The Gods of Men
Posted: Saturday, June 19, 2010
by Randy Vaughan
Regarding our short time on this planet:
We're here. We know that. We simply haven't a clue how we got here. Yes, one can extrapolate this or that from so-called evidence and insist we evolved. Another will examine the same evidence and conclude it proves creation. And still others will deduce we're nothing more than the product of aliens from other galaxies who popped by and tampered with the DNA of primates. Left unclear, of course, is where primates came from.
It was Voltaire, if memory serves, who gave us "In the beginning God created man, and man returned the favor." As is often the case these days, however, this may have been relegated to the status of "urban legend". He was correct, however, at least up to the point that man didn't stop with the creation of just one god. No, man, in all his amazing arrogance, had to whip up several.
One such god man decided he needed was government, rulers, leaders, for no more noble of a reason then humans decided to live together in groups, in "societies," and they stupidly agreed that all needed a some "one" or some "group" to "be in charge". This follows quite naturally from man's initial domestication of animals. Something that seems so harmless proved to have tragic results simply because it introduced man to the notion of "private property". So from two seemingly innocuous notions-the domestication of animals and private property-came the perceived need for the great god of government, of control.
The end result was that they themselves were now seen and treated as just so much "property" and in desperate need of their own "domestication". The word applied in the case of humans, of course, was "civilized".
Another of these gods was organized religion. Not content with their intuitive sense of wonder and awe at the universe in which they found themselves-and after seeing the success that "government" had at controlling and domesticating the human animal as well as four-legged critters-it was decided man needed yet more "leaders" and "rulers" to guide and teach them in these "spiritual" matters. Put this way: Humans continued to demonstrate enormous intellectual suicide by ignoring their own intuitive understandings and choosing not only to believe, but believe in, other humans who had no more actual experience with, and knowledge of, the unseen (perhaps un-seeable), than themselves.
And if it matters, you could argue that humans created, turned to, and accepted this "religious" authority first, then "civil". Either way, man had created his own special destiny from which there would be no escape. Humans were now of two classes: Those accepted as being vital and necessary to control, govern, and lead, and, of course everyone else.
The next god took longer to create. This is the great god of business. No, I'm not talking about the older and certainly more noble practice barter and early commerce. The village smithy, for example, would charge a few cents to fix up your horse or maybe accept a couple of bushels of potatoes. Indeed, men understand, even if intuitively so, the acceptance of an even exchange of goods for services and services for goods. This is one of the few gods, however, with a specific name: Inc.
It is also the only god created to be a "person"! Can you believe it? Only man is creative enough, ingenious enough, and self-destructive enough to create a "god" and then demote it to the level of a "person".
One could argue that the best incarnation of this Inc.-god is the great god called Wal-Mart. You and I see the buildings everyday, see the people who work for this god, but the truth, the reality (not that many care about such things) is that Wal-Mart is a name on a piece of paper, brought into existence by nothing more than the stroke of a legalistic pen, assigned the designation of a "legal fiction," a "person" with all the privileges and benefits of a "real" person, and allowed to engage in business and commerce.
Unlike a "real" person, however, the gods of Inc. (yes, no monotheism here, thank you very much) were created for one reason only: To make all the money possible, amass all the profits imaginable for those who worship this god, those humans called stockholders and shareholders. All else Inc. accomplishes is a far distant second-place, a mere by-product of having been created to amass wealth.
And it's this god, Inc., that begins to hint at the truth of all the gods of men, the one essence shared among them all. But moving on.
The fourth god also has a name and this god is clearly the Supreme Deity of all the gods men have created. This god goes by the name of "Time".
And now comes the painful and tragic truth of these gods:
None exist.
That's right: None exist and yet each, and all, and each and all in possible combinations, wield almost total control over our lives.
Show me "government," this one or that across the ocean. I defy you. You can show me buildings and lots of people acting in the name of "government". But you can't slap a government, kill a government, hold a government, wrap it and put it under a Christmas tree.
It doesn't exist, does it?
And yet people "pledge allegiance" to governments, kill and die on behalf of a government. They do all these things for a nonexistent entity that can never return their love, devotion, or loyalty.
Repeat the previous and substitute the word "religion".
And do so with the great god Inc.
And "time" is, after all and in the wonderful words of Mr. Stephen Hawking, absolutely nothing more than "the measure of the movement of matter through space."
