SOME QUESTIONS ON GOD/GODS

Salutations dear readers,

Today in the being human blog will be discussing about God and deities. Whether you believe in them or not, Deities are very important part of the human condition. So I am going to talk about God/ Gods.

DISCLAIMER: God is a very controversial topic and this blog post can create a stir. In this blog post, I will take no sides meaning I will not take one side or one faith’s beliefs. The reason for making this post is to just make you think about your beliefs and God’s position in society

I do not intend to criticize any religion or faith. I myself is a theist and do believe in God, so I apologize in advance if any comments or phrases in this post might sound offensive towards your faith.

Also I am not going to explain all about God/Gods and other deities, I am just going to discuss some few questions I asked myself about God/Gods. You can leave comments on your views in the comment section below.

BTW I am going to use the word “deity” a lot. For those who don’t know the meaning of deity. It means a being with supernatural powers. It is usually means Gods, angels and sometimes spirits.

So let’s jump in

WHICH ONE?

You might ask, “what does he mean by “which one”?”. What it means whether you like it or not, there are more than one God/Gods in human cultures and I want to specify that in this post I won’t only talk about the God in Abrahamic religions i.e. Christianity, Islam and Judaism but I will also try to incorporate deities from other faiths. So in this blog post, God/Gods implies a range of deities from Zeus in the Greek pantheon to Yahweh from the Abrahamic religions to Brahma from Hinduism to Amaterasu from Shintoism and many more. So take that in mind as we go further in this blog post.

DO WE HUMANIZE GOD?

The ancient Greeks were a peculiar group of people at their time. At a time where most other peoples had abstract visions on their deities, these people modeled and shaped their pantheon after human beings. We have all seen a movie with the Greek gods and we all know the stories about the Greek gods. Their gods would have human emotions and they even had human flaws and even committed what most considered as sins. Gods like Zeus and Aphrodite were even involved in actions like adultery.

Most must find this weird and peculiar because most faiths don’t do this with their God/Gods but all religious faiths give deities human characteristics. Maybe in some religions like Christianity, God is not an adulterer but God does have human characteristics. We say things like “God is loving” or “God is jealous” or “God is angry” and many more. These are all human characteristics.

In Genesis 1:27 of the Christian Bible there is the line, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”. But in reality we humans have created our God/Gods in our own image.

You might find this preposterous but it’s very true but why is this?, why do we give our deities human characteristics? There are many theories on this. In Reza Aslan’s book “God: A human history”, the author deduces that when man entered the Agricultural revolution the more man gave God human characteristics since that’s when man started to control nature, they started to assume that if we, man control nature then our God/Gods will have to be similar to us.

There are many other theories about this phenomenon where we give deities human characteristics but one stands out for me is the one involving QUALIA or experience.

Qualia is term that implies to all the sensations and all things an organism can experience. Qualia includes sensory information, imagination, thinking, emotion and pleasure. So things like your thinking capacity, your emotions and imagination are all part of your qualia.

What makes qualia interesting is that qualia has a limit depending on species or even individual. Like a monkey’s thinking capacity is different from the one of a human being or bees can see more in the electromagnetic spectrum compared to humans or pigs have an emotion that humans do not. Qualia has a limit. So in this theory, the assumption is that humans cannot perceive God/Gods without putting them in terms they can understand.

Just imagine in most creation myths, God/Gods created the universe and all the laws that govern it from their imagination. These beings can manipulate forces of nature so grand we cannot comprehend. God/Gods most likely do not feel angry or jealous or happy but it’s humans who have given God/Gods these characteristics so that their small brains can understand them. It’s hard to imagine and comprehend the feelings of beings who are supposed to be multitudes more powerful than us, so we just gave them human characteristics so we can understand them. This is a very interesting theory.

What do you think? Do you think we humanize deities in our stories? Leave a comment in the comment section

ARE THE GODS DYING?

When I ask “Are the Gods dying?”, I am not asking if they are literally dying. What I mean is “Are more people losing faith in God/Gods?”. “How does that even correspond to the first question?”, you may ask. They correspond because the power of any deity is found in the number of people who believe in that deity. So if people stop believing in God/Gods, these deities literally lose their power or die.

I come from a very religious nation and the concept of atheism or non-affiliation is considered demonic or total evil. When some people here talk about nations with a small population of atheists, they make it sound as if the whole nation is a non-religious mess. That got me thinking are people actually losing belief in God/Gods. Are we heading to a religion-less future? Are the Gods dying?

The answer is actually NO and YES. The number of people affiliated with religion is actually growing. Islam has the highest growth rate. Islam is expected to grow by 70% and even other religions are growing. The world is more religious than ever. More and more people believe in a God or Gods.

But the number of people who do not believe in God/Gods has increased too. Continents like Europe and nations like the USA which were once beacons of unweathering faith now have large populations of non-religious people. Look at the illustration below

This shows what percentage of the population in Western European nations are unaffiliated. The Netherlands has the highest number of people that is approximately 8,160,000 people with no religious affiliation.

I also said that the world is the more religious now than ever before but I meant in terms of population but God/Gods are becoming less and less part of some our lives whether you like to admit it or not. When my Maasai ancestors became sick, they most likely went to pray to Engai first before anything else but when I get sick my first option is to go seek medical attention. I might pray but most of us believe in the work of modern medicine more.

Most people wouldn’t like to admit it but for most God/Gods is drifting off from us. I tried to discover why. I ended up coming up with some theories.

The first one is the Scientific Revolution. Not song long ago, humans weren’t sure about the basic principles of nature. Then science came by. Science worked on the basis on criticizing current theories using science experiments. Science ends up providing answers that are close to correct. This created a sense of assurance. Man started to believe in science more.

Instead of believing that disease is caused by demons or bad air or miasma, we instead got the concrete answer of  germ theory. I believe this sense of assurance may have created a drift between man and God/Gods.

The second one might cause a stir than the first one. In his book “Sapiens”, Doctor Yuval Harari explains that man believes in many myths including God/Gods. Some other myths humans believe in include capitalism, the monetary system, nations etc. So where am I going with this. This theory declares that modern humans have dedicated their lives on the other myths more than God/Gods or in other words we have been slowly replacing God/Gods with other myths.

Sounds scary, preposterous or even blasphemous but it has an element of truth. Take me for example or any modern teenager for example. We spend most of our lives in school so as to get jobs or so that we self-employ ourselves. Why do we do this? It is because we now serve the god, CAPITALISM.

Another example can be that in the period of 200 years from 1095 to 1291 AD , European Christians fought to conquer the Holy land for Jesus Christ, their lord but it’s different now. Today as we speak, Vladimir Putin is attacking the nation of Ukraine because he serves the god, NATIONALISM and the nation of RUSSIA. The myth of NATIONALISM seems to replace God/Gods when it come to modern warfare.

It might anger some that a teenage boy declares that they worship the capitalist system more than Shiva or Ahura Mazda but it’s just a theory and it has an element of truth.

What do you think? Do you think that the Gods are dying? Leave a comment on your views.

CONCLUSION

When it comes to God/Gods, a lot can be spoken about the subject. I hesitated to write or post this blog post, so I chose to find answers to questions I had about God/Gods. The questions above are not the only questions I have about deities but I find some very offensive.

I hope this blog post made you think about deities and might even cause you to ask more questions about them.

I also hope I did not offend anyone’s religion. If you like today’s blog post, please tell your friends and comment on your take on the subject matter.