. They appear amazingly similarly and with regularity in regions seperated by geography and time.
It isn't that paganism was hiding within Christianity. It's just that these ideas are part and parcel of human culture and expression, only it changes from time to time. It's as if the same play is being presented everywhere, with the details and sets changed to reflect the local culture.
The mother figure was subliminated in biblical times in favor of a patriarchy. But even before, the supreme creator was seen as the primal androgyne; it felt lonely and split into two, the male and female. There are traces of this in the Bible, but they are greatly reduced.
It's not that the mother goddess was an *ideal*, she simply was. It fulfills a need in our minds for such a connection to the world. All these images do, but people take them so literally as to obscure their meaning.
The Fall in the Garden, for instance, is not referring to an actual historical event, popular as this motif is. The Garden story is a metaphor of our birth, which we all subconsciously remember. In the womb, we are in a state of unchanging bliss where there is no awareness of any cause and effect, or of time, pairs of opposites. We don't even have a concept of night or day, there's just this constant state of becoming. This is where our memories of a perfect place before Time comes from.
Suddenly, the contractions start, and we are being squeezed through an opening, we must suddenly learn to breathe with our lungs, and suddenly, light! It's an incredible trauma that we all go through, never to return to that blissful womb. We are thrust out into a world of opposites and anxiety. In the same way, Adam and Eve, having eaten the fruit of knowledge, are suddenly aware of duality. They suddenly realize that they are different sexes, and they are afraid of god, though prior to this, there was hardly any kind of distinction between them.
So they are thrown out in a similarly traumatic way, never able to return to the blissful Garden, with two cherubim guarding the entrance with a flaming sword. The sword is what divides temporality and eternity, and the two angels are fear and desire, the primal pair of opposites that you find in so many shrines the world over.
There is more to the story, but what's important to realize is that these stories are telling us less about the actual world than about own needs and fears. The stories are a manifestation of our shared experiences trying to find a context. The story of Jesus' life is filled with many other wonderful images.
But, as I have pointed out, it's when people take these symbols literally that there is strife, war, and genocide. This is why the monks are more spiritually in tune than the priests in any culture. Priests are pedagogical, monks are spiritual.
Basically, you can compare religion and spirituality with money and wealth. Money, like the religious images, is the symbol. It stands for something, but is not in itself not that thing it's referring to. It's a piece of paper covered with ink, you shouldn't think that you can eat it or expect to protect you from the elements. It's what you do with that money that is the worth of it. A million dollars is worth nothing if you don't know how to use it correctly or wisely. You can have all the money in the world and not feel wealthy in any practical or spiritual sense.
Such is the difference between the word "god" (and our ideas about it) and the ultimate transcendent experience, which is beyond anything like the word god.