Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Words Of The Gods

Stories
Most very old stories and myths don’t attempt to have any kind of moral lesson.  A powerful being is either angered or satiated by the acts of humans.  After awhile the humans learn at least what they should be doing to not anger the powerful god.  They still make mistakes, usually when it has been a long time since the powerful one was angered.  Sometimes it is the next generation that hasn’t had plagues fall upon its head that once more makes the mistakes of not doing the correct rituals or sacrifices.  This sounds like kids today.  They don’t listen and want to make their own mistakes before they learn from them.  But they know what they should do, they are told by their parents what this is.  Whether they do it or not is different from being inundated with the idea of what is harmful and safe and, after many generations, what is right and wrong, good and bad.  This is not the the legacy god, but of people.

Gods
But where did these powerful beings come from?  Zeus, Jehovah, Allah, The Creator, Vishnu?  Where they created by humans to explain the unexplainable things: rainstorms, droughts, earthquakes, coincidence?  Are they representations of aliens that visited us in the past? Is there one true god with many different names?  Let’s forget this question for a moment.  The answers range from silly to impossible to ever know.  Whatever powerful being, or human imagination that told us what we should do created what we think of as good and bad, but we don’t think of these actions as being things we are forced to do, orders from a master to slave, but things that are morally better.  Is this how good and bad should be created and defined?  The preferences of an all powerful being or beings?  What we do becomes good, what we don't becomes bad.

Morality
Our morality is not based on the word of god.  Or rather, the words of the gods are seeds.  From it grows a tree.  The Tree of Morality, that is us alone.  A dog learns what is the rules, what they should do and shouldn’t do.  When they do what they should do, they get rewarded with a “good dog” and a pat and they feel better.  When they transgress they are told “bad dog” and are punished with a stern tone of voice or worse.  Where did we learn this?  The words came from the gods, the meaning is our own.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the thoughts. My Atheist father and Catholic mother sent me to Catholic school for 1st through 7th grades, complete with Religious Studies every morning and class trips to Church on holy days.

    We were constantly taught about doing good as it was God's will and/or a way not to be punished. We were never encouraged to do good simply for the sake of good, or out of love & compassion for our fellow human...and certainly not ever because doing good feels good.

    Today I'm somewhere in between agnostic and atheist, and if there is a God, I don't think I'd be in trouble for this.

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