Thor's Day: What is your religion?

By Ed Rogers

Who, or what, is your god? On Tuesday last week I read, for the first time in several weeks, an article written by my dear friend Moto [Paul Calhoun]—his column  "Bah! Humbug!" He has always had a mythical approach toward being a vegan. Having been away from Paul’s writings for a few weeks, "Bah! Humbug!" opened my eyes to what I believe Voltaire said, “If there were no god, man would invent one.”

What happened since then?

Today a friend wrote and said unto me:

While reading this (from your "A history not of God, but of the idea of God" post)...

..."create a sense of him for myself." For several months now I have much enjoyed the freedom from any such sense whatsoever. If it's "obvious" to some that God exists, it's just as obvious to me that there's no such X.

...I remembered you used to believe in "the goddess," a concept you had arrived at yourself. So at least up until or at that time, I can only imagine you must've had some sense that there was some kind of "higher being." What happened since then?

And what I wrote back and said unto her I would like to share with all readers of this blog:

I realized that I was wrong. Before that, I was still laboring under the apprehension that there might be "God," and I preferred to think of her rather than of him (or it). The goddess was also my way of thumbing my nose at the he-god people. But over the course of time I realized that there seemed to be no little justification for going the full monty and thumbing my nose at the whole god concept. Not that thumbing my nose was the object, but I do admit seeming to need to go through such a phase. I think I resented how most of world civilization seems to have conspired to foist god-belief onto everyone, from the cradle.

The real advantage of throwing over the god concept is that I no longer have to bear the burden of its baggage. Everything is much simpler, sort of à la Occam's (or Ockham's) razor. It seems more and more obvious to me that most theological constructions (which can become church dogmas) are attempts to apologize for (in this context, that means create rationalizations for believing) things that seem pretty far-fetched (if not downright stupid or even immoral, such as animal sacrifice, not to even mention various shameful practices regarding slaves and women, the latter being considered a sort of slave themselves, or at least a class of property belonging to men).

"The heathen followers of the god Baal"

When I referred in Tuesday's post to "the heathen followers of the god Baal," I didn't put "god" in quotation marks. I usually don't, even though I try to remember to put capitalized "God" in quotes. I think I've established well enough that I never mean to use either "god" or "God" to suggest that I believe there are gods or a God. (Nor, I think, did Tom Sheepandgoats mean to imply, when he said in his post "Elijah Crashes..." that the priests of Baal attempted "to persuade their god to consume the offering," that he believed Baal actually existed, for Tom is very much a monotheist.)

In the phrase "the heathen followers of the god Baal," "god" is clearly understood to refer to an entity (called "Baal") whom the said followers believed to exist (and to affect their lives in various ways, and even to deserve, if not demand—on some pain or other, to be worshiped)—even though we all agree now that such an entity did not exist (except in the imaginations of said followers). As Richard Dawkins reminds us,

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.

But many still believe in the monotheistic god of the Abramaic religions, variously labeled "Yahweh," "Jehovah," "Allah," or simply "God." And non-denominational (or New Age) labels like "Creator" seem to have the same reference, but without most of the Talmudic, Biblical, and Koranic baggage. They're atheists too about some of the theological attributes, but theists about the imagined deity's active concern for the planet.

I guess there are still polytheists on the planet, but both notheists (atheists) and monotheists have in common that they are both atheists about Baal and other "heathen gods."