Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Talking God

Capital G God. The big guy. Twenty thousand years ago, God was a necessary construct. Loved ones died, crops failed, there was disease, deformity, floods, earthquakes, eclipses. A whole litany of things that the scientifically unsophisticated human population was at a loss to understand or explain, let alone control. So they invented God, or more accurately, Gods. The idea was that these all powerful beings controlled everything, but they could be influenced with various offerings to act mercifully or even beneficially towards the population. Never mind that they tended to act like egotistical, spoiled children, they provided the comfort of an explanation for a world that all too often denied understanding. Fast forward a few millennia. Now it's the 21st century. We understand weather, and disease, even eclipses. And in every careful scientific study, the explanation for any given phenomena has turned out NOT to be God. Cold Fronts, bacteria, DNA, Plate Tectonics, sure, but no scientific requirement for God. So, I hear you saying, since the concept of God has survived all these years, it must still be providing something important to the humans that cling to it. Hmm, let's see. Isn't pretty much every intractable conflict in the world based upon religious intolerance? Hindu-Muslim. Catholic-Protestant. Israel-Palestine. (Hmm, ok, there's a lot more there than just religious disagreement). And the big one, the one that will continue to define our lives for the foreseeable future, Christianity-Islam. For that matter, God has never talked to me. Nope, never met the dude. But much as these supposedly advanced aliens visiting our planet in their UFOs who only reveal themselves to toothless hillbillies with a second grade education, God only seems to talk to a certain class of swindlers and grifters, whether they be Pat Robertson, the Clerics who run Iran with an iron fist, and similar others who use their special, intimate relationship with God to support their own agenda. It seems to me that the concept of God has outlived it's usefulness. It now functions as a destructive force, allowing charlatans to prey on their constituencies, governments to justify war and assassination, and children to be raised to hate. Let's at least consider the possibility that the world would be better off if we found a way to leave God in the dustbin of history.

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