Quote:
Originally Posted by monster
You can say that a king is just a man, but a deity would still be a deity.
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I imagine what Saintess means is that "traditional" religious treatment of the divine is often similar to treatment of royalty.
Which is not surprising. In many cultures royalty and divinity are understood to overlap. The Yamato line of Japan claims divine descent and through it the divine origin of the Japanese people; Roman Emperors are regularly deified upon their deaths, their cults serving to enhance the prestige of the state; God-kings ruled ancient cities of Sumeria, one written into history as the half-divine hero of the world's first great epic; Medieval Christian monarchs, through the Church, claim their right to rule "By Grace of God"; the entire Imperial system of China functions through the ritual glorification of the Son of Heaven; hell, a certain Jonathan Edwards of colonial America, the Puritan preacher who introduces "hellfire and brimstone" into common usage, made in his infamous sermon a direct reference to God's
arbitrary sovereignty.
And of course, in a sufficiently large kingdom a king might as well be a god, since many of his subjects never ever get to see him. So how do you make people you never ever get to see in person be loyal to you? You create a whole system of rituals and beliefs surrounding your entity. Like a god.
Equate yourself with omnipotence, with holiness and supernatural authority and you have a good show going.
Ergo, when the Enlightenment philosophers rise, they minimize their Christian God into Nature, into Mathematics, to Reason -- Deism. And when the socialists rise, they kill God. For in their worldview a sovereign is to be guillotined, not worshiped, and power to be held by the common peoples of the world.