eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781449087111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 869 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Changing of the Gods
The Future of Judeo-Christian-Islamic Religion in a Postmodern WorldBy Bob Ping
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Bob PingAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-8709-8
Chapter One
Civilization And Symbolic Communication
Background
Beginning with our australopithecine ancestors more than three million years ago and continuing through the hominid line, the brains of our forebears slowly evolved until, by the time our own species arrived during the later Pleistocene Epoch some forty thousand years ago, the human brain had developed the potential for rational thought and the ability to imagine, to communicate through language, and to create culture. However, once culture was created, the far slower method of the brain's biological evolution was essentially superseded because humans could now draw upon and share the accumulated knowledge within their respective cultural bases, thereby reducing the time it took to make the adaptations required by the ever-changing environments of the natural world. But there was a downside to this ability to adapt so quickly in that it left the poor old Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brain further and further behind because natural biological evolution is so painfully slow. The result is that today we have a hunter-gatherer brain with a hard drive that is trying to deal with continuously changing culturally imposed software. This phenomenon has left the human brain in need of a vastly upgraded biological model to function more efficiently.
One of the major problems with hunter-gatherer brains trying to exist in a modern world has to do with the brain's ability to imagine when coupled with the human ability to communicate through language. Imagination is very useful, and undoubtedly saved the lives of many hunter-gatherers by allowing them to mentally rehearse potential scenarios before committing themselves to acts that might lead to dire consequences, and imagination is just as useful for modern people in many ways. However, imagination also has the ability to allow humans to create things that don't actually exist, but when coupled with the ability to communicate, give us the ability to convince others that what we have imagined is actually "real." This chapter, therefore, is concerned with the human ability to imagine and to symbolically communicate imaginary worlds through language, through writing, or through other forms of communication as well as how this ability has influenced (and continues to influence) the ongoing development of the world's civilizations.
Origins of Writing
Civilization began with the establishment of writing in the Middle East and Egypt. Egyptian writing in the form of hieroglyphics or "picture writing" began somewhere around 3100 BCE and was used primarily for religious purposes as well as for depicting Egyptian life, especially the lives of the Pharaohs. Then, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley somewhere around 3000 BCE, the ancient Sumerians both initiated and began the development of their own style of writing, called cuneiform, which consisted of wedge-shaped symbols impressed upon clay. The first evidence for cuneiform writing has been found by archaeologists in the form of small clay "tokens" used for accounting purposes in trade, eventually followed by written contracts and promissory notes that were also used for trade purposes throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley area. Later, around 1500 BCE, we find a group of Hurrian merchants living in the Syrian port city of Ugarit in what today is the coast of northern Lebanon, using cuneiform for their transactions. One might wonder why cuneiform was used by the people of Ugarit, a city so far from the origins of such writing. Trade seems to have been a major motivation for the development and spread of writing on so wide a scale and helps explain why even non-Sumerian groups such as the Hurrians living among the Syrians of Ugarit used cuneiform.
To see why cuneiform writing spread in the way it did, one must understand the ancient topography of the Middle East, especially that of the Fertile Crescent (see Map 1). The shaded area of this map shows the main agricultural areas and trade routes arching from Sumer in the southeast, northward to Babylonia, Akkad, and Syria, then westward to the Mediterranean at Ugarit, and from there southward along the entire eastern Mediterranean littoral. This arch, or crescent, is composed primarily of river valleys containing rich, alluvial soil-in other words, farm country. In addition, the topography of the Fertile Crescent makes it most amenable to transportation of goods and products, as well as troop movements for military purposes. In other words, besides being where the primary foodstuffs of the Middle East were grown, the Fertile Crescent served as a kind of superhighway in ancient times. The people who traveled this route brought with them not only goods for trading, but also ideas, religious beliefs, technologies, inventions-and writing.
You will note that ancient Sumeria lies at the very southeast point of the Fertile Crescent, and Ugarit lies on the northwestern part of the arch. The land of Hurru (the Horites of Genesis 14:6 and Deuteronomy 2:12) from which the cuneiform-using Hurrians originated, lay northeast of Ugarit. As merchants, Hurrians had contact along this superhighway with both Sumeria to its south and Ugarit to the west. It is therefore not surprising that we find Hurrians tinkering with cuneiform writing, which they most likely acquired from the Sumerians through intermediaries somewhere along this trade route. The importance of the Hurrians was that, around 1400 BCE they used the cuneiform style of writing to create something overlooked by cuneiform's Sumerian creators. The Hurrian merchants of Ugarit created an alphabet.
