"Clement of Rome taught that God rules the world with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. Clement’s view is clearly monotheistic, as it unites the opposites in one God.

Later Christianity, however, is dualistic, inasmuch as it splits off one half of the opposites, personified in Satan, and he is eternal in his state of damnation.

then we are confronted with a major religious problem: the problem of Job."

Unconsciousness has an animal nature.

"Job was naïve, dreaming perhaps of a “good” God, or of a benevolent ruler and just judge.

But, to his horror, he has discovered that Yahweh is not human but, in certain respects, less than human,

just what Yahweh himself says of Leviathan (the crocodile):

He beholds everything that is high: He is king over all proud beasts.

animal symbolism with its borrowings from the much older theriomorphic gods of Egypt, especially Horus and his four sons."

Of the four animals of Yahweh

only one has a human face.

That is probably Satan, the godfather of man as a spiritual being. Ezekiel’s vision attributes
three-fourths animal nature and only one-fourth human nature to the animal deity,

This symbolism explains Yahweh’s
behaviour, which, from the human point of view, is so intolerable:

it is the
behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally.

Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”

@holon42

In Zoroastrianism as originally imagined in the Gathas, the overarching spirit was the Wise Lord, Ahurah Mazdâh, by whom were created the opposing principles, Spanta Manyush, the holy spirit, and Ahra Manyush, the spirit of corruption. Later on, it became more dualistic, with Ormazd becoming identified wholly with the good and set against the evil Ahriman. But later yet some Zoroastrians saw infinite time, Zurvan, as the overarching spirit superior to both Ormazd and Ahriman.

@DavidSalo @holon42

The emergence of Iranian religion is a complex problem, and therefore, not easily subject to generalization. The Gathic texts we do have to hand are medieval.

They are written in a difficult East Iranian dialect, and were heavily redacted by Sasanian era Middle Pahlavi (Persian) speakers. These speakers had little understanding of the grammatical and terminological nuances of the text, and would often edit according to their own doctrinal bias.

There were a number of…

@DavidSalo @holon42

…religious groupings that we might categorize under the rubric of Mazdean religion. Zoroastrianism is only one of those, though the one most easily recognizable to Westerners.