Tips and Troubleshooting

“It has to get worse before it gets better!” is not true. The mistake of believing in the false faith of emotionalism is that God desires of us to be his puppets. Our creature person is territorial with emphasis based in emotional/analysis attachment to past and future (have and have not) while our spirit person is relational with emphasis based in insightful discoveries of trust with feeling/discerning attachment to the now of our creature’s motives. Get the two mixed up either by the creature lording it over the spirit, or approach the moments with an unfocused muddled jumble, and we have a real mess on our hands.

The different religions are attempts to represent human prominence over trust in God, under various guises to keep established this one root-fact of the central universal life: Men and women have at all times throughout history clung to the religious creeds, rituals, and ceremonials as symbolizing in some rude or sophisticated way the redemption and fulfillment of their own most intimate natures - and this whether consciously understanding the interpretations, or whether (as most often) only doing so in an unconscious or quite unknowing way.

The subject of Religious Origins is fascinating. There are a multitude of books written about it, published in ancient and modern times. The great difficulty in dealing with the subject has its own religious considerations that rely in an inherent ungodliness to investigate why religious studies may be useful. Therein lies most of why the very mass of the materials exist - and that not only on the account of the labors involved in sorting quality from what seems to be trash, but because the abundance of suppositions presented as facts opens up temptation to a student in general Science to rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory.

The more facts, statistics, and so forth there are available in any investigation, the easier it is to pick out a considerable number of similarities which will fit a given theory. With other facts being neglected or ignored, the views put forward enjoy for a time a great vogue of satisfaction. Then inevitably, because ungodly considerations are anti-faithful, new or neglected facts alter the outlook and a new perspective is established. Unseen, or consciously ignored entirely, is the ever present Truth of leading of God’s Holy Spirit to guide a seeker toward His purposes. There is also in matters of Science, used as legitimate technique to keep established the idea that investigation brings more information that brings increased understanding, a great deal of fashion to the exercise where personal senses of viability and/or status arise.

Such has been many times scandalously the case in Political Economy, Medicine, Geology, and more yet in such definite studies as Physics and Chemistry. In comparatively recent Psycho/Social sciences, one would naturally expect variations in approach mainly due to organizing methods based on the presumptions current trends of social intent the subject asks to certify. A hundred and fifty years ago, and since the time of Rousseau, the "Noble Savage" was extremely popular; and he lingers still in the story books of our children. Seeking for enlightenment through common educational techniques led to generations of increasingly confused students thinking their ordering of attentions could be mastered through more of the same.

Then the reaction from this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue (largely, it must be said, among "armchair" travelers and explorers) to represent the religious rites and customs of ‘primitive folk’ as a senseless mass of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of decent feeling and intelligence. And that is the key to understanding the perceived differences between ‘then and now’ where there are no differences at all in learning mythology as if it somehow has been regarded as divine rites of observance. Reflection about ways of others as quaintly inferior to ways of an investigator is the same method those others used to stabilize their differences from others in their times and places.

A misunderstanding of the differences of mortal existence as uniquely separate and at the same time integrated with immortal existence is why studies into religious interests of varied peoples finds its pitfalls. Instinctual understanding, the acceptance of personal survival and well being in flesh living, is necessarily focused in and on physical life and death. To stabilize fears of the unknown explanations for those things quite outside knowable reasoning are attributed to religious consideration and therefore fervor to authenticate positions of protection and security. Whereas intuitional understanding, the acceptance of personal survival and well being in spiritual living, is necessarily focused in and on immortal life and death. From the perspective of intuitional understanding (the revealed awareness from the Creator Himself) religious interests of instinctual flesh awareness are, then, understood as compensations for human lack in the face of Supreme Wisdom.

Since directive revelation from Almighty God is personal and rarely collectively social in mass experience those to whom a prophet, priest, or spiritual leader is sent are still steeped in their flesh ordered understandings. So, it is with belief and belief systems that are of peoples who are not within God’s plans of priorities in His choosing who it is that may show His witness of reality. As populations have lived in areas distant from where the Word of Life as revealed by God’s witness through a chosen people began, there arose religious ways that rose from the original Word as revealed by God to ancient ones. This was at a time ages ago when human numbers were few and much less than far between.

