THINK about this. . .
Go way back...far far back in history.
Go back before the Internet. Go back farther.
Go back before newspapers, TV and radio.
Go waaaaay back before there was public education.
Return to a time when there were no Universities or libraries.
Go even farther back in time and return to when it was thousands of years before any Modern era.
People got their ideas from (where?) their families and neighbors and peers.
Everything was imagination, guesswork and superstitious reasoning.
News was always just a rumor by word-of-mouth.
How far back have we gone?
You are back to a point when you cannot PROVE anything.
What does it mean to be unable to prove anything?
The person with the outrageous story is the communicator of how the world works.
Your local shaman, priest, rabbi, prophet, sage or witch doctor is your ONE SOURCE of "information" about the UNseen world.
This point in time is the birth of the idea of . . . "God."
God became a category for "I don't know why, so it must be _____."
Why does it thunder? It must be THOR.
Why is the ocean in tumult? It must be POSEIDON.
Good crops? God.
Famine? God.
Plague? God punishing us.
It wasn't much of an answer, but it served its purpose.
We won the war. Why? God blessed our efforts.
We lost the war. Why? God punished us for our sins.
As mankind began finding methods of reasoning and ways of proving things, God (as a go-to category) began to grow smaller and smaller.
As mankind invented logic, reasoning and science God shrank and grew fainter.
Where does the plague come from? Rats/Fleas/germs.
By the time Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great and Greece conquered the known world.
Alexander did this HOW???
Was it because he was well-tutored by the greatest philosopher, Aristotle?
Um, no--it must be because Alexander is himself a son of god!
(Which was it?)
This moment in history is a crossroads and a clash of paradigms.
Rational thought began intruding into the numinous territory of God-dom.
THE GREEK PASSION FOR KNOWLEDGE stood against the backward religious myths of indigenous peoples.
Suddenly, the God bubble popped very loudly: POP!
By the end of the Book of Malachi there is a deafening silence from "God".
With the arrival of real answers--God goes silent.
Ever wonder about that long gap between the Old Testament and the New?
That is when Logic/Reason/Discourse/ arrived in the Middle East.
The Jews abandoned the Hebrew language in favor of the Greek language.
Why?
It had scientific and logic-friendly grammar.
Then what happened next?
Greek thought was used as a tool to explain Jewish theology.
A man named PAUL started laying it all out the way Plato had described Socrates. This means this. That means that.
Systematic Theology was born and a new kind of Judaism was born:
Christianity.
The Nexus of man's achievement in perfecting rational thought combined with the need for a divine architect rested in GOD/MAN/Demi-god.
Both explanations for WHY things are the way they are was solved by nuancing and finessing the argument.
Jesus was simply declared: God/man/spirit
The silence of the ancient God of thunder, flood, fire and death combined in the new and improved version: Jesus.