An Early Draft of Eleazar Figuring Out the Conclusions of Monotheism
Eleazar answers, “our understanding of personality is built around a dynamic structure of mind, heart and will. Personality is a structural phenomenon common in the universe. The personality of human beings is only one form of the organizing psychological structure we call personality. Plant behaviors display the rudimentary traits of personality and animals obviously have a form of personality similar in structure to the personality of human beings. Anyone who has ever loved a good dog knows they have a mind, a heart and a will. Every animal has a personality, that makes it an individual animal. Having a form of personality does not make them humanlike in the sense I mean it.”
“You are acquainted with the deeds of Zeus and all the other the gods. The gods are fantastic beings who do all sorts of things humans cannot, but they act from motives you understand. You understand the thinking, feeling and motivations of the gods because these thoughts, feelings and motivations are like your own. Zeus is angry. You know what anger is from your own personal experience with being angry. If Zeus is angry with another god, you can guess that god’s reaction from your own experience with someone having power being angry with you.”
“The logic of limitless teaches us that we are in error if we project the motivations of limited personality onto the Limitless Personality of the Deity. This is the significance of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures being able to play a role in a human drama. Our understanding of stories relies on our being able to project the essential realities of our own personalities onto the characters. We understand drama based on our subjective acquaintance with human personality. Can you logically place a character with the unfathomable motivations of Limitless personality into a human drama?”
Socrates thinks very hard almost slipping into one of his thought trances but finally snapping out of it says, “I cannot.”
Do you now see what I mean when I say God is not humanlike?”
“I do,” says Socrates pausing the conversation by his obvious concentration of thought, still thinking hard but unable at the moment to come up with a question to enlarge his original probe.
After a few moments Eleazar says, “this shows us that monotheism is not as distinct from polytheism as one might think. Both are anthropomorphic, authoritative and transactional. Monotheism like other forms of religious belief, builds on the foundations that precede it. The Lord in early Israelite religion existed alongside the many other Canaanite gods. For the children of Israel their story begins with many gods and until recent times they routinely abandoned the Lord and the not fully developed monotheistic idea for polytheism and idolatry. The seed idea of monotheism begins with Abraham but as a form of practice amongst the Israelites it developed out of generations of struggle. Jacob’s struggle ended at dawn, but the struggle of the children of Jacob to define God continues.”