As centuries transpired with peoples distant from their homelands to where new lands became home, traditions arose from a falling away from those precepts and postulations from On High. It is why, in addition to human nature and needs being the same, so many religions in separate and seemingly unconnected regions hold to very similar structures of belief. Example: Some say, “The Shadow knows…” to limit ill behavior with trepidation. Not realizing a shadow knows not what to do with what it knows. Religions come like flavours of ice cream in that the purposes are the same but, depending upon an area’s seasonal/vegetational/animal influences, brings focus on the various aspects of natural observance.

When the study of religious origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up - say in the earlier part of last century - there was a fascination in Sungod worship because there was great fad of interest in the cosmos. Every divinity in the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun - unless indeed (if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same. C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The Devil's Pulpit, 1830) were among the first in modern times to put forward this view.

A little later the Phallic explanation of everything came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology, 1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868) popularized this idea in England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again there was a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism - the theory that the gods and goddesses had actually once been men and women, historical characters round whom a halo of romance and remoteness had gathered.

Later still, a school has arisen which thinks little of sungods, and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the processes of Magic by which these (so it was supposed) could be enlisted in man's service if friendly, or exorcised if hostile. Furthermore and more ‘modern’, myths about angels becoming people and people becoming angels pervaded cultural awe and wonder. It is easy to see that there is some truth in all these explanations; but it is a truth of the moments of human observances to the divine orders and not Truth in its actual reasons people exist. True, it is belief in God and His ways people have sought in their attempts to gain a foothold on purposeful activities, and religions have been the substitute for so doing. But, naturally, studies in comparative religions is a religious study itself.

Each school for the time being makes the most of its own contention. Mr. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and Christianity and Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field, relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though he does not altogether deny the others. Dr. Frazer, on the other hand - whose great work, The Golden Bough, is a monumental collection of primitive customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students - is apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable details of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and vegetation.

Furthermore, writers like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft. Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations has kept itself severely apart - as of course representing a unique and divine revelation little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover has worked to persuade the general public of its own Divine uniqueness.

In university courses throughout, (including religious institutions) positional intent of investigation hold religious battles of supremacy over right rites of passage into redemption unto God in Christ; over the argument about whether Paganism sprung from Christianity or Christianity sprung from the same root as Paganism. They both share the most part of their doctrines and rites with the other except Paganism centers in the rights of personal flesh living while Christianity centers in the rights of personal spiritual living. The popular writer C. S. Lewis stated, “The body does not have a soul. The soul has a body.” As Paganism recognizes a soul there is the necessity to also hold God in contempt for causing the human striving conditions of mortality.

The difference noted most assuredly is that where it is believed a body has a soul it gives the ideas within personal instincts of volition to simply ignore the soul’s requirements for recognition. However, when it is accepted that the soul has a body, the intent of the soul is for the Body to behave itself for the higher achieved purposes of soul authority. So there comes in fleshly wisdom, as opposed to Godly wisdom, a type of godless godliness that tries to train the flesh instinctual nature into ways of soulful living in order to be socially acceptable among others who use, unawares or intentionally, worldly observances in religious ways. This is where definitions of ‘soul’ take on an emotional/spiritism that purports to be the same as spiritual (of the order of compassionate respect) faith unto God in His leading the moments in righteousness.

Until quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and while it is true that learned professors might have pointed to a belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it is easy to see that this obviously had nothing to do with Christianity in its call to abstain from argument with God. The Secularists, too, rather spoilt their case by assuming, in their wrath against the Church and its errant religiosity, that all priests since the beginning of the world have been frauds and charlatans - that all the rites of religion were merely a devil's devices invented by them for the purpose of preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant, to their own enrichment. They (the Secularists) overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a thing that no doubt is partially, if not altogether, true.

Studying what people believe will not produce why those people believe what they do unless the beliefs of the investigator doing the study are from the same motives as those being investigated. On the surface that may seem untrue. But application of the results of studies into religious matters necessarily requires a treating of religion as one treats cultural phenomena. While it is true that religious systems are culturally phenomenal there is the unfocused focus on fear compensation in all religions that actually speaks not to the fear of the unknown as instinctual wisdom calls for – the underlying ‘fear’ is separateness from the Truth in Christ unto God.

