It can’t be much fun being God these days. The trouble with being a figment of someone's imagination, is that you have to take on all the oddities and personality problems that they dream up for you. You get no say in the matter, even if you are omnipotent.
When humans first made the gods in their own image it was different. There were deities for every occasion and the task of running the universe was shared out. When disease or famine came and threatened the whole community, the merciful god could point an accusing finger at the god responsible for sickness, or for the harvest, and everyone was satisfied, if not entirely happy, with the situation. Times have changed, however, and gods who find themselves surplus to requirement face redundancy just like the rest of us. Today it’s a one-man job (and God is male, of course) and he has to accept the fact that he himself sent the AIDS virus, floods, famine, earthquakes and so on—for the benefit of humanity. Still, to help out and clear up any confusion, he has dozens of different sects of believers and worshippers to spread “the truth"—dozens of different truths in fact, each one being the real truth.
The further back into the history of god-worshippers you look, the better the logic seems to have been in their approach.The early believers decided that if suitably bribed, the gods could be useful in all sorts of ways. Today, when acts of God don’t work out in everyone's best interest, all kinds of excuses are made for him. He gets away with murder. Presumably because of this reverse progress in humanity’s long quest for God. many of the ancient ideas have survived through to today’s rituals. Saturnalia, for example, in honour of Saturn, a Roman agricultural god, was celebrated on 17 December. This was followed by several days of feasting and jollification with candles being lit, slaves allowed certain liberties, and a good time being had by all.
Ancient beliefs
Anthesteria (or caster as it is now known) was originally a Greek 3-day festival held when the first signs of new life in nature appeared. Lots of wine was consumed. and on the third day pots of vegetables were boiled for the spirits of the dead who were believed to be roaming at large. The day ended with the spirits being chased out and sent back to their spiritual home. On the third day they “rose again", you might say.
As far back as we know in the history of religion, grain or fruit had been offered to the gods to make sure they understood exactly what was required of them. Modern Christians do the same in their harvest festival. Many of the born-again variety, especially in America, have a similar approach except that it is considered preferable for the offering to be made in hard cash.
The very idea of being born again, which is only a modern recruiting version of the more conventional Christian baptizing, has a history which goes back, at the very least, as far as ancient Greece. Anyone who had been mistakenly supposed to be dead and had turned up, perhaps after a battle, and after the ritual handing them over to the god of the underworld had been performed, had to go through a play-acting form of re-birth before being re-accepted into society in order to convince the gods of their revived mortal status. In an equivalent ancient Indian ritual, performed for the same reason, the person being born again had to spend a night crouched in a tub of fat and water. Over this, the rituals normally performed for pregnant women were carried out. John the Baptist, who went in for ducking people in the river in order to cleanse them of their sins and give them new life, was only reviving an already old custom.
Another early idea was that of making human sacrifices, often with the victim being given the name of the deity to whom they were to be sent. The eagerly awaiting audience would swallow the flesh and drink the blood of the victim in an attempt to be at one with the god. Catholics today do the same or. at least, they claim to.
Childish absurdities
Every advance in humanity’s knowledge of their surroundings leads to a change in the ideas of "God”. This change, however, is obviously not one of greater understanding, but less. As "God" becomes more distant and obscure, the efforts to reach him are ever more bizarre. The “development” of religious ideas is backwards. They made more sense in the day when everyone knew that the Earth was the centre of the universe, was supported on pillars, and was flat. These were the kind of ideas held by the writers of the books of "God’s holy word”, and the absurdities contained in these are clear today to anyone who can read and is capable of doing so without a totally closed mind.
Believers however, whose hope of doing well in life (this one and the next), rest on the acceptance of these as "gospel", or. at least, on an ability to find a self-deluding interpretation of the nonsense, are put in an ever-increasingly ridiculous position. With faith, however, they rise to the challenge. For example: What is sin?. Answer (from a leaflet handed to the present writer by a Hyde Park evangelist, in response to the observation that the small baby she was carrying was not a sinner): "All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever”.
What is God? The nearest we ever get to an answer is that he is the creator of all things. This task took six days followed by one of rest—what did God do on the 8th day?, the 9th and 10th and so on until today? In what sense did he exist in a state of complete nothingness? How long was he in this state? When did he start the project? We do have an exact answer for the last question thanks to a certain Bishop Usher and a Dr Lightfoot. Usher computed the date to 4004 BC and Lightfoot, not to be outdone, worked it out to 23rd October, at 9 o’clock in the morning. What day of the week did God start on? Not a matter of great importance unless you happen to be a Seventh-Day Adventist and you, therefore, know that it was a Sunday, which makes the sabbath fall on Saturday and the rest of the Christian world one day out.
Some believers, who think that the idea of God creating the universe in just six days, and out of nothing, might sound a little far-fetched, concede that there may have been an error in translation and that a “day”, in fact, could mean a period of perhaps 1000 years. This, no doubt, would have made the task much easier, but presumably we cannot apply this multiplication of time (by 365,000) to the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. This trip, which ought not to have taken more than a few days (24-hour days, that is), took— with God's guidance—40 years. Even more miraculously, the clothes and the shoes they were wearing never wore out—‘And I have led you 40 years in the wilderness your clothes are not waxen old upon you. and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy feet". The robes and the sandals worn by a 10-year-old at the outset must still have been in good condition and supposedly still a reasonable fit, when the wearer at the age of 50 finished the trip.
Why bother with such absurdities, you may ask? Why not treat them with the same amusement that you would treat a 6-year-old who believes in fairies and Father Christmas? The answer is that if civilisation is to reach the stage where poverty is not tolerated, where the best that can be produced is produced—to satisfy human need, not the profit motive, and where all humans have equal access to the best possible standard of living and human dignity, the childish and primitive ideas that we are all inherently sinners, and therefore incapable of acting humanely, and that an invisible tyrant in the sky has a paradise where “only a few will be chosen”, must pass into obsolescence first. Such ideas have no place in the 20th century.
Nick White
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