Gods and Aging

 As I continue to age, increasingly I wonder about what life might have been like, had I lived these many 87 years in a land that was free of religion.  Each day, we greet our two cats with love and some fun, but never with tales of Hell if they stray from their path of goodness and love towards us.  And then, each morning, we sit by our pond with a nice cappuccino I prepare in our kitchen, and we sit by our pond, and feed our three Koi’s, Harriet, Nick and Nora. We named our koi’s after 1930s radio program characters, Ozzie and Harriet, and the detectives Nick and Nora Charles.  And, yes we speak to them, or perhaps at them as we feed them some floating Koi’s food, chatting about their dining experiences this fine day.  And again, we never mention that God thingie up above, mainly because it would seem even sillier than our chats with them.

And then, every now and again, we are visited by our newest great granddaughter. And no one ever mentions god to her, at least not yet because she is way too young to understand that awful concept.  Whether she receives guidance in that regard is, happily, not our responsibility, but her parents.

But again, what if we lived in a world free of such concepts?

I have often wondered why that first human ever created the concept of God. I mean, what would have driven an early human to create such a concept? Was it an act of desperation, a human driven to such an idea because the very notion of “Nothingness” was simply unacceptable? Or was it perhaps an act in which some early human was seeking a measure of power or control over other humans, and claiming such knowledge granted instant power.  And as I wandered through the mists of time, I realized that religion has a complex and very old origin. That Christ on a Cross thing defines only one part of religion’s origins, depending on what you might like to think of as “religion. And the more I read, the more confused did I become.  How about “animism”, the concept that all things, including rocks have souls—see  Edward Tylor through his 1871 book Primitive Culture.  And in Wiki, another author, Nurit Bird-Davis speaks of animism. Nurit Bird-David argues that: “Positivistic ideas about the meaning of 'nature', 'life' and 'personhood' misdirected these previous attempts to understand the local concepts. Classical theoreticians (it is argued) attributed their own modernist ideas of self to 'primitive peoples' while asserting that the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of self into others!” She explains that animism is a "relational epistemology" rather than a failure of primitive reasoning. That is, self-identity among animists is based on their relationships with others, rather than any distinctive features of the "self". Instead of focusing on the essentialized, modernist self (the "individual"), persons are viewed as bundles of social relationships ("dividuals"), some of which include "superpersons" (i.e. non-humans).

So you see why the more I read, the more confused I become.  But key here is that thinking of and articulating views about the “otherworld” are very old, reaching back thousands of years into the BC era.  And views about “God” are many and also reach back very far into the past. Again, from Wiki: In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. God is usually thought of as being omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent as well as having an eternal and necessary existence. God is most often held to be incorporeal, with said characteristic being related to conceptions of transcendence or immanence.

Some religions describe God without reference to gender, while others use terminology that is gender-specific and gender-biased. God has been conceived as either personal or impersonal. In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe, while in deism, God is the creator, but not the sustainer, of the universe. In pantheism, God is the universe itself. Atheism is an absence of belief in any God or deity, while agnosticism deems the existence of God unknown or unknowable. God has also been conceived as the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent". Many notable philosophers have developed arguments for and against the existence of conceived God.

So, needless to say, most thoughts about religion are all over the map of logical and even illogical thinking.  We can construct many counter-arguments about God, but for every counter-argument, there are several counter-counterarguments. My personal belief system, probably leans toward the agnostic, i.e., we do not and likely never will “Know” whether God exists, at least until we die, and then all brain activity ceases, thereby at least getting in the way of understanding the God thing.

I guess I understand why people all over the globe might develop some sense of an ethereal life force. I mean how else to explain why we are all here?  An accident might be the most logical explanation, but surely it is the least satisfying. A superforce creator, i.e., a GOD, who either created all this stuff, including us, or at the least oversaw the creation seems at least as reasonable.  So, it seems reasonable that, as early folk wondered about this question, at least some of them would have conceived of a creator—a superbeing.

But then comes religion, And that seems different in kind. Religion is really just a set of rules by which one is to live, depending on your particular view of that superbeing.  And the key to the central problem of all organized religions, is that some folks argue that they have been chosen to understand all the rules of the game.  See, that superbeing actually speaks to them, so they are able to interpret the rules of life. And, it is important to understand, that LIFE has RULES. You can’t just live your life without paying attention to God’s rules. And those “God’s Rules” thing is what makes me wonder about what life on this planet would be, without them.

So far as we know, our animal kingdom, and our insect kingdom operate largely without written rules of behavior. And typically, the critters, should they operate in violation of some actual rule of existence, will end up as someone’s lunch, or, at the least, laying in a ditch somewhere. Similarly, our various plant kingdoms seem to either thrive or wither depending on the whims of the gods of weather. Nobody instructs your daffodils on their behavior.

So, how come we humans seem to need all these “rules of behavior”.  Well, mainly, it seems to me that humans allowed to act on their own, like hummingbirds, or lions invariably seem drawn to the lion behavior pattern. That is, humans seem not drawn to behave nicely to other humans, and that forms the basis for organized religion.  Lately, we observe American humans drawn to killing machines, and, even though we do have rules of behavior that frown on humans killing other humans, many humans choose to ignore those rules of behavior, whether the rules are religious, or legal.  As humans, many of us seem to get off on killing other humans—see Vlad Putin and his gang of thugs, and all those NRA folks armed with AR-15s.

And organized religion, despite all its rules, seems completely incapable of controlling either force. So, maybe the rules of organized religion are largely intended to control other, more civilized activities, like sex, or payments to priests to keep them from frowning on us.  In any case, the many rules of religion seem not to do us much good, given their incapacity to prevent humans from killing other humans.  Instead, they focus on having fun, including those games people play with each other, called Sex.  Those “Thou Shallt Not Kill” rules seem now merely quaint.

So, maybe now might be a good time to simply switch off the rules of religion, and assume that people will be guided exclusively by the rules of our legal system—you know, if you kill someone, there is a reasonable chance you will yourself be killed, or at least locked up.  And as to those rules regarding sex, i.e., contraception, abortion, sex aimed at fun rather than more kids, maybe they should just go the way of all fairy tales.  And should the seriously religious, e.g., Amy Coney Barrett and her BFFs, object, perhaps they should just go somewhere else to live, say the North or South Poles, where they can chat it up with whales and penguins, who won’t listen to them either.

But life here might just be more pleasant for the rest of us. We could remove most of the guns in our Land, and provide everyone who wants one, some condoms to play with.  Convert all the churches to children’s playgrounds, and homes for the homeless. That would be nice. And maybe all the priests of the land could go out and get real jobs, driving trucks perhaps.  That would be useful in addition to being nice.