‘Taking The Animal Out Of God: Re-evaluating the inhumanity at the heart of Western religion’ by Wendell Krossa
The author presents a unique new perspective on the historical development of Western religion and views of God. He traces the process through which the first practitioners of religion projected some of the most primitive characteristics of their existence onto their earliest views of deity- exclusion, a band orientation, domination, and destruction of enemies. Western religious traditions have continued to employ these inhumane features to shape all succeeding perception of spiritual reality. They have done this through such doctrines as the separation of humanity from God, the election of a special people (and rejection of the non-elect), divine control of life (a ruling patriarch), eternal damnation, and blood sacrifice to appease divine anger. These primitive mythological themes have rendered the Western God more animal-like than human. They have also inspired endless religious intolerance and violence because people have always tried to replicate their understanding of divine reality in their own societies.
It is now inexcusable to continue protecting such inhumanity under the canopy of the sacred. If we are going to progress toward the better future that we were created for, then we need to re-evaluate our spiritual ideals and ensure that they are genuinely humane. Fortunately, the growing recognition of God as supremely humane has led to an entirely new approach to spirituality. We now understand that a humane God has never required people to adopt a religious approach to life. In the search for meaning and purpose, simply being human in daily life is enough.
Taking The Animal Out Of God covers the following areas:
1. The search for a humane God- the inhumanity at the core of Western religion.
2. The historical stages of human perception of gods/God- in terms of animal life, blood sacrifice, the cosmos, and humanity.
3. God and the Bible- no divine revelation.
4. Human origins in animal reality.
5. The projection of the animal onto God.
6. God and testosterone- God becoming male.
7. Separation from God- the Persian prophet Zoroaster and the origins of Fall/salvation mythology.
8. God as religious- organizing and mediating God.
9. The origin of sin.
10. God as horizontal- no domination.
11. God and law- no one under law.
12. God and freedom- no predetermined existence, the power to love.
13. The commonness of God- the origins of holiness/purity theology in Fall mythology and locating transcendence in ordinary human activity (rescuing God from religion).
14. God as spirit- Mind or Consciousness and the greater reality.
15. God and death- rethinking death aside from the Fall.
16. It gets much better- the rising and advancing trajectory of life.
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The author may be contacted at wkrossa@shaw.ca
For more detail on the contents of Taking The Animal Out Of God see Extended Description following.
Many of us in the Western world have been taught to view life in terms of such themes as the separation of humanity from the spiritual realm or God, the direction of life as regression from an original state of perfection, threat of future disaster, violent sacrifice to resolve human imperfection, and punishment for personal failure. These themes flow from a heritage of ideas known as Fall/salvation mythology, which is the core mythology of the three Western religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This mythology has profoundly distorted our perception of the humane nature of reality and the progressive direction of life. And for the past three millennia it has traumatized human minds with unnecessary fear and despair. Fall mythology also portrays life in terms of a dualism where a good power and an opposing evil power are engaged in cosmic conflict. This dualism has been further refined in the belief that there are chosen insiders and rejected outsiders who represent the greater invisible powers and are engaged in a proxy war on earth. It is a perspective that has driven people to endlessly convert, conquer, and destroy one another in the name of their differing gods.
The author, Wendell Krossa, employs a variety of disciplines to trace the origin and development of this mythology. He argues that the central themes of Fall mythology reflect the basest drives of a primitive past- the drives to exclude, oppose, dominate, and destroy. These drives have been at the root of human enmity and conflict since the beginning yet their continued expression in human society is encouraged because they are protectively enshrined in mythologies that are believed to be divine in origin. And they are expressed most graphically in the Western view of God. Unfortunately, the embodiment of these features in God has prevented many people from recognizing that the sustaining Life behind the universe is supremely humane.
Aside from being inhumane, the core themes of Fall/salvation mythology are no longer credible as explanations of life. For instance, the sedimentary record clearly reveals that death existed long before fully formed humans ate some forbidden fruit in an ancient Eden. This contradicts the central point of the Fall myth which states that death entered the world when those first humans sinned. It is plain evidence that there never was a Fall or separation of humanity from God. Corollary to this, there is no evidence that God is angry with the human struggle to overcome an animal past in order to live more humanely. Therefore, there is no need to appease an upset deity with violent human sacrifice. A broad array of evidence points to the fact that the religious view of God as holy, angry at sin, and bent on punishing humanity is a fundamentally defective view of the spiritual realm. Fall/salvation mythology no longer provides (and never did) a credible basis for meaning or hope.
The modern scientific movement has been helpful in liberating minds from the more irrational and destructive elements of these ancient mythologies. It has been immensely useful in helping us to appreciate the trajectory of life as emerging, progressing, and ever-improving. However, science has sometimes fallen prey to its own form of extremism in advocating a strict rationalist approach to reality and declaring that evidence of randomness means that life must be understood in terms of meaninglessness and no more. In this viewpoint, any recognition of intelligence or purpose in the development of the universe is dismissed as mere wish projection. The rationalist approach does not properly respond to the human consciousness of transcendence and the human search for meaning.
The author argues that both religion and science have failed to help us understand that the universe story manifests a supremely humane spirit that is rising through humanity to move life toward a better future. The emergence of human consciousness and its struggle for a better existence is the central element of this universe story. He also presents the liberating insight that the Transcendent is not a religious reality but is to be known in terms of mundane human existence. Ordinary human response and activity has always been the primary arena through which transcendence is manifest in the universe. This liberating truth renders religious mediation entirely unnecessary. Atheists, believers, and pagans all share the same free access to the spiritual.
The author outlines the historical process through which religion and religious gods were developed to embody the basest animal drives and how these self-created gods have long been employed to validate inhumanity toward others. He presents a unique perspective on the origin and development of religion and views of divinity. He also presents material on more humane directions for human spiritual understanding.
This book offers a new perspective on spirituality as the expression of the common human spirit. This spirit is moving in an entirely different direction from that of the religious spirit.