What would it look like if our gods were real? And how would that affect our understanding of the natural world? In this episode, we explore the role of our ancestors in understanding our gods, and how they relate them to natural phenomena.
00:00:00.000The tone of our gods being somehow personification of natural phenomenon and like a poetic way of describing the natural world, I think when people say that, sometimes they mean something deeper.
00:00:15.080On the surface of it, it appears to a lot of us that practice our religion in a very devotional way, like a form of atheism, like it's a suggestion that gods are not real, they're just a poetic way of describing natural circumstances.
00:00:30.000And that's the way that scholars have traditionally related to non-Abrahamic faiths is by suggesting that our ancestors are these primitives that grunt and beat on sticks and make up magic spirits to explain things they don't understand.0.85
00:00:47.020Yet the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians are able to magically, you know, their God's the real one, but everybody else is just a confused savage.0.52
00:00:57.680our ancestors were incredibly smart people. They had the same brain capacity that we do as modern
00:01:03.160humans. They don't need to make offerings and devote worship and temples and hoffs to pretty
00:01:11.540ways of describing natural things. So I would challenge you to what would it look like if our
00:01:17.700gods are real entities that have been part of the gift cycle with our folk since the dawn of time?
00:01:24.780And if our ancestors grew to understand them by relating them to natural circumstances that highlight their power or highlight their glory in a certain way, the directionality of that's really important.
00:01:39.160If your starting point is that the Isir must and do exist, therefore let's understand how our ancestors related to them.
00:01:46.920Certainly, we see, like your point about Balder, we understand the similarity between Balder's return and the sun as being a beautiful expression of that.0.79
00:01:59.120But it's not because Balder is the sun, it's because we see that natural thing as a beautiful reminder or symbol of Balder.
00:02:10.180Balder is not a symbol of the sun, the sun is a symbol of Balder.
00:02:13.860And the directionality of that matters tremendously.
00:02:16.920Thor isn't an explanation for thunder.
00:02:19.680Thunder helps us understand the majesty