China Cat Sunflower
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Hi Juan,
I hope this isn't an unwanted interruption of this fine conversation betwixt you and Tao, but I want to ask something related to your excellent OP.
I read where you were discussing ancient people in the context of a continuity of human effort from earliest times through the present toward understanding what we might call the divine. It occurs to me that what the ancients were doing was essentially applied science. They were surely interested in the mysterious source of life. They wanted to know how and why things lived and died. Why animals possessed abilities they envied. Where the ancestors were. What caused natural processes and events. At some point we're talking about primitive animism and ancestor veneration as an adjunct to high science. Along comes cosmology and astrology, writing, the arts, polytheism, monotheism, imperial monotheism...vvvt, out to us.
Since our current high science and art traces back directly to the expressions of earliest man and his attempt to understand and record what he was learning, it's interesting to consider the question of what a pristine animism would look like. I mean, animism completely shorn of fluff and floof.
Chris
I hope this isn't an unwanted interruption of this fine conversation betwixt you and Tao, but I want to ask something related to your excellent OP.
What truth? G-d? That to me seems the only definitive objective truth we have limited access to.
I read where you were discussing ancient people in the context of a continuity of human effort from earliest times through the present toward understanding what we might call the divine. It occurs to me that what the ancients were doing was essentially applied science. They were surely interested in the mysterious source of life. They wanted to know how and why things lived and died. Why animals possessed abilities they envied. Where the ancestors were. What caused natural processes and events. At some point we're talking about primitive animism and ancestor veneration as an adjunct to high science. Along comes cosmology and astrology, writing, the arts, polytheism, monotheism, imperial monotheism...vvvt, out to us.
Since our current high science and art traces back directly to the expressions of earliest man and his attempt to understand and record what he was learning, it's interesting to consider the question of what a pristine animism would look like. I mean, animism completely shorn of fluff and floof.
Chris