Let There Be God (and on the Seventh Day We created God)…

 

 

Christian God

Christian God

The idea of a Michelangelo-like anthropomorphic God, wrathful and scheming (before Jesus made him all love-y dove-y), bad teeth and all, thunderbolt in hand, is so absurd and fantastic, that I’ve long wondered how such nonsense ever got started, and moreover, how it persists. My idea is that it originates in the feedback over death, probably around the time Neanderthals (no, not Me-anderthals) began burying their dead.

We humans look for meaning, of course, as such is our curse, so some must have wondered about these newly dead: Where do they go? What will they do when they get there? The idea that people are here one moment, then gone the next, is a tough pill to swallow, after all. Even dogs go through mourning. I suspect the phrase “WTF” also originated around this time.

Hindu God

Hindu God

So someone must have come up with the idea of an Ever-ever-land where those unfortunates—or not, depending on your circs—migrated to and populate forever. That easily lends itself to a dual realm where the good guys ascend and the bad guys fall, and before you know it, you’ve got the Super-Men ruling over it all, likely the same ones who previously ruled over large portions of the Earth, the Big Guys forever.

Socrates and Plato speculated and postulated the existence of an eternal soul, after all, before the Christians made it doctrine, and they just may be right. The Christians and Hindus only differ in whether that soul comes back into a physical body or goes on to inhabit an astral or hellish realm, many gods or one, both concepts equally absurd and fantastic. But you could never prove otherwise. That’s the beauty of any strongly-held belief: depending on which questions you ask, you always get the right answers, i.e. internal consistency.  The Muslims got it right on this one, a God with no face and no son, just many messengers.  You wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water, after all….

Advertisement