Wednesday, March 8, 2023

An Imperfect God

Where's god's perfection if he admits to mistakes? Genesis 6:6 clearly states he "regretted that he had made human beings".  The god of the bible is a deity created by man, in the image of man, not unlike hundreds of other mythological deities made up in the same Iron Age era. Claiming that there is only one true god is a rejection of religion's documented history, particularly because 1) there is not a shred of evidence any of these mythological gods ever existed. (It's what secular history teaches us.) And 2) it's just a small slice of the much larger picture of religion's ages-long evolution from polytheism to monotheism.* 

In light of this, claiming the superiority of one god over hundreds of others is nothing but a fool's errand. More so, even the historical inaccuracies of the bible lend credence to the very questionable origins of the Abrahamic religions.

From Wikipedia:

Quasi-monotheistic claims of the existence of a universal deity date to the Late Bronze Age, with Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten from the 14th century BCE.

In the Iron-Age South Asian Vedic period, a possible inclination towards monotheism emerged. The Rigveda exhibits notions of monism of the Brahman, particularly in the comparatively late tenth book, which is dated to the early Iron Age, e.g. in the Nasadiya Sukta. Later, ancient Hindu theology was monist, but was not strictly monotheistic in worship because it still maintained the existence of many gods, who were envisioned as aspects of one supreme God, Brahman.

More recently, Karen Armstrong and other authors have returned to the idea of an evolutionary progression beginning with animism, which developed into polytheism, which developed into henotheism, which developed into monolatry, which developed into true monotheism

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism)

* In its early stages, the Israelite religion was derived from the Canaanite religions of the Bronze Age; by the Iron Age, it had become distinct from other Canaanite religions as it shed polytheism for monolatry. The monolatrist nature of Yahwism was further developed in the period following the Babylonian captivity, eventually emerging as a firm religious movement of monotheism.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions)

Another pertinent reference: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_deities


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