I believe that rather than God having created humans in “his” image as claims Genesis in the Bible (we will talk about God’s gender in a minute), it is the opposite. Humans have created God in their image. And my best bet is that they have done so to soothe themselves from the disturbing thought that the world has no rhyme or reason. But before we go any further, I want to highlight how much wrong there is in the sentence “God created man in his image”. For one, why the male gender for both? The answer comes from the fact that most religions have been invented by men for men. Words matter, my friends. So please try to change the pronouns you use when referring to God: they, them.
In today’s podcast episode, I explore the difference between monotheism and polytheism.
On the one hand we have the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that all worship a single God. On the other hand, you have Indian religions, Iranian religions and East Asian religions, that worship multiple Gods. If you look at all these religions from my premise that humans have invented God in their image, the fact that a religion worships one God or more, doesn’t really matter. In my opinion, the only difference is that in one case the single God will reflect the complexity of the human personality whereas if we worship multiple Gods, each one is likely to reflect one aspect. No offence meant to religious people. But I guess the point I am making is that I don’t see any valid reason for the monotheist to look down upon the polytheists as less evolved, because it’s the same. What is rather disturbing is that the monotheists usually claim that if you don’t follow their god, you will go to hell. I am not aware that polytheists threaten people in the same way.
In the episode, I talked about the main twelve Gods of the Greek Pantheon, and observed that the roles assigned to these gendered Gods and Goddesses reinforced the social roles of their time, be it in a divine feminine and masculine way, which resonates with the episode I did about why I do not use the terms divine feminine and masculine. To me it’s nothing more than a patriarchal model, that has been handed down through the centuries and sadly espoused by the New Age movement, thereby continuing the bias.
Emile Durkeim seems to agree with my theory that humans have invented God as an extension of human life. Matt Rossano adds an interesting dimension to this debate. He believes that humans have invented God to enforce moral values. He claims that whilst humans lived in small groups of people, morality was easier to establish due to social pressures like gossip and reputation, but that the larger the groups, the more difficult that was to maintain. As a lawyer, I am hoping that law does this better than religion, although arguably, laws do not deal with morals as much as religion does.
If you would like to listen to the episode, click here.
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