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Originally Posted by orbsycli
so let's say, hypothetically speaking...there was a god.
and this god could watch over all regions of the universe.
anyway, my opinion is, this statement is stupid and foolish. plain and simple.
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In a day when there were little groups of people in little communities separated by large distances, they had local gods that presumably kept track of local events. Very old Bronze Age stories told tales of gods getting into fights over their territories, and the winner advanced his piece on the board by giving his people a lift (farmland, hunting grounds, slaves). That set of beliefs probably had a several-million-year history by the time the big empires of the late Bronze Age began to arise and move out like army ants to consume the world around them. Now it could be the god of an entire city state, like Babylon, say, taking on the god of the Jews, Yahweh, in a fight to the finish. Beat them down; take them into exile -- that'll show that desert deity a thing or two. But then, along comes the Zoroastrian (probably carved Z into stuff on the way by) and knocks Babylon down, freeing the followers of Yaweh, who go back home confident in their victory, that He has finally prevailed. (We'll skip the Diaspora for now.)
So, what started out as a simple, country (i.e., pagan) approach to indwelling spirits only moderately bigger and badder than the people who believed in them, now had moved into the city, later the empire, and as it stands now, a very few, very big, dominant cultures with very big weapons and very big axes to grind. The hubris of the small tribe, which might affect a few hundreds in battle, is now writ large like huge graffiti across whole continents, and threatens the extinction of millions. Driven by the same competitive, murderous intent that evolved with us from the days we lived in remote villages in the Rift Valley, we went wandering in search of new places, new lives. Our wandering ancestors told their tales of victory, survival, and the triumphs of their gods, right up until the day they were wiped out by other, bigger, badder gods. And so it will be someday still ahead of us,
as the deadlier legacy of our DNA emerges once again to prove that our god is bigger than theirs. Who knows? Maybe he is - or so we'll think, if there are enough of us left to appreciate it. Till then, we'd just better hunker down, hold hands, build bombs, make babies, cover our eyes to keep out the light, and cry, "God bless America!"
(OK - that one got away from me a bit... you never can foresee just where these will end up when you start out.)
