Who has the best god? I mean the real deal, the true god(s). It’s hard to tell, but there needs to be some way to assess which Supreme Being is Numero Uno. In the 500,000 million years of the modern Homo sapiens, we have worshipped a staggering number of gods, beyond the myriads of gods from the polytheistic traditions where every mountain and spring contain some sort of deity. Today’s big players are Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Krishna and Brahman (these are not in order of importance because none of them should be), and there are also millions of contemporary adherents to other gods like Baha (to the Bahá'í faith), Ahura Mazda (Zoroastrian), and Waheguru (Sikh).
Behind our modern age lies a multitude of dead religions littering the landscape of civilization’s past. For every Ashur (Assyrian) there was Ba'al (Canaanite), competing through their respective faithful, killing each other to prove which god was the better god. And if you happen to lose the battle, well, you must have upset your god somehow to allow this to happen. Flagellate yourself, burn some old woman as witches or sacrifice some children to get back in your respective benevolent Creator’s good graces.
Those gods which have been lost to time, usually when the faithful have all been slaughtered or converted, disappear only to be discovered by a sweat-soaked archaeologist digging around in hot sand millennia later. What survives of a Abrasax (Gnostic) or a Perun (Slavic) has to be pieced together in stone tablets, monuments, and (if you are lucky) papyrus, all that devotion and worship swept away by the desert winds. These were just the head honchos. A representative ancient religion had a god for phenomena, ideals, emotions, geographical entities, or even just inanimate objects. Gods of fertility, justice, revenge, punishment, security, war, wealth, sea, the sun, the moon, the constellations, grain, metals, snakes, horses, luck, poetry, death, music, wine, pleasure, childbirth, growth, love, memory, humor, flowers, fruit trees, night, day, etc, etc, so forth and so on, rule their special realms and require individual worship. Hey! Don’t the Catholic saints kind of work this way, too? Just the known list of moon gods and goddesses is extensive: Artemis, Bendis, Coyolxauhqui, Diana, Heng-O, Ix Chel, Khonsu, Thoth, Osiris, Min, Duau, Mên, Selene, Sin/Nanna, Tsuki-Yomi, and Yarikh to sample a few from across time and the world’s surface.
The polytheistic religions really let their imaginations run. You can find a whole array of Super Friends in the African pantheon, the Armenian pantheon, the Aztec pantheon, the Berber, the Canaanite, the Celtic, the Chinese, the Egyptian, and the Greek Pantheons; not to mention the Guanche, Hindu, Incan, Japanese, Japanese Buddhist, Mayan, Native American, Norse, Rigvedic, Roman, Slavic and Sumerian pantheons (thank you Wikipedia). Modern polytheistic religions include Shintoism, Chinese folk religion, Thelema, Wicca, Druidry, Taoism, Ásatrú and Candomble.
Then just what is the best yardstick for assessing a god? When shopping for your religion, you should never throw yourself at the first apostle who comes a-rapping at your door. Require some proof, empirical evidence to win you over. Have some self respect! Don’t drop to your knees for the first feel good deity which hands you a pamphlet. A god must be evaluated through the text since He or She must be too busy to personally meet His or Her creations, and so I think, should meet the following criteria:
1. Historically accuracy – If the word of God cannot match the archaeological and anthropological evidence then the text has no credibility.
2. Scientific insight - What does the inspired lore of God say about disease? Does it come down demons or microbes? Is the earth flat or spherical? Is the solar system heliocentric or geocentric? Has He imparted anything like Planck ’s constant to one of His prophets to share with the world? The being that set the stars in the sky ought to be up on His particle physics.
3. Prediction of events – Has the scriptures any insight into what is going to happen? Please stop trying desperately to attach meaning to those vague, weird visions of the Book of Revelations to fill this requirement. If you mean Hitler, say Hitler or at least the guy with the square moustache and not the eagle which pounces on the fish with two heads.
God, any god, who can leap those hurdles, has my attention. I am His/Her/Their willing servant. But I have not found Him/Her/Them yet. As a failed Christian, I know the Bible comes up short in all three criteria. Why extraneous schemes like the Bible Code come about is that the text so often comes up short in fulfilling meaning and so devotees invent extravagant systems to get the scriptures to say more. If you look hard enough you can find something. Program your computer to look for certain words and maybe it will find that every fifth letter of each verse of the KJV of Leviticus spells “c-l-i-n-t-o-n-c-i-g-a-r”.
Now I can just hear you say, “No one can measure a god’s validity by science. God has to be taken on faith.” I have heard this argument before, and not as loud as a guy at the Richard Dawkins’ book signing I attended who kept chiming his mantra of God cannot be seen through reason. Why not? I can attribute the earth and everything in it to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as well as any deity with such non-reason. I might as well pray to a rhododendron as to Jehovah, if we have no constraints of rationale. Reason is the tool by which we live and thrive. It keeps us from walking off cliffs or drinking after a poisoned dinner partner. Think about it. There’s a reason that the Scriptures command us to believe as a child – unguarded and unthinking.
People since the dawn of our human consciousness have been looking up at the sky seeing that big, bright orb hanging there, needing a satisfying explanation of what’s going on up there. Without real knowledge we come up empty except for our imaginations. We created a god or gods in our own image. He- notice how many gods seem to be angry men!- has laws (conveniently reflecting the interests of the people who speak for Him), needs sacrifices and glorification, wants us to sacrifice our lives for Him, unquestioningly support His holy men, and, like George Carlin said, “for some reason He needs money!” This anthropomorph embraces our insecurities, provides a means to send us to war, pacifies to obedience, sells us politicians and political parties, and picks our pockets. Every generation or so the believers can end up killing each other over the way we worship Him.
