Making Gods

Craft Project: Wrap yarn around sticks to make a simple God's Eye based on the traditional Ojo de Dios from the Huichol Indians of Mexico's Sierra Madre.
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Your God's eye is done! A quick and easy way to make a God's Eye is with variegated yarn. There's no need to change yarns as you wind.

Apotheosis

Embellish the God's Eye with tassels, feathers, or a string of beads. Make two or more God's Eyes from the same yarn colors wound in a different order. They are sure to look fantastic when hung together. It's just yarn and sticks. Enlarge Share this craft.

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How to Make a God's Eye Read all of the steps before starting. Project Preparation If you are using twigs, they will need a little preparation.

Glue Glue two sticks or twigs together in a cross. Share this craft project with your friends and family. Make a place to work. Read all of the directions. Various Hindu and Buddhist rulers in the past have been represented as deities, especially after death, from Thailand to Indonesia. Even several Sultans of Yogyakarta were semi-deified [ citation needed ] , posthumously.

Deceased North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung is the principal object of the North Korean cult of personality in which he is treated similarly to an explicitly apotheosized leader, with statues of and monuments dedicated to the " Eternal President ", the annual commemoration of his birth, the paying of respects by newlyweds to his nearest statue, [5] and the North Korean calendar being a Juche calendar based on Kim Il-sung's date of birth.

Instead of the word "apotheosis", Christian theology uses in English the words "deification" or "divinization" or the Greek word " theosis ". Traditional mainstream theology, both East and West, views Jesus Christ as the preexisting God who undertook mortal existence, not as a mortal being who attained divinity. It holds that he has made it possible for human beings to be raised to the level of sharing the divine nature: The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology contains the following in an article titled "Deification":. Corresponding to the Greek word theosis are the Latin -derived words "divinization" and "deification" used in the parts of the Catholic Church that are of Latin tradition.

The concept has been given less prominence in Western theology than in that of the Eastern Catholic Churches , but is present in the Latin Church 's liturgical prayers, such as that of the deacon or priest when pouring wine and a little water into the chalice: Catholic theology stresses the concept of supernatural life, "a new creation and elevation, a rebirth, it is a participation in and partaking of the divine nature" [12] cf. In Catholic teaching there is a vital distinction between natural life and supernatural life, the latter being "the life that God, in an act of love, freely gives to human beings to elevate them above their natural lives" and which they receive through prayer and the sacraments; indeed the Catholic Church sees human existence as having as its whole purpose the acquisition, preservation and intensification of this supernatural life.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints LDS Church or Mormons believes in apotheosis along the lines of the Christian tradition of divinization or deification but refers to it as exaltation , or eternal life, and considers it to be accomplished by "sanctification.

How We Make Gods

While the primary focus of the LDS Church is on Jesus of Nazareth and His atoning sacrifice for man, [14] Mormons believe that one purpose for Christ's mission and for His atonement is the exaltation or Christian deification of man. However, only those who are sufficiently obedient and accept the atonement and the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ before the resurrection and final judgment will be "exalted" and receive a literal Christian deification.

One popular Mormon quote, often attributed to the early Mormon leader Lorenzo Snow in , is "As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be. Mormons believe that the original Christian belief in man's divine potential gradually lost its meaning and importance in the centuries after the death of the apostles, as doctrinal changes by post-apostolic theologians caused Christians to lose sight of the true nature of God and His purpose for creating humanity. The concept of God's nature that was eventually accepted as Christian doctrine in the 4th century set divinity apart from humanity by defining the Godhead as three persons sharing a common divine substance.

That classification of God in terms of a substance is not found in scripture [19] [20] but, in many aspects, mirrored the Greek metaphysical philosophies that are known to have influenced the thinking of Church Fathers [21] such as Justin Martyr , Origen , and Augustine. Mormons teach that by modern revelation, God restored the knowledge that He is the literal father of our spirits Hebrews As such, Mormons assert that as the literal offspring of God the Father Acts The glory, Mormons believe, lies not in God's substance but in His intelligence: Thus, the purpose of humans is to grow and progress to become like the Father in Heaven.

Mortality is seen as a crucial step in the process in which God's spirit children gain a body, which, though formed in the image of the Father's body, is subject to pain, illness, temptation, and death. The purpose of this earth life is to learn to choose the right in the face of that opposition, thereby gaining essential experience and wisdom.

How to Make a God's Eye

The level of intelligence we attain in this life will rise in the Resurrection Doctrine and Covenants Bodies will then be immortal like those of the Father and the Son Philippians 3: Those who are worthy to return to God's presence can continue to progress towards a fullness of God's glory, which Mormons refer to as eternal life, or exaltation Doctrine and Covenants In early , the LDS church published an essay on the official church website specifically addressing the foundations, history, and official beliefs regarding apotheosis.

In art the matter is practical: So it is that the apotheosis genre exists in Christian art as in other art.

The features of the apotheosis genre may be seen in subjects that emphasize Christ's divinity Transfiguration , Ascension , Christ Pantocrator and that depict holy persons "in glory"—that is, in their roles as "God revealed" Assumption, Ascension, etc. Later artists have used the concept for motives ranging from genuine respect for the deceased Constantino Brumidi 's fresco The Apotheosis of Washington on the dome of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D. Many modern leaders have exploited the artistic imagery if not the theology of apotheosis.

Niehaus -designed Apotheosis of St. At the golden dawn of online space, he brought a snake into Eden. He forced his little world of techno-misfits to answer its first big questions, questions familiar to students of any society and its basic rules: And how does a community test and affirm its social boundaries? N eighbors can create the ineffable threads of a good society, a point made in the book The Great Good Place , by sociologist Roy Oldenburg.

He argues that for this to happen, a culture needs a place for people to meet informally. Chat is common in a third place; so are games. The earliest online communities ticked many boxes of a third place.

Until MUD, however, none of them had really been a place. MUD was the first game world that could host dozens of players at the same time. Humans will have a chance to prove their adaptability as the Earth undergoes unprecedented challenges in the Anthropocene, an era named after our impact on the biosphere.

To learn what it takes to survive far into the future, astrobiologist David In the early days, the University of Essex server would only allow dial-up players to use the network to play between midnight and 6 a. Fans quickly changed their sleep schedules, becoming vampires to power up their characters through all-night sessions. He designed his software as both hangout and a kind of sanctuary. While a physical sanctuary was a pretty new concept for what was then called the wired world the Internet would come later , the concept has deep roots in our offline experience, according to anthropologist Tom Boellstorff.

Boellstorff spent three years applying real-world ethnographic tools to virtual spaces, which resulted in the seminal book Coming of Age in Second Life.

How We Make Gods - Issue Communities - Nautilus

Marginalized communities in Indonesia became tied together, he found, by the spaces in local parks where they met. L ike spaces in the offline world, MUD had to establish its rules, and those were partly shaped by a crisis of social behavior—which brings the story back to Egor. Bartle is quick to stress that, offline, the man who played under the screenname Egor was a nice guy. His rampages in MUD simply expressed a nascent hacker ethic: To the first fledgling MUD community, however, Egor posed a clear and present danger. He dug his fingers into the programming of the world he had created.

He hard-coded a bolt from the heavens—the Finger of Death —and smote Egor to bits. Part of that came, he says, from the mindset it took to code in the early days. Making computers work was a meritocracy of best solutions and finding better ways to do things. Yet when problems arose, an all-powerful being outside the physics of the game simply made the most sense. The hierarchy quickly codified.