Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Isis,
Ra, Osiris, Wotan, Thor, and Freya are just
some of the gods of the ancient world; people
used to worship and pray to them then as people
worship and pray to their gods today. Were they
any less real? What happened to them? Did they
die off and cease to exist with their worshippers?
Were they pensioned-off to other planets? Or
were they, perhaps, mental creations of their
worshippers, fulfilling a psychological need?
If so, then they had no objective existence
at all.
One religion
claims that God said: "Let us make man
in our image, according to our likeness"
(Genesis 1:26, of the Bible); but maybe it was
the other way around: that man has created God
in his image. This is known as anthropomorphism,
that is, ‘with human form’. People
endowed the supernatural—or what they
thought of as such, because they didn’t
understand the forces or laws of Nature—with
human attributes, such as form, and emotions
such as love, hate, anger, jealousy, favoritism,
etc., and then proceeded to worship it. They
attempted to put a limit on the Limitless, but
only succeeded in limiting themselves thereby.
So now they are stuck with a human-like God
of their own making, necessitating further fantastic
mental gymnastics in order to make facts fit
the concept. |
