Robert's Blog

Thursday, December 13, 2007

From the earliest instances of man's ability to communicate, references to spirits and unknown forces have been called gods.  Qualities that man wished he had have been attributed to "the gods."  Weather, natural disasters, deformed newborns, wicked people, good people, all have been thanked or damned as part of god's plan. 

Because, at the dawn of civilization (cave dwellers through the 2nd century AD)  there  existed only the verbal and infrequently cave etchings   recording events like floods, earthquakes, sudden deaths, etc. (See the 30,000 year old cave carvings in France). Egyptian cuneiform attributes events to the wrath or goodness of the gods. And, oh my, how the creative Greeks ascribed to all of man's interactions the many gods of their mythologies.

Individuals, families, tribes, villages, towns and nation states were mindful of these gods handed down to them over the ages.  In the handing down of the myths of the power of the gods there was great immaginative license.

We have the "Virgin Mary", and man proclaimed it God's miracle.  We have hundreds of men decrying the unjust rule of the Romans and only one singled out as the Christ. Perhaps the reporters of the day could not bear to recount the characteristics and virtues or lack thereof for most of those crucified by the Romans that week, so they settled on whom they considered the leader of the pack.  His crew then seized the opportunity to use his death as a cause celebre... martyrdom and resurection.  From this mythology, and the abject ignorance of the masses, "christianity spreads." 

After all, they claimed, Christ was the "son" of "god" who rescued him from the dead. So says man. What a PR campaign that could marsha!  (After being placed in a crypt, his patrons who owned it and the garden of Gethsemane, took him from this healing crypt and had him transported first to Egypt and then to what is now the northern shore of Morocco.  The Apostles were instructed to spread the ascension myth to cover tracks on shipping Christ out of Judea..)

In Morocco he and Mary Magdelan raised a large family.  That family continues to be sheltered and financed by the Pope.

Expectedly, man created most ancient and modern gods in the image of man.  Not very immaginative.  And this god has been depicted as a caucasian, african, arabic, or swarthy jew, but mostly a caucasian god.  It's the same in China, Thailand, Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Jamaica, and where ever skin color identifies culture and subcultures.  Gods' creators looks like him, but never her. ( We won't get into this "oversight."  Why create a "god" having some one elses characteristics, especially of the "weaker" sex.)

So we have gods who bless, gods who damn, gods who are vengeful, gods who are arbitrary, capricious and mean.  Man has defined the virtues or lack thereof of his gods as he understands himself.

However, the most important functions of all of these man-made gods are the following:

1. Instill fear, if disobeyed, and thereby control the ignorant and the naive,

2. Control other behaviors, like charitable instincts that makes Christianity and judiaism the richest corporate religions in the world.

3. Tell the ignorant that God's gift of free will places the onus for negative events on man not god.  However, all good is due to God's love, and

4. Use the gods as crutches to avoid reality.

5. Subjugate women to man's will by attributing misogyny to "The Word of the Lord."