R.C. Sproul

If you get up and jump around right now, get out of your chair and start running around the room, somebody might say, look at her, look at him.

They're very animated.

All animated means is animated.

that you're alive, that you have a spirit that is manifesting itself, an animus, if you will, that is being demonstrated by your activity or your excitement or your being stirred up.

Well, animism is a primitive, simple form of religion where inanimate objects, what do we mean by an inanimate object?

We mean an object that doesn't manifest life like a stone or

Something like that.

We don't think of stones as being alive or the sun.

We don't think of the sun as being alive.

Animism believes that these objects in nature are inhabited by spirits.

like evil spirits.

There's a little god that lives in the rock, or there's a god in the tree.

I know of one tribe that the center of their worship was a tree that was covered all the time with hordes of bees.

It was called the bee tree, and it was in the middle of the village.

And this was the main god for these people.

They came and they offered sacrifices and they said their prayers in front of the bee tree because they believed the bee tree

was inhabited by a spirit.

And so this religion was animistic.

Well, the theory in the 19th century was that all religions start with this kind of primitive view of nature.

And then it gets a little bit more sophisticated as it develops and as it grows, and soon it becomes polytheism.