Behind it all, in all situations and circumstances of awed determination to hold to principles of belief is the yearning of the creature man or woman to make the ‘what’ of living by ‘why’ living captures one or another’s attentions. Basic urges of interest for flesh survival, compensation for the fears of death with regard to appreciations for birth, call to be satisfied such as hunger, temperature comfort, sexual companionship, and a sense of territorial defense for safety and privacy in eliminations. Instinctual flesh-based incentives require the ‘what’ of motives to absorb the ‘why’ of motives in such a way that ‘what’ actually is ‘why’.

Self actualized protections through survival-of-the-fittest determinations lead to dependence upon gods and goddesses; who in their fantasy reflections support and defend the basic animal nature. Thus, the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex to undertake. It yields many aspects of personal faith (a faith in the viability of self) for consideration. Scientific religious seeking, if there can be such a thing, is only by keeping a broad course and admitting contributions to the mortal truth from various sides. If the student believes there is merit in contemplating mythology to find reality he or she will find that the valuable results which can be obtained only serve to reinforce the distances from why awareness exists.

It is absurd to suppose that in this or any other science neat systems can be found which will cover all the facts. The facts themselves are observances of other’s ways of dealing with their own surroundings. Certainly, who each person is in God’s plan of reconciliation to Him, His way, is a quite different creature from those who are seeking to establish who they are through emotionally exercised wonder over the powers of persuasion religious deification of ideals brings. Nature and History do deal in such things to supply individuals and communities for a sop to Man's vanity.

It is clear that there have been three main lines of deviation from Creation’s leading along which human speculation and study have run. One connecting religious rites and observations with the movements of the Sun and the planets in the sky, and leading to the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance; the second connecting religion with the changes of the season, on the Earth and with such practical things as the growth of vegetation and food, and leading to or mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting religion with man's own body and the tremendous force of sex residing in it - emblems of undying life and all fertility and power.

It is clear also - and all investigation confirms it - that the second-mentioned phase of religion arose on the whole before the first-mentioned - that is, that men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food and vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the same, before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and the laws of their movements; or about the sinister or favorable influences the stars might exert. And again it is not extremely probable but naturally evident that the third-mentioned aspect - that which connected religion with the procreative desires and phenomena of human physiology - really came first. Human intent of discovery and victory over death’s mastery requires the third to be first.

In the errant philosophical belief that lesser ancient man has evolved into a greater modern counterpart there are postulations that desires and physiological phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive mind long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky had been at all definitely observed or considered. We find it considered probable that, in order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given in which they have been studied, and conclude that in general the Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing in heaven.

This presupposes that God Himself is a conceptual undertaking Who arose from the processes of cultural development. But, as physical flesh nature is up-side-down and backward from reality in God’s created avenues of approach to His grace and mercy of viability in Him, it can be readily understood that the order of human development of religions is not merely opposite from His order but has been manifested in all three considerations, space, environment, and self expression in untold manifold ways at the same times, at all times, throughout history. Thus, using locations and timelines to gain a foothold in understanding religious development in the past gives a thorough view of people’s apostasy against the all-caring God above.

Each person has always had in their God blessed gift of will determination to meet the moments of a day in choosing how to respond to internal and external events. Until one, and another, combined in understanding with the first to apply their trust in faithing the directives of authority in His Divine right of glory, ‘get the picture’ of why the delights of living in the flesh are created, the presumption automatically defaults to the will of self-ish pride. Selfish pride over the reasons one has to do what one does is why the ‘why’ of God’s design is lost to the moments of realized ‘what’ is done. Also lost are the reasonable senses of decency to respect the light of awareness of life in others shared in such ways that reality becomes religious control.

At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons are thought to be created by tradition and desire, rites for propitiation and placation are established by Fear - fear stimulating the imaginations to fantastic activity. Primus in orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, because of trusting in instinctual preponderance instead of God’s benevolence, only becomes a mental/emotional stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness of the individual and increases unabated after that. It is widely thought that the development of personal self-consciousness follows the patterns of mankind as a whole throughout history… as a developing organism of the cosmos but no real evidence presents itself to establish a fact of the matter.

By categorizing ancient peoples before more recent times, in what is assumed was the period of simple consciousness (caveman), modern conveniences have given people to suppose that when the human mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. As mechanically protective appliances have ruled the hearts and motives of humankind there has arisen a being-ness where no figure or image of self is considered as in the animal mind. Therefore there are fewer corresponding natural figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that of the self in protection against the elements.

