Gods
have matured with us. They began as personifications of whatever was
awesome and dreadful, outwardly experienced seas and storms, inwardly
experienced lust and greed. Such gods could demand human sacrifice and
were later regarded as demons. The most powerful Roman god (see image)
broke all the moral laws.
Antithetically, morality without awe is secularist. Rudolf Otto
argued that "holy" synthesizes "awesome" and "righteous" and that this
synthesis defines the Biblical deity. Such an idea of God develops in
the Bible. These categories remain meaningful even when we have ceased
to personify them. CS Lewis rightly argued that fear of a ghost differs
qualitatively from fear of a man-eating tiger and that both differ from
the dread that we would feel if we believed that we were uncomfortably
close to a "great spirit." To combine this dread with moral obligation
is to complete Otto's synthesis.
However, I think that:
awe is part of our response to impersonal nature;
morality
results from the natural selection of intelligent social animals - we
help others either because they bear the same genes or because they
might help us in return and this motivation is experienced as moral
obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds
like when expressed in biological terms.
These
reflections on the development of religion and humanity were prompted by
reading Poul Anderson's account of Hanno bearing gifts to Melqart. See here.
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