What are Gods? (Part 2): Where Do They Take Us?

Gods are reflections -- and projections -- of self and group (community)-ideals.

Have you ever heard of an 'imperfect' God? A 'weak' God? An 'insecure' or 'inferior' God? I have never heard of such a God. It is an exercise in self-contradiction. Gods are meant to be 'worshiped' and you don't worship something and/or someone that/who is imperfect, weak, insecure, inferior...

So why do we worship Gods? Is it our drive to be perfect? And/or our wish or need or drive to be 'vicariously perfect' by associating ourselves with -- and worshiping --someone or something who we perceive to being greater -- and more perfect (or 'perfectly perfect') -- than ourselves?

It is important that we clear up some points and make some distinctions before I delve seriously into this issue.

Firstly, we must distinguish between 'Gods' (who and/or what we are worshiping) and 'religion' (the individual and/or group symbolic, ritual process whereby we do our 'worshiping').

Secondly, you have to know who you are dealing with here: you are dealing with me, DGB -- a philosopher, a humanist, a strong supporter of The Enlightenment-Romantic Philosophical Period, and a supporter of Spinozean Pantheist-Deist Spiritual-Romantic Values.

What does this mean? It means that I would sooner 'worship the glory of God and Creation and Life' driving in the mountains of Alberta, or driving on the mountain shores of Cape Breton Island or Lake Superior, or walking in the fields and forests of Ontario, or feeding my birds in the back of my townhouse, or watching my amazing little Beta fish who I think has been with me for over a year now, or talking to my parents on their small farm in the middle of Prince Edward Island where I have never been, or spending a weekend in Niagara Falls with my girlfriend -- all of these, I would sooner do than I would celebrate 'the glory of God' in a ritualized Church.

This is not to say that I haven't heard some fantastic sermons in my life, by some very passionate preachers who have chosen to celebrate 'God' and Life along a totally different path than me. Different people have different ways of expressing their passion -- both good and bad -- for life (and sometimes, most unfortunately, through rage, hate, violence, destruction, and the worshiping of pain, revenge, and death).

People choose similar and different Gods to worship. And then sometimes, they can get very passionate in terms of righteously and narcissistically protecting the particular God they have chosen to both worship -- and follow. Different Gods can take us to different places -- some to 'Heaven on Earth'; others to 'Hell on Earth'.

Thus, we have to be very careful about who and what we are worshipping. To say it again, our Gods -- and/or our 'Idols' (human renditions of Gods or humans with perceived 'God-like' qualities) -- are reflections or projections of our own individual and/or group idealism. But if our own self-idealism and/or the idealism of the group that we belong to -- is 'pathological' -- then we may be chasing our 'idealistic dream' to all sorts of related 'dehumanized and dehumanizing' places -- domination and submission, sadism and masochism, pain, rage, hate, divisionism, destruction, self-destruction, and ultimately -- an untimely and/or miserable death.

'Human Gods', 'human idols', 'human leaders' -- to the extent that they are able to 'sell' or 'intimidate' mass followers and mass followings, disguising pain as pleasure, sophism as truth, poison as candy, in effect turning the world and the world's humanistic-ethical value systems upside down and being able to convince their followers that everything is still 'right side up' (or intimidate and coerce them into at least pretending to believe this to be true) -- can easily create mass havoc, pain, grief, sickness, death, and dying, in effect, and Hell on Earth.

We can talk about many of the most powerful dictators in the world, past and present, in this light -- Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Genghis Khan, Alexander The Great, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao tse Tung...some mixing elements of 'humanism' and 'cultural explosion' with their mass killings (Alexander The Great, Napoleon) and others just being bad, bad, bad on some greater or lesser political and/or religious dimension...Charles Manson...


Going back to ancient, mythological times, we have 'Gods of Love' -- both the altruistic, nurturing type (Jesus Christ) and Gods of Romantic Love (Aphrodite, Cupid, Eros...) We have Gods of Power, Fairness, Justice, Truth (Zeus, Apollo, God)... We have Gods of The Earth (Gaea), Gods of Marriage and Family (Hera)...

Here, let me waste no more time citing Gods that could number in the hundreds if I went at the task with any precision...Here is a link giving you a larger sample:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figures
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And that is not even beginning to list the great number of 'mortal' Gods or ''Human Idols'...from ancient Greek mythology to present day 'pop-culture'...

Now you could say that we are through with all those Gods -- that we no longer worship them -- and that we have very much simplified the process today bringing everything down to the worshiping of 'one God' -- or 'monotheism'.

But does anyone really believe that we have stopped the process of 'God or Idol-Making' and the associated act of 'God or Idol-worshiping'?

So I ask the philosophical question again: What is this 'fixation' and/or 'obsessive-compulsion' with 'God and Idol-Making' and at the same time, the dialectic polarity of this act -- 'God and Idol Worshiping'?

In the next section, we will explore the relationship between Gods, Archetypes, Ego-States, Transference-Figures -- and Core Nuclear Personality Conflicts.

-- DGBN, Jan. 26th, 2009

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...are still in process....