Does everyone really believe in the same god?
Does everyone really believe in the same god?
if so, does the idea belond to something more ancient than the hebrews themselves?
You hear this being said all the time, but i think most people have different ideas to one another. many people actually think god is a man and a creator, others think god is some undefinable entity more in line with more ancient concepts of original spirit.
In many translations of ancient texts the term 'god' is used where they did not perhaps even have the idea - at least not in monotheistic terms. so what god did the ancient greeks believe in where the term is used?
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The advocates of a pluralist theology of religions, of course, are well aware that the idea of Ultimate Reality as ineffable mystery is not new. In fact, they point to its ubiquity and antiquity as evidence of its deep roots in human experience and as grounds for its acceptance today. But here I think we come to a key question: the nameless, ineffable God has deep roots in human experience. But what experience is this? Or to put it another way, in whose behalf does the nameless, ineffable God reign? In fairness, we must say that the human spirit has been drawn to speak this way of God for many reasons, including awe and humility before the mystery of life. And yet we may at least ask whether the cult of the ineffable God owes at least some of its appeal to its political utility, especially for empires, which by their nature seek to unite many peoples, cultures, and religions under a single earthly authority. In the famous words of Edward Gibbon, in the age of the Caesars all modes of worship were "considered by the people equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrates equally useful."
We have already seen that ancient Egypt knew of the cult of the ineffable God. Yet it was Alexander the Great who, by conquering the whole eastern Mediterranean in a few short years, created the social and political conditions in which the cult of the nameless, ineffable God attained prominence in the Western world. According to the New Testament scholar James Dunn, the theology that underlay the policy of Alexander the Great and his Greek and Latin successors regarded the different religions as in the end only manifestations of the same deities.6 This theology allowed the victors to incorporate defeated nations by absorbing the local religions into the larger syncretistic whole of the empire. So, for example, the Greek God Zeus and Roman God Jupiter were regarded as one and the same; at Bath in England, we find a statue to Minerva-Sulis, Minerva being the Roman goddess, and Sulis the local equivalent. In the great hymns to the Egyptian goddess Isis, she was addressed as "Thou of countless names," because she was identified with so many different religions.
Gradually, among the learned, the religious attitude took hold that the different religions were in fact only manifestations of the one deity, or, in the words of a treatise falsely attributed to Aristotle, "God being one yet has many names."7 This view, philosophically buttressed by the successive waves of platonic revival that emphasized, in addition to God's unity, his utter transcendence and ineffability, became in fact the reigning civic religion of the ancient imperial world
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Originally Posted by Ummon
