Option 2?

“If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.”

 - Volaire

So, don’t mistake this as a purely metaphysical argument.

The question of what the gods are, where they come from, is from my admittedly peculiar perspective, a practical one.  It’s an important question, though I’m not going to elaborate on the reasons.

Someone gave me a different explanation from the one I was exploring last time, however, so, let’s explore that a bit.

How about, instead of some sort of non-linear time historical palimpsest model, we accept that all of that there is only one god, who made everything, and all the other pantheons are based on, at the best, misinformation.

Now, that said, there are beings that we *think* are gods.  They’re really more like… demons or fallen angels?  Or both?  I’m not clear on the details, but the point is that even if they aren’t what we think they are (or what humanity has historically thought of them), they exist and have some kind of power.  They want (more?) power (over us?) and worship (which, I guess, is the same thing they would want if they are ‘real’ gods?), but they lie, they don’t need to have experiences any of the history attributed to them.  I suppose in theory they don’t need to stick to a particular role, either?  “I’m, errr… Vishnu, yeah, that guy.”

Now I don’t think we can necessarily relate this creator god directly to the Christian “God”, because then we’re stuck with all the well known science-versus-religion debates.  Evolution, age of the earth, etc etc.  While I’m willing to accept that the Rules (science) don’t have to apply to gods (or whatever) in particular, I think they still need to apply to the physical world.  Other things can also be true, or true-ish, but I’m not really willing to junk all of science.  This has some implications about the special-snowflake status of humanity, and if someone really wants (Or, since I am sure no one else really reads this, if I ever feel inclined), I could elaborate, possibly.  However I will say that if you are going to create a world and set up rules for it to work by, why would you make them in a way that counter proof of your own existence?  And don’t give me that ‘the devil made dinosaur bones to lead us away from God’ crap.  The devil, or the demons, would have to have been really busy in the last 4000 years to successfully fake all the data that we’ve got now, and while there is missing data and different interpretations, there isn’t enough legitimate discrepancy for me to believe that this has been ongoing with no opposition.  Unless god sucks at science, or is incapable of countering the actions of the opposition, propositions which seem equally implausible.

So rants aside, according to this theory there is one god.  We don’t know very much about it, or, possibly lots of things we know about it are wrong.  I don’t know if I am supposed to believe the same sorts of thing in this scenario – that humanity is somehow responsible for the gods who then exist retroactively.  It can’t be true, because then we surely would have come up with more than one (or, it *can* be true and we *have* come up with more than one, this paradigm is just better developed in a way to discredit opposition…  Which just returns us to the previous theory).  So if this god exists, it has to be responsible for doing a lot more, and yet at the same time has been terribly unsuccessful at making sure it gets proper credit.  Since you know, until the past…600 years, only a pretty small faction of people knew about this ‘one god’ theory, and those who knew have mostly been fighting with each other over who has got it right. 

So…  one God whose ability to interfere in the human world is quite limited, then?  And who somewhat ironically needs to rely on humans to spread word of its existence to the rest of the world that it created?  However we have already established that what we know about it is mostly wrong…  So maybe it doesn’t particularly care what is thought about it?  Or else the opposing ‘demons’ as a group have been more successful in their efforts to thwart it?  They are more powerful as a group, if not individually?  Hard for god to oppose so many enemies?  I stand by my observations re: science however. 

If any of that is true, then god certainly can’t be omnipotent.  And we don’t know anything about what it its interest are in humanity (if any), and what its relationship to us is.  My grammar is horrible, please forgive me.  It seems like it is more interested in opposing the actions of its rivals (demons) than doing anything for humanity specifically.  But I don’t know what the demons are doing to merit this particular attention, other than setting themselves up as ‘false’ gods.

If this is a fight over humans, then I don’t think that god, if it exists, has ever been fighting from a position of strength.  There have always, to my knowledge, been more people who believe in other religions than Christians (who can’t have it all right as regards their own God anyway).  Christianity, and even Judaism, is not the oldest known religion.  It seems off to me.  Honestly I’ve been an atheist for a while, and nothing I have learned recently has really got me thinking that this god is Right, or the only one.  It makes more sense to me that there are many gods, if there have to be any.  Apparently, there does.

Whatever the context, I don’t know anyone’s motives.  There is just fighting.  I’m really not much of a fighter, so it is hard to figure out where I should be fitting in to any of this. 

I have more semi coherent thoughts, but I’m running out of steam.  Is it time to sleep?  It just might be…

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

- Richard Dawkins