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A friend called yesterday with a title idea: God is Sexy, or God is Sex-Ease. Which led us to a theological discussion. Perhaps in spite of her Christianity, she doesn't think the body and the spirit must be or should be at war. She does think all things were, or are, created by God according to a plan in his mind. (That would include human sexuality, so why, she asks, should the religious be bothered about it?) As I tried to explain, I think the things of nature--all that there is except what humans have fabricated--come into being by natural processes such as evolution. But here's a thought: If man has created God in his own image, contrary to Christianity and theism at large, maybe it's a matter of Homo Faber projecting his own process of making things to a cosmic scale. That is, he projects his own ability to picture in his mind and then devise a useful artifact onto God the creator, maker of worlds and everything in them.

AlanCliffe 6 Mar 28
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I wonder can she conceive of herself as a disembodied mind, can anyone? I suspect that the notion of the mind body dualtity existed long before Rene Descartes, it is an artifical construct. I will glady accept any scientific evidence that delineates where the body ends and the mind begins.

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Your friend is living proof that despite any obstacle, people will always create their beliefs to coincide with their needs.

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Interesting discussion. A Religious Naturalist might look at it like this:
To her point - the tension between body and spirit doesn't have to be characterized as war, but neither can it be so easily dismissed. It is a product of evolutionary mismatch. For example, in the bonobo population, there is no such tension. It is accepted practice to use sex liberally for various purposes, like peace-making, or just because it feels good, and they suffer no backlash.

But if evolutionary pressures caused their brains to grow in size and complexity to the point they became eusocial animals, and then they developed agriculture and sedentary societies, with private property, then lineage becomes an issue. When lineage (inheritance) is an issue, who you have sex with matters, and there is motivation to manage sexuality, and thus arises a tension between body (evolved instincts) and spirit (attitude).

To your point - If God is, as a Pantheist or Religious Naturalist might say, just a personification of Nature, then God (Nature) clearly did make man - not the other way around. What man did was not to create Nature, but simply to envision it as a person with agency, for easy handling of an otherwise cumbersome abstraction. So, projecting his own ability to picture and then devise artifacts onto personified Nature is both an apt description of what humans did as well as a harmonious interpretation of religious mythology.

skado Level 9 Mar 28, 2022
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I fail to see how the second half relates to the first half, except in the most banal of ways. Perhaps you could enlarge. Just a little.

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