i'm not sure what the point is here. is he simply unaware of roman, greek, egyptian, and norse mythologies, etc.?

or do they not count somehow?

That's what his comment was aimed at. It would require considerable re-adjustment to adapt it to many eastern religions.

The comment appears to be restricted to Abrahamic faiths only. Great point though.

He is saying mankind survived for tens of thousands of years without any knowledge of the supposed creator and ruler of the Universe.

If the Abrahamic God is actually the true God, what was he doing al those thousands of years.?

It all falls apart if we look at the actual lifespan of the Earth and not the OT timetable.

but mankind has long had an understanding of gods and other mythological beings.

one could argue that was simply an earlier understanding of the many facets of the "one true god".

or one could argue that "mankind" hadn't yet evolved sufficiently for god to reveal himself as he did in the bible. in the meanwhile god looked over early man just as he looked over the animals and the earth and the sun and so on.

or one could argue that man was in fact created 6000 years ago, along with evidence of earlier man (and dinosaurs) to test our faith


as an atheist, i don't buy any of this, of course; but neither do i find vedder's argument compelling in the least.

that only revealed himself to a small group of desert nomads for a very short period of time.

None of them compelling either.

Allow me to suggest that if we could properly conceive of a maggot we could make one. The reason we can conceive of God and gods is that they are easy, and maggots are hard. I mean hard in the sense of making, and not eating. God has less moving parts, and when some part of him doesn't work, we can make an excuse for it. If some one asks what God does, we can say God doesn't do anything. God just is.

we use the word 'understanding' differently.

If I say "Merry fucking Christmas"

Some may understand that as wishing them a Merry Xmas, others would understand it as telling them to fuck off.


The phrase "I didn't understand it that way" comes to mind.

or only some others believe it exists, or everyone agrees that it's fictional.

for example, what part of batman do you not understand?

I can understand a fictional character within the context of the expression of its creator. Outside that, I do not understand.

[font style="font-family:papyrus,'Brush Script MT','Infindel B',fantasy;" size=4 color=teal]And he makes a good point.[/font]

still surviving in historic time have been animists and believed in ghosts. Animists believe that everything is alive, that consciousness (perhaps in rudimentary forms) and emotion in particular inhere in all reality. It follows from that that a creature that seems dead is not really dead, only alive in a different way. Thus the belief in ghosts and the ceremonies of gratitude to the consciousness of game animals. Storms and other disasters were attributable to the anger of the spirits of the air and water, etc. And this was a reasonable guess, given their experience: what they knew was that trouble often came from the anger of other living beings. But it was a guess.

With more knowledge, our ancestors came to believe that dead is dead, life is fleeting. They still believed in immaterial, immortal beings, and attributed many disasters to their anger. They erected a separation between mortal and immortal that animists had not conceived. They thought they might be able to barter with some of the powerful immortal beings, perhaps even gaining immortality from the deal. Thus, originally, JHWH was one god among many, but the one with which the Hebrews had a deal, and the Roman divine economy was quite complex. Juno took responsibility for their money system, for example, in return for the service of a group of celibate women. Disasters are now attributable to the divine being's anger that the compact wasn't kept -- and since humans pretty much cheat when we can, that seemed to explain a lot of history.

But further thought, and more knowledge of nature, suggested that the division between mortal and immortal was not wide enough -- that there is a single God, a demiurgos who created not only humans but also djinns and dev-ils (Persian for "little gods.&quot

And with still more knowledge of nature, materialism seems, on its face, a better explanation of what we see (especially if we ignore the logical problems of materialism, and that's pretty easy to do.)

My point: human beings seem to have a fundamental need to explain, but their explanations, at any stage, are limited by their knowledge and reason, and are supplanted as those things grow. To both sides -- theists and atheists -- I ask, what makes you think you are the final product of all this history? What makes you think your ideas will not be supplanted by some ideas you are unable now to conceive? Maybe the animists are closer to the truth than you are.

The time-myopia of the Abrahamic religions is one of their worst aspects, IMO.