Ancient Egyptian deities purposes. Egyptian texts often refer to deities' true, underlying forms as "mysterious". The Egyptians' visual representations of their gods are therefore not literal. They symbolize specific aspects of each deity's character, functioning much like the ideograms in hieroglyphic writing. For this reason, the funerary god Anubis is commonly shown in Egyptian art as a dog or jackal, a creature whose scavenging habits threaten the preservation of buried mummies, in an effort to counter this threat and employ it for protection. His black coloring alludes to the color of mummified flesh and to the fertile black soil that Egyptians saw as
The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can't Tell Us What to Do religious responses to the dilemma, and concludes that none of them succeed. Further, Lindsay talks about the epistemological problems in claiming that a doctrine is based on divine revelation, as there is no independent way to verify that such a revelation has occurred. It is from this point that the reason in the eponymous sub-title of the book is given: "God cannot tell us what to do because, among other reasons, we are not able to recognize a command from God. Because God cannot effectively communicate with us, we cannot base morality on his commands." Reviewing the book in Free