Almost every culture on the planet has created gods, probably since the beginning of human consciousness. It seems like it's a natural process, to try to explain things they don't or can't understand, to have a parental figure to keep people in line, and to watch over them, etc.
There are common threads with many gods, such as immortality. But usually the individual traits of a god are made in the image of the humans imagining it.
So here is my question to you. If you were to create a new god, what would it be like? Assume that the god you'd create would be one you'd like.
Here is the god I'd make, at the moment. I'm sure this will change once I get some good ideas from all of you.
- Immortal
- Generous
- Compassionate
- Loving
- All sexes (like a hermaphrodite, but this would be conceptual more than anything) so that it would relate to all sexes
- Good and gentle sense of humor
- A parental attitude to how we live our lives - so it would let us make mistakes and grown as a civilization on our own
- Doesn't need or want to be worship
- Lets us have a clause that when we die, it will be painless (sorry, I hate the idea of suffering when we die)
- Infallible
Aspects that I am still mulling over for my god:
- Perfection - I think this might be a bit boring, to be completely perfect. I'm not sure about it. In other words, if god created everything in perfection, we wouldn't have any room to grow.
But actually, we don't need a god and I'm glad we don't have any. We've already made it past the "baby" stage in our development as a species. We can work things out for ourselves. We need to take responsibility for ourselves, and we deserve the credit for how far and fast we've advanced.
So really, the way we have it now, on our own, has worked so far. Sure, we could be less violent and destructive as a species, but overall, I don't need anything supernatural, including a supreme parental figure.
I would want a god that is open and honest. No secrets.
ReplyDeleteBut then, wouldn't everybody have next week's winning lottery numbers?
Sounds like good qualities, EM. :)
DeleteI think you can be honest, and even open, without handing the answers to someone.
For instance, I'm honest and open, but I'm not going to tell someone that I hate their new haircut. Or a god could be honest without coddling us and keeping us from living and having excitement and mystery.
I'm not sure this is a worthwhile exercise. Individually, when we are calm and collected, when we have the benefit of 6,000 year old hindsight, when we are secure enough to publish our thoughts to the world, sure, we imagine, for the sake of argument, a god such as you describe above.
ReplyDeleteBut, as a species, when we are hungry and wet and dirty and tired and terrified of the terrible flashes of light in the sky which are almost immediately followed by awful booming noises that rip right through us, when we don't understand what those lights in the night sky are, or where the sun goes at night, or why our families and villages are being decimated by illnesses we don't understand and can't fight, in those situations and even worse ones, then we imagine the gods we are all familiar with today. They provide the explanations for war and our suffering. They calm our fears and simultaneously relieve us of responsibility for our own actions.
These gods are the worst reflections of ourselves. They won't--and can't--change even as we do. They let us remember our own history without falling down in shame--God ordered that massacre, not us--and occasionally we learn something from that and progress.
I see what you're saying and I agree that the gods humans have created are the worst reflections of ourselves. Well said!
DeleteI do think that thought exercises can be helpful, though, if only to stimulate our imaginations and take a fresh look at our belief systems and worldviews.
Isn't that why we have fiction, and science fiction?
Certainly this more of an amuse-bouche than a big meal of profundity, though. :P
"My God!
ReplyDelete... it's full of stars! (did I just date myself?)"
If you did, then I'm almost the same age as my mother — assuming we're talking about a 1968 novel that came out almost two decades before my birth.
Anyway, what's so great about being immortal? It seems to me that becoming blasé and tossing floods onto your people to break the boredom might be an inevitable consequence of immortality.
Yes, it's from the last scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey, which was released in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on Clarke's short story.
DeleteI saw it about 10 years ago though.
That's a good point, Frenzie. I guess I was just thinking that a god should be the best it can be, better than humans in every way, because if it were just like us we'd just call it human or another species, etc.
So I felt that it should be immortal because we are not. My god wouldn't get bored, though. That is a human emotion (or a higher functioning vertebrate emotion, since I know my dogs get bored too). My god would also be compassionate, so killing us out of boredom would never cross its cosmic mind.