Christian Right

[Paul Edward Snyder]

59. Gods the Atheists Worship

Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 12:31 AM - Edit history (1)

The idea of godly entities has always intrigued me. I am deeply religious and strongly drawn to the Christian concept of the Jewish God, Yahweh. No one seems to know exactly what the word Yahweh means, except that it means something like “I am I am”, which seems redundant. I suspect its actually a startled response, something like, “It’s me!,” or “I am who I am,” suggesting the idea of a god without the company of other gods.

But, going back to the idea of gods and where it came from. Being an Evolutionist as well as being deeply religious, I suspect it had something to do with the evolution of human speech. Evolution is seldom sudden and it must have taken thousands of years for articulation to attain some semblance of coherence, but there must have been some survival value to the articulation of sound without words for it to be an advantage strong enough to develop into speech.

I suspect that the manipulation of sound became an advantage when it was used to lure prey close enough to make it the next meal. As manipulating sound became physically more precise, there may have been an attempt to call to the invisible spirits that moved the leaves of trees and whispered from the treetops. An awareness of the power of these invisible creatures may have occurred later when powerful winds (storms and tornadoes) hit and hurt.

The next step would be to try to placate (“Please do not kill me!”) these entities by attempting to figure out the sounds that would summon the murmur of seemingly benevolent entities for comfort and advantage, and other sounds to placate or divert the more powerful and destructive ones. When the sounds developed into actual words in a societal context, an attempt may have been made to discover what these invisible creatures were and how not only to understand why they did what they did, but how to communicate with them and, being human, how to manipulate them.

Worship, putting ourselves in a position of absolute submission (rolling over on our backs or prostrating ourselves on our bellies as the natural sign of submission), was an obvious response to overwhelming power, and flattery an obvious attempt to manipulate. Thus we had the power of sound to summon gods and the power of words to negotiate with these invisible beings.

The irony is that the words we created to protect us from something that does not exist have seduced us into creating other entities that do not exist, but nevertheless control our behavior so much that they could in themselves be considered deities. The words that can have such an overpowering control over our lives are societal words when they cease to be tools, and become living (though non-existent) entities.

Friendship, when it becomes more important than our friends, is one. Marriage, when it becomes more important than our spouse, is another. When Family is more important than the members of our families, Community, city, state, even country can take control of us at the expense of family, friends and countrymen, justifying even their extermination and even our own.

We, of course, can exercise our freedom, our expression of ourselves, in walking away from a friend, a spouse, a family, a community, a city, a state, a country, but to do so because a word requires it is worship just as much as the worship of Greek gods, the gods of other more recent religions, or the one god of the Judaic/Christian/ Islamic religion,

Interestingly enough, we seem powerless in their clutches, as if some inner compulsion draws us into their machinations. The only avenue to a clear view of the control words have over our attitudes and our actions, I would suggest, would be an entity with which we struggle (much as a child wrestles a parent or dances with a trusted partner); an entity that guides rather than controls us; an entity that does not encumber us with dogma or literal translations of some Sacred Text that could otherwise be helpful in guiding us in our decision making. The problem we create in this relationship is when we wrestle to win, to hurt, to bend our opponent to our will or when we draw away from our dance partner and seek to impress it/he/she with our devotion to the dance and our enthusiasm to perform perfectly (to purify), what was a shared experience.

And finally, in my opinion, it doesn't make any difference if such an entity exists or not. I can’t imagine why any deity worth worshiping would care if we believed it existed or not.

Let Atheists pretend they have no gods. It is just my opinion, of course, but I would maintain that they have lots of them.