_dNCs4RSABg.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Now I'm going to read you some things from Friedman who wrote the disappearance of God.

Speaker 1:          00:06          He was trying to look at the underlying structure of the stories. Now, Friedman noted that the books in the Old Testament were written by a lot of different people at very different times and then they were sequenced by other people for reasons that we don't exactly understand, but there's still an underlying narrative. There's multiple underlying narrative unity's despite the fact of that rather arbitrary sequencing, and that's a strange thing. You know, I guess you could say if you had a collection of ancient books and you were trying to put them together, you try to put them together in some way that made sense. Right, and it wouldn't make sense unless you stumbled across some kind of underlying narrative that allowed you to order them, and so it's not entirely surprising that that they're ordered in a manner that's comprehensible. But Friedman's comments on the underlying narrative structure, part of it was, well, we'll go through this. The books of the Old Testament were composed by a great many authors according to both traditional religious views and modern critical scholarship, the phenomenon of the diminishing apparent presence of God across so many stories through so many books by so many authors spread over so many centuries is consistent enough to be striking, impressive and ultimately mysterious,

Speaker 1:          01:24          but the hiding of the divine phase is only half the story. There's another development also extending across the course of the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible, which we must see before we can appreciate the full force of this phenomena and before we can pose the solution to the mystery of this, of how this happened. Gradually from genesis to Ezra and see that there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life on earth. The story begins in genesis with God in complete control of the creation, but by the end, humans have arrived at a stage at which in all apparent ways, they have responsibility for the fate of the world. The first two human beings, Adam and eve, take little responsibility themselves. They do not design or build anything when they're embarrassed over their nudity. They do not make clothes. They cover themselves with leaves. It's God who makes their first clothing for them.

Speaker 1:          02:16          No. I'm by no means a fully developed personality. No, it is not an every man either. Broadly speaking, he reflects a step beyond Adam and eve and human character and responsibility. Abraham, beyond that counts of divine commands that Abraham does carry out. The narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative. He divides land with his nephew lot. He battles kings. He takes concubines. He argued with his wife Sarah. On two occasions, he tells kings that Sarah, his sister, out of fear, that they will kill him to get his wife, and he arranges his son's marriage. In the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness, there are, in the case of Abraham, the stories of man's life, the Abraham section that's developed the personality and of a man of man to a new degree in biblical narrative, while picturing in him a new degree of responsibility. It is not just that Abraham has kindler kinder, gentler, more intrepid, more ethical, or a better debater than his ancestor noah. Rather both the Noah and Abraham stories or pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the day before the story is over. Humans will become a great deal, stronger and bolder than Abraham.

Speaker 1:          03:33          I don't know what that means, you know? See, it isn't. It is certainly the case that the individual exists in the modern world, the differentiated self aware, self conscious individual, and it's certainly the case that that wasn't the case at some point in the past and so it's the case that there's been a development, I don't know if you could call it a progression, but a development of the autonomous individual over some span of historical time. Now we don't know how long that's been, but my suspicions are, it hasn't been that long. I mean,

Speaker 1:          04:11          I read once about a Neolithic ceremony that involve the particular placement of a bear skull in a cave, and then I read that and they had found these placements in caves that were at least 25,000 years old and then I read that they found caves in Japan among the Ainu who were the indigenous inhabitants of Japanese territory and rather archaic people who had the same ceremony with the bear and that put the skull in the same orientation and place in caves and that that tradition remained unbroken for about 25,000 years. And you think, well, is it possible for an oral or ritual tradition to remain on broken for spans of tens of thousands of years? And the answer to that is not only is it possible, it's actually the norm because like

Speaker 1:          05:00          one chimpanzee is like the next chimpanzee, right? In the progression, in the biological progression. If you took a chimpanzee troop now and you went back 25,000 years and you looked at a chimpanzee troop, it'd be the same thing. There's no historical progression. That's how you can tell the chimps really don't have culture because if they could even create one, 1000th of a percent of culture, transmissible culture progeneration, it wouldn't take more than about a million years before they'd have a whole civilization and they don't. They're the same as they were and so the continuity, the stability and unchanging nature of his species, essentially speaking is the rule that the variant is us. It's like what the hell happened after the last ice age? Fifteen thousand years ago, we went from tribal uniform stable to whatever the hell we are now. It's this transition from

Speaker 1:          05:56          generic too. It's something like that and I can't help but think that that's reflected in this text and it has something to do with this transition of consciousness from, from what? From possession by the generic divine to dominance by this specific individual. It's something like that. Is that a neurological transformation? Is that what this is a record of been? We don't know. One of the things you said about God because human relationship with God as an object of belief is very complex. He in his technical writing, he always talks about the image of God. He never talks about God. He talks about the image of God. He said that the image of God dwells within us, not the same thing as God dwelling within. Right? Because we could mean all of these capacities that we have for transcendent consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution that could have no reflection. They can have no relationship whatsoever to an actual transcendent reality. There's no way of telling the transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience, but that doesn't mean that it has in reality outside of this objective, even if it's even if it exists as it clearly does, but

Speaker 1:          07:18          Friedman suggests that what's happening in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive force and that the old testament documents that implicitly, unconsciously as a consequence of descriptive fantasy and that that's what's going on in the book and that so the Cosmos is under the control of generic daddy to begin with. Something like that. And then that controls shifts to localized, identifiable increasingly personal and detailed individuals. And you see that in Noah and then you see the neighborhood and then you see it in Moses, and then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual. And that's what these stories, they're there, they're there, they're like prototypes there. There are attempts to to to bring about the proper motive being right and so Abraham is a is a manifestation of that because he enters into a covenant with God. He's selected by God or interesting to a partnership with God. It's not exactly obvious. God provides him with forward motion and intuition and leads them towards a successful mode of being. And it's complex, successful motive being. Because Abraham is a very complex life. There's plenty of ups and downs, right? It's, it's not unbroken

Speaker 1:          08:43          security of being towards the divine hand. Abraham lies and cheats and deceives and does all sorts of things that that a real person would do. And and Moses for example, killed. And so these people that the biblical people are very genuine individuals, but they're given with all their faults, right, with all their sins, with all their deceit, they're still put forth as potential modes of proper models of potential proper being in the world. And the entire Corpus of the Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variance of the personality. Trying to experiment to find out what personality works in the world.