Living With Gods review: 40,000 years of religious art, and this is it?

[trotsky]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/06/living-with-gods-review-art-religion-british-museum

After a few minutes in the exhibition that accompanies Neil MacGregor’s new BBC Radio 4 series on the power of religion, my skin started to sizzle and my blood to boil. I truly felt branded inside, marked out as a reprobate, for the premise of the show is that belief in God(s) is such a universal human trait that if you lack it, you may not be human.

That is signalled by a large wall text at the start, suggesting that the correct name for our species may not be homo sapiens, but “homo religiosus”. As someone who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t miss her, I felt a bit left out. Is belief really the all-pervasive force this exhibition claims?

...

This still might be fascinating stuff, if the comparisons and connections between world religions were made with more depth. Is every faith knocking at the same heaven’s door? Living With Gods appears to be saying something as crude and trite as that. Again, it is no doubt a lot more subtle on radio. But to claim, for example, that the meanings of fire in Zoroastrianism and Christianity are ultimately aspects of the same mystical worship of flame is a completely glib erasure of the complex histories of both belief systems.

...

Finding common patterns in myth, magic and belief is a vast intellectual problem. Anthropologists from JG Frazer in The Golden Bough to Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked have dedicated enormous books to it. Yet this show casually throws together artefacts embodying a vast variety of beliefs and asserts that they all share similar meanings. In reality they have all been stripped of context and history, robbed of specific content. The exhibition is designed as a dreamy white space, all mysterious cloudy screens. It’s apparently meant to suggest heaven. I found it more of a sterile limbo.

[guillaumeb]

1. 40,000 years of religious art.

Think of that. 40,000 years of religious belief. Perhaps we should simply dismiss 40,000 years of belief as indicative of a general lack of reasoning power, or call it mass mental illness.

Or, we could admit that religious/philosophical belief and speculation has always accompanied human sentience.

[trotsky]

2. We've also been raping and killing each other for longer than that.

Just because something has been around a long time, doesn't make it necessary... or good.

But thanks for confirming the bolded text.

[guillaumeb]

3. So if only we could go back 40,000 years, or longer,

and magically eliminate the very idea, the very concept, of religion and philosophy, we would have perfection?

[trotsky]

4. I have no idea, and neither do you.

But if religion has been with us for 40,000 years and we still do the same horrible things to each other, is it really helping?

[guillaumeb]

5. We each have our own opinion. eom

[trotsky]

7. If that's how you need to bow out, so be it.

Let me know if you ever feel like discussing your answer.

[MineralMan]

9. That's just silly. Religion began as a way of explaining the

unexplainable. As we are able to answer more and more of those ancient questions, religion seems more and more superfluous to me.

[guillaumeb]

10. I understand your opinion. eom

[Lordquinton]

6. 40,000 years and still no closer to any kind of clarity

In fact, there's less of a clear definition of the gods than there ever has been in history. Amazing that as we gained more knowledge of the world, gods became more mysterious and indescribable, until the only descriptive feature is that you can't describe it.

[trotsky]

8. Funny how that works, huh? n/t