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Updated: May 31, 2025
From the days of Zoroaster to the final establishment of Christianity by Paul, the tendency although slight had been toward the elevation of woman, and consequently toward a greater acknowledgment of the female element in the god-idea.
While comparing the early emblems which prefigure the primitive elements in the god-idea, Hargrave Jennings observes: "In the conveyance of certain ideas to those who contemplate it, the pyramid boasts of prouder significance, and impresses with a hint of still more impenetrable mystery.
Similarly, generations of men have been born with a weakened mental vitality towards superstition; a weakened mental capacity that renders their minds an easy prey to that fear which manifests itself in superstition, creed, religion the God-idea. It was Karl Marx who remarked that, "The tradition of all the generations of the past weighs down like an Alp upon the brain of the living."
And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
On no other question did the primitive mind reach truth. Universally its speculations concerning the world were discovered to be wrong. On this one topic we are asked to believe that the savage was absolutely right. From the age of fetichism rightly called by Comte the creative age in theology the history of the god-idea has been a history of a series of modifications and rejections.
But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative of perfect mating.
The serpent, for instance, although a male symbol, in certain ages of the world's history appears as a beautiful woman. This is accounted for by the fact that a woman and a serpent once stood for the god-idea. Together they constituted an indivisible entity the creating power in the universe. They therefore became interchangeable terms.
Here devout worshippers believe that the androgynous God of fertility, or Nature, still manifests itself to the faithful. Close beside these more ancient shrines are others representing a somewhat later development of religious faith shrines, by means of which are indicated some of the processes involved in the earlier growth of the god-idea.
These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown that the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for the old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood than that which the early Church postulated.
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