The Invention of God: The Beginnings

God is man himself hoping for the best while living in a cruel and impersonal world.

The history of man is the history of the rise of God, propounded by man, made powerful by man, created by man. The great French philosopher Voltaire once said that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." And boy did man invent God. Across the centuries a panoply, indeed, a pantheon of gods rose and fell, from the intrigue ridden gods of Ancient Greece to the gloomy, vengeful, almost neurotic god of the Abrahamic traditions to the 230 million all-purpose gods of the Hindu faith, man created a concept that will shape his history and has shaped its history for the last 5,000 years and is undoubtedly continuing to shape man's history.

For all the talk about god, there is always one thing that comes apparent - god shares many characteristics, qualities, even attitudes of man. Indeed, the Judeo-Christian tradition insists that we were made in the image and likeness of god, and by that alone, then the Judeo-Christian God is a sinful , frail , weak god. Man is sinful, frail and weak. The absolutist bent of the Abrahamic god reminds me not of a transcendent, supernatural, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god but a crazed, power-grabbing, megalomaniac middle eastern dictator of the likes of Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad or even the gruesomely tyrannical Joseph Stalin or the bloodletting Adolf Hitler or for a classical bent, the insanely macabre Emperor Nero.

At best, the Abrahamic god is nothing more than a vain, moody, jealous, unreasonable, really psychotic god who vacillates between giving life to the dead to encouraging genocide, the murder of prostitutes, adulterers, homosexuals and those who work on Sundays. It would be safe to say that the Abrahamic traditions is psychosis on steroids perpetuated on a mass-scale that would be the envy of Adolf Hitler.

Bertrand Russel once said that "Religion is a defensive reaction against the destructive forces of nature." At an earlier time in the evolution of man, there was a daily struggle to literally live through the night. Man can only be said to be really, really afraid of the world around him. The uncertainty of finding the next meal and the certainty that one could be some wild animals meal was paramount and governed his life, his existence and his psychological construct. There must be something that is over and above all the feebleness of life, as Shakespeare would say in Macbeth, "Life is but a walking shadow, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The invention of god was not only inevitable, it would have been virtually necessary to make sense of the world around him, of his life, of his mental well-being.

The invention of God began with the invention of myths. Joseph Campbell in the book The Power of Myth  described myths as clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life, these spiritual potentialities were the seeds that sprang the rise of the god concept. As a secular humanist, I no longer believe in a spiritual nature in the sense of being connected to a higher being or the existence of any consciousness apart from man (until of course disproved by science at a later time), but rather, I define spirituality as man's quest to make sense  of the world, in a way, it is a search for meaning. However, Campbell continues to say that myths are not the search for meaning but the experience of meaning. Which I might add, is finding meaning in the experiences of life. Which goes to say that it is still a way to search for meaning. For as man searches for his meaning, he experiences life and makes meaning out of it.

The great French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre says that man is thrown into the world and that it is up to him to find that meaning. Man creates his meaning, as Sartre would put it. He alone is responsible for the meaning he attaches to his life. The invention of god is the making of meaning of man's existence. Without the god-concept and without the benefit of science and mathematics, man in his infancy had to do with myths. This is man protecting his psycho-emotional state. This is what Russell meant when he said that "religion is a defensive reaction against the destructive forces of nature."

The invention of god gave man meaning, purpose and anchor in what Thomas Hobbes called the "short, poor, nasty, brutish and solitary" life of man. God is man externalized, empowered, certain, in-control, powerful, eternal, and enabled. From a sense of utter lawlessness in the steppes of Africa from which man rose to preeminence of the world to the struggle to find a sense of meaning - the god-concept had to be invented.

A Youtube video entitled "God's God" perfectly, succinctly, and comprehensively captures the gist of what the business of god-making is all about.