(no subject)

[andrewducker]

Anthropomorphism is a very common trait amongst people - I think it's a heuristic for understanding the reason for things. If you assign a motive to all objects and acts then it makes it easier to think like it and predict it's next move.

In my experience, women tend to do it more, which may come from the higher social tendencies and aptitudes they have, but that's just handwaving on my behalf. Certainly more women I know than men have named their cars, computers, etc.

If you take this and our tendency towards heirarchy - for power to flow from a centralised point and for people to 'outrank' each other, I think that's where God comes from. He's the anthropomorphism of the universe itself, and the inevitable result of heirarchy taken to its logical extreme.

Comments

[birdofparadox.livejournal.com]

anthropomorphism kicks ass.

i once had a beau tell me that he didn't think that all inanimate objects in the universe had nubbins of personality, but thatobjects left around me had to absorb some residual... :)

as for god being the anthropomorphic representation of the universe, do you mean the collective consciousness of humanity, or the earth-as-organism's perception of itself?

[andrewducker]

I mean that the concept of God is the result of humanities tendency to anthropmorphise the things around it.

The earliest people explained Thunder as "The gods being angry" or "The Thunder God speaking". This has slowly been abstracted further and further out to the point where one god is responsible for everything rather than different things being the province of different gods.