I recently presented an alternative to the conceit shared by both atheists and immature religionists that religion is static, a closed system of doctrines and practices insusceptible of development and correction and refinement. The following is a bit of evidence for the alternative.
The ancients sacrificed animals outside them on the altar of divine worship. Progress was made when more spiritually advanced individuals realized that it is the animal in them that needs sacrificing. Slaughtering a prized animal such as a lamb and offering it up is crude and external and superstitious. What needs to be offered up is our base nature which is grounded in our animality but is a perversion of it.
But what if God commands Abraham to sacrifice that animal outside him that is is own son Isaac? Abraham should conclude that it cannot be God who is so commanding him. I argue this out in detail in Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation and in Kant on Abraham and Isaac.
Addendum (1/7/13): S.N. was reminded of this quotation fromPorphyry, De Abstinentia II, 61:
θεοῖς δὲ ἀρίστη μὲν καταρχή· νοῦς καθαρὸς καὶ ψυχὴ ἀπαθής
The best offering to the gods indeed is this: a pure mind and a soul free from passions.
That is my meaning exactly.
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