Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Is God Primitive?

Whenever most people think of God, they usually think of him in context of the Bible. What is the state of things in the Bible? Well, for the most part, it seems like everyone is living in a primitive society. No cars. No airplanes. No electricity. Everyone is living off of the land. They all have cattle. Leprosy is a thing. Sand. There was a lot of sand. Sand everywhere.

The point is that most of the bible is incredibly primitive by dint of being set in a primitive time, and it is the basis of today's Christianity. Not to mention that most every time I hear people quote God or the Bible they obsessively add old English "thy's" and "thou's" to their language, even if they aren't directly quoting anything. It's gotten so bad that it's become a part of Christian culture.

There's some weird psychology that goes along with this that has even affected me. Because the religion seems primitive, it sometimes makes God feel primitive as well. But how can this be? Realistically, how could God be primitive? Yes, He's much older than dirt. He's one of the few people who can actually say that and mean it. But I don't understand how God can be primitive and remain that way throughout all of history. I don't buy it.

One problem with the idea of a primitive God is that we would be expected to be primitive as well in service to Him. Once more, how can this be? What sort of God would not want us to progress? I don't understand the whole mentality of this. Sometimes I look at people like the Amish, and I just cannot understand why they would put themselves through that sort of torture. How is remaining primitive a benefit to anyone?

I think perhaps the Amish believe that modern innovations lead to corruption. There is a modicum of truth to what they are saying, but the innovations themselves are not the source of evil. It is the humans utilizing it. In that light, the human race has always had evil no matter what tech level has been in place. This leads me to believe that the whole concept of a tech level to evil ratio to be a moot point. People and the individuals among them are either good or evil, period.

Another thing that seems apparent to me is that the resources to create such things as computer, cars, and airplanes were always available on this planet. They were here in staggering abundance. They had to be or else we would have never gotten to the point at which we finally arrived. If God intended us to remain primitive, He certainly planned everything with a ridiculous amount of redundant material. This of course leads me to assume that, even in primitive days, God was a modern thinker.

I am also reminded of that very interesting command "Be fruitful and multiply." "Fruitful" would be the operable word in this case. The word essentially means to be productive. Now, the primitive view of this word just means to keep harvesting more and more crops, but a more modern take would be to keep innovating. In and of itself, there is no evil in innovation. We can make lives easier on everyone through innovation. Evil people can still ruin it. An axe is just as good at chopping wood as it is in murdering someone.

But in summary, I should say that I think God is and has always been modern, perhaps far more than even we can understand in this day and age--ahead of our time, if you will. He must be. And to equalize Christianity with the primitive times in which the Bible was written does it an extreme disservice. He is not the God of the primitive; He is simply God. All that exists happened because he could imagine it. He is beyond all the things we use to hold ourselves back: culture, laws, language, accents, and levels of technology. None of these things could not even have happened if He did not exist first. Again, He is not the God of the primitive; He is only God. And we exist because of him. Please consider it.

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6 comments:

  1. To assume that God is primitive is to assume God is stupid and we are smart. Our little trinkets are somehow beyond his imagination. Hah! Not only did he craft the reality we use, our technology is ENTIRELY within the machine that is our reality. Our things cannot work lest his things make them work! That's where miracles prove our technology is not so advanced after all.

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    1. God doesn't have to keep up with the times; we have to keep up with Him.

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  2. Indeed, we are derivative of God not the other way around, we will always be primitive in comparison to God. He is beyond anything we can do or imagine. I'm reminded of the game "El Shaddai", in that the technology of Heaven is far beyond us.

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    1. That was such an interesting and eye-opening game, even if it was fiction!

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  3. The primitive mindset leads to stagnation. He wants us to use what we have been given. We have the tools we need to make things better.

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    1. You must use your talents in life. That has always been a given.

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