-Primitive religions are like baseball teams , each team Is like a different city state with their own local religions : the Yankees, redsox, dodgers, all with their own pantheon of local gods: Derek jeter, Mariano Rivera, Nolan Ryan , and each fan wears the symbol, the jersey, of his or her personal favorite god and when city state fights another, their gods battle each other. Religions wax and wane as the fortunes of their gods do. Within each religion, every fan has a personal connection to one or another of the major gods within the world of baseball.
At some point, the religion of football comes out of the east, a different sport, more brutal, more primitive, more vigorous and proceeds to overcome the religion of baseball, sweeping all before it. Yet , while it manages to supercede baseball as a religion, on a deeper level it is still a religion based on local religions: Cowboys,Bears, Giants, Patriots, under the big umbrella Idea of Primitive Religion, with the same affinity for local gods: Peyton Manning, Bret Favre, Michael Strahan, et. al. as the religion of baseball.
Different but the same underneath.
Fans could have tie-ins with several different gods with no feeling of self conflict, and the gods didn't care.
The Jews did it differently. They organized themselves as a People. They did not have a personal relationship with god outside the context of themselves as a group. Yahweh, Sport itself, was their god and they were the chosen fanbase. They did not (or weren't supposed to) have individual idols before them. Sometimes they got seduced by the sports idols of primitivsm, ultimately they would come back to themselves as the People of Sport, the one god.
-Christians took the the primitive idea of participatory belief and the Judaic idea of the one true fan and combined it into the religion of the triathlon, where the fan is also the celebrant and each fan must establish his/her own personal relationship with the divine. It's instructive the the entire process starts with baptism. Everyone runs at their own speed. The fan and the adherent become one.
-Islam is golf. The People of the Book
The individual submits to the rule of Law. Worship takes place in the blinding light of Fairness. There is mo compromise. To cheat is to be condemned for all eternity. Bobby Jones is the Prophet and St. Andrews is Mecca.
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