It is interesting to view the shift of religion over time as it relates to the Greeks, and then later Romans; how they changed from a shame culture to a guilt culture. How deities were renamed and viewed with reassigned roles. How they viewed their paths in life extrinsically and then suddenly (a few hundred years) intrinsically. Yet Calasso points out another regime that men went through pertaining to the gods, in fact a couple regimes. "Mans relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: conviviality, then rape (quite blunt isn't he?). The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference" (Calasso, 52-3). Quite the shift if you stop and think about it... I mean "there was a time when the gods would sit down alongside mortals" (Calasso, 53). They were buds, bros, homies on the high-downlow! (Get it) Man and the gods were pals and then the gods got all shifty (ahhemm Zeus) and started raping people, and there was crying and bastards, blood and swans, and who's going to forget about that bull! And then (a few hundred/thousand years later) there is text, oral delivery, and outright devotion (or atheism) to it all. Makes you wonder what the dinner conversation would be like in this day and age if God, Allah, Muhammad, Buddah, Jesus (a mexican native), the Dali Lama (for kicks), and Jesus (the one with the sandals) all happened to swing in (on their way to bingo) on that forlorn Wednesday evening (right when you were about to watch your show!), and invite you to sit down over some chinese...? Most people would probably freak out, yelling "oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."
Meanwhile God is like "Yes my child? Yes my child? Ok. What the (rhymes with buck) do you want!?"
...Ok, ok, sorry I got a little carried away there but you can see where the picture was going... and yes it was painted in a --insert verb-- way (didn't/don't mean to offend anyone). I guess I was rather intrigued in the human emotion and its changes and adaptations over the course of millennia and how will change in the next hundreds of years?
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