What's so special about an alphabet? According to Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, in their book When They Severed Earth From Sky:
As long as writing systems contained hundreds of signs, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, one had to devote one's life to learning and using such a script. Society supported a small number of such scribes who only wrote the texts important to the society as a whole such as key religious, economic, and legal documents. The accumulated wisdom of the common people, however, died with them, since there was no one to tell their story. The development of simpler syllabaries in the second millennium B.C. allowed more people-merchants and the like-to write. But truly widespread literacy required a script with so few signs-a couple dozen-that a person could learn the script quickly and spell simply by sounding words out.
The Hurrians accomplished this by creating an alphabet from the cuneiform they had learned from the people lying to their south and which they then adapted to their own spoken language, a concept that was subsequently borrowed from the Hurrians by the local Semitic people of Ugarit in order to develop their own written language.
Eventually Hurrian society disappeared, but the concept of an alphabet lived on among the people of Ugarit, who by now had their own alphabet. The major problem of all these earlier alphabets was that they consisted only of consonants. But then, around 1200 BCE the entire eastern Mediterranean world became disrupted by a mass movement of invading people from Greek lands known as the Sea People, some of whom settled in Ugarit. The Greek invaders learned of this alphabet while living in Ugarit and borrowed the concept to create their own Greek alphabet-but with a difference. The Greeks added written forms to express vowel sounds, something that was missing from the Semitic writings. It was from the creation of a consonant/vowel alphabet that the written form of the Phoenician language was born, Phoenicia being that part of the eastern Mediterranean encompassing Ugarit and its surrounding lands.
Why was the addition of vowels so important to written language? By the addition of written vowels the Greeks, through the Phoenicians, made available to the common man an even simpler method of writing because with vowels many fewer written consonants were required, thereby making an alphabet simpler and easier to learn. Once writing was made available to the average person, civilization was able to proceed apace, because writing and the dissemination of ideas could be transmitted to an extent and flexibility never before possible.
Symbols versus Signs
As we have seen in the chapter on language, the earlier hominids did most of their communicating primarily through simple speech and gestures of various sorts. But as humans began to evolve their respective cultures, symbols began to play a more and more important part in everyday life until by the time of the first civilizations, our species had set themselves on a path where symbolic forms of communication began to totally dominate people's lives as never before. The addition of writing to the entire human symbolic matrix was responsible for a great deal of this transformation. What is it about symbols that have such power over our species? To answer this question the work of philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) can be quite useful. Mead studied the behavior of individuals and small groups, and his work is closely associated with the sociological study known as symbolic interactionism. Mead understood that the communication of humans was in fact of a different kind than the communication presented by all other species, including that of our own primate cousins. He therefore gave the name signs to the type of communication found in the rest of the animal world in order to distinguish such animal communication from that of humans, while for our own specialized communication he used the term symbols. As one pundit put it, humans are "symbol-minded" creatures.
We might ask ourselves what the difference is between signs and symbols and what the rest of the animal world does when signing that differentiates it from the human use of symbols. A prime example of this difference can be seen when studying the chimpanzee method of communication through signing. Concerning chimpanzees, R.P. Cuzzort and Edith W.King, in their book Twentieth Century Social Thought, give the following example of signing:
A chimpanzee, for example, when in the presence of another chimpanzee in distress, will behave with evident signs of fear or distress of its own. However, as soon as it is removed from the sight of the suffering comrade, the chimpanzee will immediately resume normal activity. There is evidence suggesting that the human capacity to suffer over the misfortunes of another for any length of time (after the person is out of view) is a function of our capacity to translate the person's condition into a symbolic presence, which then is able to stand for the reality of the other person's suffering.
