In God We Trust Guns Are Just Backup Shirt

Yet there’s a big difference between sensing God in nature, as Thales and his successors did, and positing a God who stands above nature, as the God of faith does. To reconstruct the journey from one to the other, we need to push our imaginations into a place that’s profoundly unfamiliar. It’s nearly impossible for us to perceive the novelty of Thales’ achievement, so deeply has it colored us all, however devoutly some of us may struggle to bleach it out. It sounds so normal to us (and if you’re reading this, you’re one of us): Thales and his successors recognized that there’s a physical world out there, that it’s governed by orderly operations of its own, and that we don’t need gods or spirits in order to explain how those operations work.This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. They’re the ones not included in us. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them. We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July 2009, when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god.

In God We Trust Guns Are Just Backup Shirt

The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world. These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. When Odysseus incurs the enmity of Poseidon, the sea god rouses himself in a terrible storm and wrecks Odysseus’ ship. Odysseus spies land, but Poseidon’s waves cast him violently up against the sharp rocks before hurling him back out to sea. With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land. Exhausted, at last he comes to “the mouth of a sweet-running river” that offers shelter from the rocks and wind. Odysseus prays directly to the river: “Hear me, Lord, whoever you are,” he addresses the river, asking it—or rather asking him—to grant Odysseus sanctuary from Poseidon, the sea. And the river “stayed his current, stopped the waves breaking, and made all quiet in front of him.”Like the Olympians, the little river is amoral and not much interested in the human world, but it is susceptible to a properly formulated plea for sanctuary (Greek custom held that sanctuary had to be granted to a self-declared suppliant). More to the point, it’s a god all on its own, a free agent, obeying its own will and desire. River and deity are one and the same