Exhortations to the Bloggers

                                                                                    

Exhortations to the Bloggers, which may be an Accompaniment to Arnold K., Taken mostly from Clement of Alexandria

The Seven Ways of "Introducing Deception and of Procuring Gods"

1. "Some men were deceived from the first about the spectacle of the heavens.Trusting solely to sight, they gazed at the movements of the heavenly bodies, and in wonder deified them, giving them the name of gods"
2. "Others, when gathering the cultivated fruits of plants that spring from the earth, called the corn Demeter"
3. "Others, after reflecting upon the punishments of evil-doing, make gods out of their experiences of retribution, worshipping the very calamities"
4. "Even certain of the philosophers themselves, following the men of poetry, came to represent as deities the types of your emotions, such as Fear, Love, Joy, Hope; just as, of course, Epimenides did of old, when he set up altars in Athens to Insolence and Shamelessness."
5. "Some gods arise from the mere circumstances of life deified in men’s eyes and fashioned in bodily form" (meaning death and fate and so on)
6. "There is a sixth way... according to which men reckon them to be twelve in number" (i.e. Top-down, genealogy and mythology)
7. "Finally... there remains that which arises from the divine beneficence shown towards men; for, since men did not understand it was God who benefited them, they invented certain saviours" (Mistake a real god for a fake one)

"Do not therefore seek diligently after godless sanctuaries, nor after mouths of caverns full of jugglery", a list of shrines:

1. the Thesprotian caldron
2. the Cirrhaean tripod
3. the Dodonian copper
4. the old stump honoured by the desert sands
5. The Castalian spring 
6. the spring of Colophon
   

Exhortation to the Greeks, by Clement of Alexandria (or pseudo-Clement) is a (very funny) polemic written telling Christians not to participate in mystery cults, and, to a lesser degree, telling the pagans that they should stop being fools and become Christians. It provides a biased, but very useful, humorous, and short look at the workings of greek religion and of pagan religions in general, and I think it is a good accompaniment to Arnold K.'s post on religions as a primary/secondary source.