(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

"Many people today, though undoubtedly concerned with the problem of life's meaning, are agnostics or atheists; very few such people could be found among the ancient Egyptians. Many people today find life's meaning outside of religion and view religion as incidental or tangential to life; very few ancient Egyptians saw it this way. Of today's devout, all but a very few are monotheists; of ancient Egypt's, all but a very few were polytheists. We read theology and value abstraction; they recited myths and preferred concreteness. We demand consistency in religious thought; they did not. We hold omnipotence and omniscience to be necessary attributes of divinity; they did not. We have a canon of scripture; they did not. We reject magic; they did not. We view government as secular and rulers as all too human; they sawe government as sacred and kings as somehow divine. We believe that the world needs to be improved, and therefore (if we are religious) to be transformed by communal obedience to God's revealed will; they believed that the world needs to be maintained, and therefore to be stabilised by governmental imposition of order from above."

Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991. (from the Introduction, page 3.)