Project Gutenberg's The God-Idea of the Ancients, by Eliza Burt Gamble

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Title: The God-Idea of the Ancients
or Sex in Religion

Author: Eliza Burt Gamble

Release Date: August, 1996 [Etext #639]
Posting Date: November 26, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOD-IDEA OF THE ANCIENTS ***

Produced by Charles Keller

THE GOD-IDEA OF THE ANCIENTS

OR SEX IN RELIGION

By Eliza Burt Gamble

Author of "The Evolution of Woman"

PREFACE.

Much of the material for this volume was collected during the time that
I was preparing for the press the Evolution of Woman, or while searching
for data bearing on the subject of sex-specialization. While preparing
that book for publication, it was my intention to include within it this
branch of my investigation, but wishing to obtain certain facts relative
to the foundations of religious belief and worship which were not
accessible at that time, and knowing that considerable labor and
patience would be required in securing these facts, I decided to publish
the first part of the work, withholding for the time being that portion
of it pertaining especially to the development of the God-idea.

As mankind construct their own gods, or as the prevailing ideas of
the unknowable reflect the inner consciousness of human beings, a
trustworthy history of the growth of religions must correspond to the
processes involved in the mental, moral, and social development of the
individual and the nation.

By means of data brought forward in these later times relative to the
growth of the God-idea, it is observed that an independent chain of
evidence has been produced in support of the facts recently set forth
bearing upon the development of the two diverging lines of sexual
demarcation. In other words, it has been found that sex is the
fundamental fact not only in the operations of Nature but in the
construction of a god.

In the Evolution of Woman it has been shown that the peculiar
inheritance of the two sexes, female and male, is the result of the bias
given to these separate lines of development during the earliest periods
of sex-differentia