You and I can see the "matter"-like that 18-wheeler that just ran the red light-and we can see the "space" involved: He's going to ram you in about three car-lengths. But it was man who created the god Time in order to more easily express the relationship between that distance and the big-truck. I.E., the "measure of the movement of that truck as it covers the distance of those three cars" gives you just enough "time" to scream very loudly before the impact.
And so, boys and girls, here we are, living in a world dominated and controlled by gods, each created by some humans for the sole reason and purpose of domesticating and controlling the rest of us. They insist we obey and pledge allegiance to a "government" and that we worship their own version of a "god" of this organized religion or that. They really don't care which, you see, just as long as we play along.
And our lives are expected to be arranged around the work we do for "business" and that everything is about the "time" we spend at this labor or getting ready for that labor or finishing up yet more labor so we can prepare to do it all over again.
The newest religion, by the way, is called "Science". This one may be the most clever of all. You find that many who believe this god, as well as believing in it, vehemently deny the existence of those gods of religion. It's all rather comical actually, that one who finds fault for another for believing, and believing in, something will insist that his god, the object of what he both believes and believes in, is "different" in some way, better.
Those who don't believe in the gods of organized religion created fancy words to describe conflict, death, destruction, and war carried out in the name of the gods of religion. They call it things like the "crusades" and the "inquisition".
The same, or more, conflict, death, destruction, and war carried out in the name of the god of government and with the help of science is usually called progress.
By now you should've extrapolated what the two more of these gods are. First, there's the ever-popular and enduring god called War. Now that's a stupid idea for a god if ever there was one but men have been worshipping at the feet of this guy from the very beginning. Men love to say things that, in their own ears, sound succinct, pithy, profound, and true, things like "War is the only way to have peace." It's old, corny, but true nonetheless that "killing for peace" makes as much sense as "screwing for virginity".
And last but certainly not least, the god who has grown so in popularity the last few decades that it probably has more true worshippers than all the others combined. Meet the god men call Money. As with war, men will say all sorts of things to convince themselves they don't worship Money, things like "money can't buy happiness". But oh how they worry when they don't have it. At the same time, they can't be faulted too badly for this. Money, you see, really has become THE god above all the others and, trust me on this one, it's an exercise in total futility when you try to convince the worshippers of Money that their god, like all the others, doesn't exist.
You see, that's the problem with non-existent gods. They need not exist, have life and being as you and I, for them to still be "real". It's nothing more complicated than the fact that people believe them to be, believe in them, that makes them real. There is the reality in which we live, the mundane of simple empirical interpretation, experience, and understanding. There is also the reality we impose upon ourselves, and others, through what we believe, the gods we create for ourselves and subsequently try to impose on others.
These gods demand not only worship, but obedience as well. And it is exactly here that you can see the duplicity of humans at work. Now I'm uncertain if this subterfuge was either well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided or tacitly deliberate. You see, those few humans who speak for these gods, act in the name of and on behalf of these gods, wanted desperately to not be seen as "bad" humans but, at the same time, they truly wanted to have control over others, to be seen as "authority figures," to be feared, if not "worshipped," for having a kind of "power" over everyone else.
So to avoid this quagmire of wanting it both ways, humans invented what might well be the most high and mighty god of all: Free Will. One would not be incorrect to elevate "free will" to the highest of all deities man created since it becomes the ultimate out, the common thread in the twisted tapestry the defines man's time on this planet.
Now if by "free will" you mean "free to choose," yes, I'll play along with that. You're free to choose vanilla or chocolate ice cream. But if you're offered the choice between vanilla and strawberry and you'd rather die than gag on strawberry and if that person making the offer knows you loathe strawberry? Well, that's hardly a "choice," now is it?
Now if you're talking about true "will," such as birds flying south in the winter or bears hibernating because indeed that is their "will," their "instincts," you've now painted yourself into a corner. You're left with an inherent self-contradiction: That of man's so-called "will" (the suggestion that he has an innate predisposition to act in predetermined ways, in accord with his "nature," ways that are beyond his control) being "free from" that very natural proclivity whatsoever. In short, you're left with a bird sitting on a telephone wire, slowly freezing to death while having no desire to either fly away or stay put.
In essence, a "will" that is "free" from a natural inclination to act one way or the other is, again, a contradiction in terms.
