The Natural History of Religion - David Hume

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Have any of you had the opportunity/interest to read through Hume's work? I'm currently reading the first essay and I suspect many of you, assuming you haven't read it already, would find it to be very interesting.

I remember a few years back someone recommended it to me. If I didn't finish it I read at least got to the part about flux and reflux between polytheism and monotheism and found it interesting that he saw this as an area where the pendulum had a way of swinging back and forth from era to era based on different causes.

Being that it's been a while since I've read this I don't know if this point will conflate or agree with the whole logic he was mapping but; I tend to think it's very difficult, intuitively speaking, for a person to be a true polytheist. I say that because we tend to think as a race in terms of hierarchy, and in hierarchical structures we work our way upward until we get to the pinnacle of what that 'thing' could be. Like with human beings, you could come up with at least a constellation of traits wherein would lie the ideal alpha male and alpha female (I say constellation because humanity is so complex that one person or another accurately describing the capstone male and female of our race would be nigh impossible) and you can think of this in the Platonic sense as well; Lon Milo Duquette loves to use the example of a chair in various plains of conception - the idea of 'rest' at the top, the basic data template of what a chair could be the next thing down, then all the various possible chairs that could be considered chairs whether canonical or non-canonical, and then ultimately every chair in physical existence at the bottom. Similarly we see galaxies in clusters, stars rotating around galaxies, planets rotating around stars, moons around planets, and quite often the small being subsets of the large. To really think of the universe as wholly autonomous deities without a shared egregore between them of greater strength than all of them that they're ultimately subservient to - such a suggestion seems to disagree with the fundamental stacking of nature as we see it and imply an expectation that the basic fundamentals of physics could just catch an attitude and cleave apart at any moment.

^ I agree - I am not religious nor superstitious, but I do believe in an interconnectedness of sorts; If not in shared fate, perhaps in shared experience.

Technically we do have a shared fate too - heat death of the universe.

True - which makes the concept of a designer either highly unlikely or highly immoral.

We are all connected in that for sure as we all have a shared success rate in our genetic lines which are thousands of years old.

Do you know what the odds are. Wow.

The point I wanted to make is that we all have what Freud and Yung call a Father Complex and that was also recognized by the ancients and what they sought as their God.

God, to the sages was almost always referred to as Father and not God because God to then actually meant a person of power, as indicated by the emperors who declared themselves Gods and their sons, sons of God.

It is the religions that screwed up by calling the Father God.

Note how Jesus mostly calls God Father.

Regards
DL

Have a look at:


An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

It is one of the best books on epistemology ever written in English. Hume is probably one of the most influential philosophers who write in English. In effect, Hume demolished metaphysics. His demolition of the concept of necessary causal connection motivated Immanuel Kant to write "A Critique of Pure Reason".

Here is a nifty quote from Hume:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

I am a fan of David Hume