Humans have been playing around with the concept of a God for many millenia. Gods have come, Gods have gone. If all the Gods that have been worshiped were to be assembled together it would make for a very large gathering. It would also be a very fractious gathering because each God, claiming supremacy or at least partial supremacy, would be at odds with all the others. Blows might well be struck!

On my many travels around the world I have taken special note of the different religions both the surviving ones and the deceased ones. The effect they’ve had on the tortuous history of mankind has been astronomical. Everywhere there are edifices showing the religious fervor that once gripped mankind or still does. Let’s take just two examples, The Vatican and The Temple of Karnak. Both these centres of religion are grand affairs although Karnak, still majestic, gives only a reminder of the grandeur that it once possessed. The Vatican, spread over acres, by contrast, is stuffed to the gills with art treasures and opulence that is beyond price.

The difference in theology between the religion which gripped the Egyptian civilization and that of Roman Catholicism (which still holds more than a billion people in its sway) couldn’t be more extreme. In Egypt, in the beginning, there were many Gods. Even the Pharaoh was considered to be a God and the Pyramids were created to hold his or her mortal body. Some of the Egyptian Gods were: Neith, the goddess of war and hunting, Re, the sun god, Horus the god of the sky, Amun Re the king of the gods, Osiris god of the afterlife, etc. With the arrival of Amenophis, all the gods were merged into one called Aten, the Sun God.

The Judeo/Christians, by contrast, began by worshiping one God though, with Roman Catholicism, by the time you add in Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost, the Pope and a whole array of deceased Popes and Saints, it does tend to become just a little more diversified. Christian Catholics, who espouse love, during the Spanish Inquisition, did invent and carry out all manner of hideous torture to try to force people to believe in their ‘loving’ God. That demonstrates to me just how religion of any kind can negatively affect the mind of fanatical ‘believers’.

Contrasting these two examples however raises some interesting points. In Egypt, nearly three thousand years ago, millions of people worshiped with great zeal. They prayed, they fasted, they believed that there was an afterlife and they had to cross the River of Life to get to heaven. Their religion has come and gone and all those hopes died with it. Other civilizations suffered a similar fate. In 2008, people still pray, fast and hold beliefs of an afterlife. There are Judaists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many hundreds of other variations of religion who all believe that they worship the one true God and that they alone will go to heaven. They can’t all be right!

And if the Egyptian civilization, the Aztec one, or many others like them, are anything to go by, perhaps the whole concept of God is man-made and man-promoted and exists only to perpetuate the power and wealth of religious institutions.

Perhaps God never died. Perhaps He, She or It never existed except in manipulative men’s imaginations!

Photo Link