In other words, there is continuity to human behavior that, although present in some creatures to a very limited extent, is lacking in most of the animal world. Such continuity is provided primarily by the extensive use of symbols in human interaction, and it is this continuity that makes human culture sustainable. The rest of the animal world does not have a sense of continuity between events, at least not in the way humans do. Among humans such continuity can be both real and imagined and involve vaster expanses of time than could ever be attained by any other species. The rest of the animal world lives almost exclusively in the present. We alone as a species are able to have a sense not only of the present but of the past and future as well. This means that humans, as individuals, can have a biography, and humans, as groups, can have a history. It also means that humans alone can attain knowledge not only about their individual past but also about the past of their families, tribe, society, nation, and culture. And it also means that we can imagine the possibilities inherent in certain future events and prepare accordingly.
So just what are these things called symbols that make us so unique? The definition we will use is the definition offered by Bredemeier and Stephenson in their book, The Analysis of Social Systems. This will be followed by a breakdown of the definition into its component parts in order to provide a more complete understanding of just what is meant by the word symbol. Here is the definition:
By "symbol" is meant any verbal form, bodily gesture, act, or other means of communication that arbitrarily stands for some perceived characteristic or set of characteristics of the sensory environment or a posited environment beyond direct sensory perception.
The verbal form mentioned in the definition is what we call language, a use of symbols with which we are all familiar. However, symbols are more than just oral communication. For instance, while we are speaking, we may also be using bodily gestures to supplement our communication. Gestures may include the way we stand as well as the facial and hand expressions we use while talking. Such supplemental symbolic methods of communication can either be a necessary adjunct to verbal communication or may act more or less independently; that is, the gestures accompanying verbal language may either support what we are actually saying or they may betray what we are really thinking while we are communicating orally.
The third part of our definition includes acts, which is a complex, socially understood series of communications that are understood to represent one complete communication. For instance, envision a Roman Catholic going to church, approaching the altar, and genuflecting and crossing while saying some prescribed words. All of this together would be considered an "act." Such an act communicates that the person performing the act is religious; that they are of a particular faith; and that they are, or at least are pretending to be, devout. Throughout our working day we perform many acts, some more ritualistic in the sense just indicated, others less so. For instance, the set of behaviors surrounding the water cooler may be considered a more or less ritualized performance consisting of certain predictable acts by the participants.
The fourth part of our definition includes other means of communication. In addition to verbal language, gestures, acts, and the written word, there are several other means by which communication of various sorts can take place, such as certain verbal inflections and tone of voice. Also, communication via mathematics comes to mind, as well as our newly developed electronic communication systems, including radio, television, computers, cell phones, etc.-a list that keeps growing by leaps and bounds. Furthermore, we have our own interior communication-our thoughts-by which means we can even talk to ourselves without anyone else being involved in the conversation. And finally, there is the sometimes pleasant, but often weird or even horrifying communication that takes place through dreaming.
The fifth part of the definition has to do with the fact that symbols have an arbitrary component. The arbitrariness of our symbol usage is that the particular society we are born into tells us from birth and onward just what is the "right" way of communicating and what is the "wrong" way; what is "real" or "unreal"; what is "true" or "false"; and what is "good or "bad." During childhood we are taught those symbols that our culture tells us represents the real world, and as children we internalize this notion of reality. What we are taught is reinforced by cultural norms that enforce what our culture insists is real. The problem here is that many things we have been arbitrarily taught by our culture as real may in fact not be part of actual reality, but are instead a part of our culture's mythology. Since what these arbitrary things established by one's culture "really are" are taught from birth, one will have little incentive to question such "truths," because by adulthood they will have become part of one's own personality structure. This limits our ability to see "reality" as something other than what we have been socialized into believing. At least this is the case when we are young. Learning as adults has a lot to do with being able to separate the arbitrarily presented real of the culture in which we are raised from the true reality embedded in the natural world. For most folks this is a very difficult process.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Changing of the Gods by Bob Ping Copyright © 2010 by Bob Ping. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Section One The Supernatural World....................1Chapter One Civilization And Symbolic Communication....................3
Chapter Two Beliefs....................31
Chapter Three Magic And Superstition....................73
Chapter Four Myth And Legend....................107
Chapter Five Gods, Goddesses, And Godlets....................151
Chapter Six One God....................195
Chapter Seven Morality....................233
Chapter Eight Religion....................271
Section Two The Modern And Postmodern Worlds....................317
Chapter Nine Today....................319
Chapter Ten Tomorrow....................399
Chapter Eleven The Future Of Judaism....................437
Chapter Twelve The Future Of Christianity....................487
Chapter Thirteen The Future Of Islam....................535