So it is that the imaginative power of fear is thought to have begun with Self-consciousness, and from that imaginative power was unrolled to express the whole panorama of the gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the centuries. Technology, being the panacea of mortality, presents a very real distance for the levels of conscious consideration involved in the steps and stages of individual and community acceptance of God’s leading in transformation from instinctual self-focused determinations into intuitional God appreciative tending to the needs of what needs to be accomplished for His sake in marriages, families, and wider social significance.

Fear presents itself in the weighing of personal intentions with expectations. When the flesh rules the heart motives of protective self-assuredness are kept in secretive/revealed balanced unbalance with communal imperatives. This causes acceptance of social norms as normal and personal expressions that deviate from the patterns of group compatibility to be measured abnormal. Religious observance serves to vent the hidden desires of instinctual yearning in such ways that social acceptance turns it’s demanding rights of determination over inhabitants into controls the group can be relaxed within their appeased senses of community safety.

The immense forces and domination of Fear in the self-consciousness of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated, and which is even difficult for some of ‘us moderns’ to realize. But naturally as soon as Man begins to think about himself - a frail phantom and waif in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode of operation he is entirely ignorant - he is beset with terrors; dangers loom upon him on all sides. It is noticed by doctors dealing with people in areas where technological advances are at a minimum that one of the chief obstacles to their helping to cure illness among indigenous or native races is sheer superstitious terror.

Thanatomania is the recognized word for a state of mind ("obsession of death") which will often cause a savage to perish from a mere scratch hardly to be called a wound. The natural defense against this state of mind is the creation of an enormous number of taboos - such as we find among all races and on every conceivable subject - and these taboos constitute practically a great body of warnings which regulated the lives and thoughts of the community, and ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent Customs and Laws.

In advanced populations, those living under a mostly secularized rule-of-law mentality, such taboos are augmented by intellectual order where primitive (close to the earth) peoples are thought to be naïve at best and ignorant at the worst. Necessarily, though the outward differences tell of native simplicity and impaired development, the human course of advancement in enlightened societies is not advanced at all because there is a trade-off of recognition concerning the pitfalls and successes in anybody’s daily living. Avoidance of what is ‘wrong’ and acceptance of what is ‘right’ without the foundation of why right and wrong are either is the equalizing tell-all for determining the intentions of attentions one, another, or a group has in their approach to fantasy or reality awareness.

Fear is revved up and tended to not only of acts which might reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful in their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree; wondering how the bills are going to be paid… and so on. Included for both native and advanced populations, in definitely different ways are taboos against acts which offer individually obscure extraordinary or attraction to personal pleasures – in native lands these may be noted as sex or marriage or the enjoyment of a meal; in advanced lands these may be noted as, again, sex or marriage or the enjoyment of a meal depending on who means what to whom in whatever arena of influence may be present.

Taboos surrounded these things too, and the psychological connection is easy to divine. There, again, we have a non-religious religious assumption that psychological connections are somehow a foundational baseline of reality that anyone may hold to as solid directive explanation. “Label it and we have found the reason behind the problem,” habits of self-validation in the face of cultural cohesion are the same as a man in the forest cutting his arms in a health dance to ward off the tree demon of death. So complex a system of regulations made life anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of compelling the growth of self-control.

Fear does not seem a very worthy motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal passions, and introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously it became itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and observation, transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder and awe and (when the false gods rose above the horizon) into reverence. We can see that mankind is still the same as from the early beginnings (in the Stone Age) of self-consciousness where in Man since there has not been a gradual development - from crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to rudimentary observation, and so to belief in Magic.

Magic has its combined willful realization from applied faith inverted to selfish results by attempting to acquire messages from nature created by God, whereas properly applied faith looks to God as the generator of any noticed appreciations earthly wisdom may bring from nature. Thence to Animism and personification of nature-powers in more or less human form, as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of the tribe; and to placation of these powers by rites like Sacrifice and the Eucharist, which in their turn became the foundation of community Morality as opposed to trust in the Father above Who always has been Who He says He is.

All religious observance, as opposed to trust through faith in Christ for Who He is in the moments of living out a day, are direct attempts to make the Creator into a servant to the Created. This is hidden in many religions behind the façade of self-abasement, violence against other religious groups, or sheer casting aside of anything and anybody who has any faith-based sensibilities, no matter how accurately aligned with God’s will of wishes that none should everlastingly perish.