A tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan for directing us to this lovely passage from
a recent essay by Tony Woodlief at Image Journal:
We are god-obsessed because we have lost God or we are
running from God or we are hopelessly seeking Him, and maybe all of
these at once.
We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will
always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her
face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men
fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting
myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell
in the trees.
And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist
and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof
that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself
proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof
that the brain just evolved to work that way.
2 comments:
Interesting observation. I'm no academic by any stretch of the imagination but I suspect that fear of mortality created gods. Humans are the only animals that are conscious of mortality. It doesn't bother other living things. Ignorance is bliss. And animals don't have gods.
My dogs have a god. Me. :)
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