The flaw with gods, as an explanation for the drama of life, is that they are pictured as separate forces working for conflicting goals, and that one can conclusively overcome another. Such is naturally how man’s mind would devise the scene, but it contains an error that makes a comprehensive overview impossible. All peoples of the planet, from the onset of their various histories, paint verbal realms of a life behind/beyond/above that of man’s visible one. Beings more powerful than man play out their individual lives in struggles which ultimately determine the kind of lives men experience.
Man’s mind has always seen human life to be endlessly replete with things that seem inexplicable; acts of man which by any ordinary mental measure appear irrational, unjustified, detrimental and self-defeating, and the mind is at a loss to make sense of the constant danger and unexpectedness this presents. Thus, the mythologies of gods enacting prototype lives of man on a larger, unseen stage, which enables mind to maintain the obviously needed sensation that although man has freedom of will, oftimes overwhelming forces drive him to unplanned acts.
To most, this scenario has and continues to, play well. Behavior which someone finds abhorrent is explained by a momentary success of some evil god over their deemed good one. Simply blaming the doer of the deed is unsatisfying, and in place of the term, gods, you may insert: unseen economic or political forces. But ‘tis all the same mirage. This approach to analyzing life, while commonly accepted, is fatally flawed for those with an uncommon hunger.
Regardless of whether the sobriquets employed reflect deific, political, or economic forces, the above perspective renders the infinite fabric of life unrecognizable due to mind’s need to see connected, cooperative systems in terms of discrete, competing components. As a ridiculous example, (to highlight the case), the mind would see the mouth and the stomach to be in conflict. What the former happily takes in – the latter immediately starts to destroy. Similarly does mind picture god-X, (representing this-or-that feature of human temperament), as a separate being from god-Y, (who reflects some other aspect of mortal nature), when no such separation exists.
Life, the universe, reality is seamless, and while the mental picture of behind-the-scenes, battling forces present to thought a tolerable facsimile of an explanation, (not surprising, since thought devised it), believing that particular, mentally labeled “parts” of life can be somehow separate from the totality of life via their actions, which yours or someone’s mind condemns, establishes in ordinary consciousness such a fractured concept of life, that those with exceptional expectations will forever be disappointed.
J.