[Buddha-l] Historical vs Psychological Religious Narratives

[L.S. Cousins]

Leigh,

I will respond once but not again, since the subject seems rather 
off-topic for this list.

>Aside from self-created gods, Egyptian cosmology also includes gods creating
>through speech (sort of like creating from nothing), and others who create
>things (earth, people, gods) from their own bodies.
>
>The appearance of multiple supreme deities comes to some degree  from our
>own collapsing of different cults over great spans of time and space. At a
>given time and place, one deity was often considered supreme. Political
>amalgamation also involved accepting different local deities into a national
>pantheon. (This is relevant because the more abstract or transcendent a
>deity is, the less it makes sense to speak about multiple individual deities
>of the same order.)

I wouldn't see it this way. It seems to me more likely that the 
situation was like that in India where similar claims were made of 
various gods at the same time. The surviving sources come from 
specific locations and so create an appearance of predominance which 
may not have been reflected on the ground.

>  > dealing with a transcendent being in terms which can really
>>  only be conceived after the development of the Platonist
>>  philosophical tradition. For the latter we are dealing with
>
>Do the pre-Socratic philosophers count here?

We have rather limited sources for many of the pre-Socratics; so it 
is difficult to be quite sure. But I would say not. You need 
something like Plato's theory of Forms.

>  And what do you make of the Upanishads (and their concept of Brahman)?

The date of some of all of the Upanishads is in question here. 
However, I would in no way suggest that the notion of a supreme law 
or reality originates from the Greeks. That seems ubiquitous.

>Reading various translations of Akhenaten's Hymn to the Aten, which dates
>from sometime around 1300 BC I think, I get the feeling that Aten was closer
>to a modern Christian concept of God than simply a more powerful human.

Despite many claims, Akhenaten was not a monotheist. He certainly 
recognized other gods too. I strongly suspect that the translations 
give a very misleadingly 'christian' aspect to his hymn - almost 
unavoidably so.

>There was major Hellenic influence in later ancient Israel, but I have not
>heard the suggestion that Jewish monotheistic thought was strongly
>influenced by Platonism. Is there evidence for that?

Palestine became part of the empire of Alexander and subsequently 
part of the Seleucid empire from the later fourth century B.C. This 
means it was very much part of the Hellenistic world precisely at the 
point at which Platonist influence becomes strong (I include here 
Neopythagoreans and Stoics loosely under the heading of Platonists as 
being influenced by Plato). We do not know if there actually was a 
standard Hebrew version of the Pentateuch before the creation of the 
Greek Septuagint in the third century B.C. After the revolt of the 
Maccabees against the Seleucids, there was a reaction against Greek 
influence which obscures the historical picture.

Lance