Behind our modern age lies a multitude of dead religions littering the landscape of civilization’s past. For every Ashur (Assyrian) there was Ba'al (Canaanite), competing through their respective faithful, killing each other to prove which god was the better god. And if you happen to lose the battle, well, you must have upset your god somehow to allow this to happen. Flagellate yourself, burn some old woman as witches or sacrifice some children to get back in your respective benevolent Creator’s good graces.
Those gods which have been lost to time, usually when the faithful have all been slaughtered or converted, disappear only to be discovered by a sweat-soaked archaeologist digging around in hot sand millennia later. What survives of a Abrasax (Gnostic) or a Perun (Slavic) has to be pieced together in stone tablets, monuments, and (if you are lucky) papyrus, all that devotion and worship swept away by the desert winds. These were just the head honchos. A representative ancient religion had a god for phenomena, ideals, emotions, geographical entities, or even just inanimate objects. Gods of fertility, justice, revenge, punishment, security, war, wealth, sea, the sun, the moon, the constellations, grain, metals, snakes, horses, luck, poetry, death, music, wine, pleasure, childbirth, growth, love, memory, humor, flowers, fruit trees, night, day, etc, etc, so forth and so on, rule their special realms and require individual worship. Hey! Don’t the Catholic saints kind of work this way, too? Just the known list of moon gods and goddesses is extensive: Artemis, Bendis, Coyolxauhqui, Diana, Heng-O, Ix Chel, Khonsu, Thoth, Osiris, Min, Duau, Mên, Selene, Sin/Nanna, Tsuki-Yomi, and Yarikh to sample a few from across time and the world’s surface.
The polytheistic religions really let their imaginations run. You can find a whole array of Super Friends in the African pantheon, the Armenian pantheon, the Aztec pantheon, the Berber, the Canaanite, the Celtic, the Chinese, the Egyptian, and the Greek Pantheons; not to mention the Guanche, Hindu, Incan, Japanese, Japanese Buddhist, Mayan, Native American, Norse, Rigvedic, Roman, Slavic and Sumerian pantheons (thank you Wikipedia). Modern polytheistic religions include Shintoism, Chinese folk religion, Thelema, Wicca, Druidry, Taoism, Ásatrú and Candomble.
Then just what is the best yardstick for assessing a god? When shopping for your religion, you should never throw yourself at the first apostle who comes a-rapping at your door. Require some proof, empirical evidence to win you over. Have some self respect! Don’t drop to your knees for the first feel good deity which hands you a pamphlet. A god must be evaluated through the text since He or She must be too busy to personally meet His or Her creations, and so I think, should meet the following criteria:
1. Historically accuracy – If the word of God cannot match the archaeological and anthropological evidence then the text has no credibility.
2. Scientific insight - What does the inspired lore of God say about disease? Does it come down demons or microbes? Is the earth flat or spherical? Is the solar system heliocentric or geocentric? Has He imparted anything like Planck ’s constant to one of His prophets to share with the world? The being that set the stars in the sky ought to be up on His particle physics.
3. Prediction of events – Has the scriptures any insight into what is going to happen? Please stop trying desperately to attach meaning to those vague, weird visions of the Book of Revelations to fill this requirement. If you mean Hitler, say Hitler or at least the guy with the square moustache and not the eagle which pounces on the fish with two heads.
God, any god, who can leap those hurdles, has my attention. I am His/Her/Their willing servant. But I have not found Him/Her/Them yet. As a failed Christian, I know the Bible comes up short in all three criteria. Why extraneous schemes like the Bible Code come about is that the text so often comes up short in fulfilling meaning and so devotees invent extravagant systems to get the scriptures to say more. If you look hard enough you can find something. Program your computer to look for certain words and maybe it will find that every fifth letter of each verse of the KJV of Leviticus spells “c-l-i-n-t-o-n-c-i-g-a-r”.
Now I can just hear you say, “No one can measure a god’s validity by science. God has to be taken on faith.” I have heard this argument before, and not as loud as a guy at the Richard Dawkins’ book signing I attended who kept chiming his mantra of God cannot be seen through reason. Why not? I can attribute the earth and everything in it to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as well as any deity with such non-reason. I might as well pray to a rhododendron as to Jehovah, if we have no constraints of rationale. Reason is the tool by which we live and thrive. It keeps us from walking off cliffs or drinking after a poisoned dinner partner. Think about it. There’s a reason that the Scriptures command us to believe as a child – unguarded and unthinking.
People since the dawn of our human consciousness have been looking up at the sky seeing that big, bright orb hanging there, needing a satisfying explanation of what’s going on up there. Without real knowledge we come up empty except for our imaginations. We created a god or gods in our own image. He- notice how many gods seem to be angry men!- has laws (conveniently reflecting the interests of the people who speak for Him), needs sacrifices and glorification, wants us to sacrifice our lives for Him, unquestioningly support His holy men, and, like George Carlin said, “for some reason He needs money!” This anthropomorph embraces our insecurities, provides a means to send us to war, pacifies to obedience, sells us politicians and political parties, and picks our pockets. Every generation or so the believers can end up killing each other over the way we worship Him.