And if "free will" means only that our "choices" are "free from" external influences, I'm left wondering why there is so much babbling about being "tempted" by the devil and "tested" by God, and so forth. But man doesn't live in a world free "from" external influences, does he?
No, there are all those gods intervening and placing constant demands on our lives. Remove the pressure of "Time" demanding we get out of bed and what we'd "choose" would be to stay in bed for another hour or two. We wouldn't devote so much of our "Time" to working for "Money," much of which we "must" pay to "Government" out of the fear of going to jail. Humans kill other humans because refusal to obey "Military" will get you into serious trouble.
No, humans do not live in a world free "from" external influences so even if we are "free" to "choose," those "choices" are, in varying degrees, made for us. The only "freedom" we have in the matter is the degree to which we are willing to suffer the consequences for our refusal to obey.
And you certainly must see that our obedience is the one commonality among all these gods, the one thing demanded by all who presume to speak in the name of, and act on behalf of, these gods. They care less if we "worship" them, like them or hate them: But you will obey or you will suffer the consequences!
And the self-appointed messiahs, gurus, leaders, "authority figures" are granted this luxury of having it both ways because people believe in the god of Free Will. You do not "have" to pay your taxes. You are "free" to refuse, you know. Oh, but if you do refuse, do not pay, "choose" to disobey, well, you will be thrown into jail and everything for which you've worked will be taken away. But still, you really are "free" to not obey.
And maybe I'm wrong for trying to assign "supremacy" to any of these gods simply because when I reduced everything I've observed about the human condition to its simplest observation, perhaps "Stupid" really is the god of all gods that men have. This one, however, isn't one created by human will or the perception of human need: "Stupid" came into being by default. So preoccupied with the creation of all these other gods, human failed to see what they were doing to themselves, their lives, their involvement and interaction with each other.
It didn't take long for them to see that their world was out of control. And then began thoroughly incoherent babblings about "change". Yes, all agreed at every step of the way that "it," "things," the "world," the "system" needed to change. And yet nothing substantial ever changed, now did it?
Why is that?
It's because while talking at great lengths, boring lengths, all they truly accomplished was to confuse a true ability to "change" those external influences making their lives miserable (external influences they themselves had created) with another trait, that of the ability to "adapt". So while paying great homage to the notion of "changing" their external world, what humans really do, generation after torpid generation, is "adapt" to the madness, the insanity, the willing obedience to their gods, not one of which has the best interest of humans in mind.
You see, contrary to how loudly some humans love to protest, the species is indeed one driven by a compulsion of faith. They are going to have "faith" in something, faith in the people they love, faith in any conceivable combination of their gods, faith in "government," in "country" (there's a god I overlooked.), in their "religions," in their "military," and so forth. But you have to know that humans are going to place their faith somewhere.
I'm sorry that humans have proven themselves to be far more stupid than I ever wanted to believe. Don't misunderstand: For the most part they have big hearts and are capable of so much good and love that this, and this alone, provides the balance they need to prevent their total self-destruction. But I've been watching and participating in this insanity for a long, long "Time," meaning I've seen lots of moons and sunrises and sunsets. I've come to accept the truth of "Two legs bad, four legs good." Four-legs are content to be; two legs are content with nothing at all.
So my own intuition tells me that if one has the courage, the tenacity, and the determination to resist and fight to the furthest degree possible all those gods of men, that he will come face-to-face with what must be the only "real" "God" behind it all. In short: I'm placing my faith in, and betting on, true "Nothing". Every man-made god has, without exception, proven to be unfit, unworthy of my time, my energy, my devotion, my faith. It's not "nothing" that has created this mess, but rather all these "gods" with their unending demands and commandments and willing accomplices who believe in them and act on their behalf. At the very least, a god of "nothing' adds nothing to the madness, makes no demands, and doesn't interfere.
And if I'm completely wrong, I can always blame those other gods for driving me stark raving insane. In turn, they will blame it all on my free will. Then in my defense I'd say I really tried to adapt to their world but that wasn't good enough for them and, in the end, I simply lacked the ability to change who and what I am. I simply refuse to feign obedience and loyalty to gods who cannot reciprocate in kind.
Those gods of men can't have my heart and my soul is not for sale.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)You must not be as young as your photo suggests- How anyone much younger than at least 50-60 yrs. could possess such extraordinary knowledge and wisdom of human beings and the world we live in, is almost inconceivable- Excellent article- Thanks- Ella
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