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Pile o' Bones
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Re: godlings
Yes, of course you can say that about anything in the universe. As I said, it's all God. As Kant put it, we live in the phenomenal world, and it is only phenomena that we can ever hope to understand; i.e., things as they appear. But behind the phenomenal world is the numenal world, the Absolute. It is beyond comprehension, or else it would not be numenal, but phenomenal. This is the world of things as they are.
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least (Walt Whitman)
And humans have become gods. Augustus, Claudius, Jesus, Rastafari, etc. These were/are but men, yet the god-form itself is equal to any other god-form. If a tree can become a god, why not a man? You could think of it this way: the archetypes, which belong to the numenal world, or at least are the nexus wherein the numenal and phenomenal world intersect, take on the likenesses of these forms within the human imagination, just as the Ainur took on anthropomorphic likenesses and became the Valar.
In animistic faiths, the whole phenomenal world is considered to be alive, imbued with Spirit, or spirits (it matters little, as singular and plural designations are meaningless in the numenal world). Animists understand that beyond the phenomenal world there exists a numenal world (although not in the way Kant understood it) which is Spirit.
But the numenal world can never be known by us, for we ourselves are phenomena. If we entered the numenal world, we would no longer be what we are. Yet as I said the numenal interfaces with the phenomenal world, and all religions deal with some aspect of that connexion.
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Edited by: <A HREF=http://www.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_profile&u=00000277>The Black Lieutenant</A> at: 11/12/00 2:46:43 pm