In Gods We Trust

First UU Wausau

August 12, 2007

Richard Olson

          I guess we could say that they were doubly blessed.  First of all, their god was on their side.  And having a god on your side is often an advantage.  It helps build morale.   It adds a heightened sense of nobility. It becomes a pious cause.  A sort of “for God and Country” mentality.   But when the god of your enemy appears to be on your side as well, then the advantage you gain is remarkable.  The Spanish Conquistadores may have indeed been doubly blessed. The Aztecs, along with other indigenous peoples of the Mesoamerica on the other hand, apparently were not.

          After some seven hundreds of occupation, Catholic Spain finally managed to oust the Moors, an Islamic nation from North Africa.  The religious fervor that followed that ouster helped to fuel the drive to conquer new worlds in order to spread the good word of monotheism and the trinity.  The so-called discovery of a new world offered fertile ground.           

            Long before the arrival of Europeans to what would later be called the Americas, a multitude of polytheist nations had flourished.  While we have to recognize that the culture of these nations was rich and colorful, we also know that it was marred with bloody human sacrifice to their gods. 

          Naturally the Europeans found these civilizations and their religious practices barbaric.  However, the Europeans saw their barbaric actions to convert those pagans as justified.  But still, we have to ask ourselves who were the real savages in the Americas.  

          In the Aztec pantheon there were many gods.  One of their chief gods was Quetzalchoatl, a god who was depicted as a plumed, or feathered serpent.  At the time of the conquest the prevailing myth was that Quetzalchoatl had temporarily gone away, but would return again some day.

          The story goes, and it is a story refuted by some historians, that  the Aztecs believed that the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes was their god  Quetzalchoatl returning as promised.  Cortes was a tall and imposing white man with red hair, an unusual sight for the short blacked-haired dark-skinned indigenous people.  Trusting that Cortes was the returning god Quetzalchoatl they invited him into their cities, cities that he and his soldiers conquered with relative ease. 

With both the god of the Spaniards and, in a sense, their own god Quezalcoahtl, working against them, the Aztecs stood little chance.

          I have just used a couple of words that I think you know, but let me explain them anyway.  Monotheism is the belief in one god.  When you consider the history of humankind and the many gods we have created, monotheism is a relatively new idea.  I emphasize the words “relatively new” because it has only been a popular concept for some three thousand years.   Monotheistic faiths include some of the major players of our times, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, even though I see Christianity as somewhat polytheistic because of the belief in the Trinity, and the adoration of Mary and many other saints.

          Polytheism means the belief in several gods.  Even though many civilizations have been polytheistic, the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians are probably the most studied examples.

You probably know at least something about the Greek, Roman and Egyptians pantheons.  Apollo, Zeus, Prometheus, Poseidon from the Greeks, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Cupid from the Romans and  Isis, Osiris, Ra or Re from the Egyptians.  Some of the gods and related myths they created years ago are still evoked today, such as Pandora’s Box, Nemesis and Narcissist.  

          There are, of course, many other categories when it comes to gods as well.  There is theism, the belief that a single god created everything as it is today and that this god is proactive in daily life. There is deism, the belief that a god created everything but no longer meddles in daily life.  There is pantheism, the belief that god is everywhere. There is pantheism, the belief that god is in everything.  Add to this mix, atheists, agnostics and ignostics and who knows how may other classifications.

          As you have already noticed,  I have been using the words “god”, “gods” quite a bit today.  I will also use the word “goddess” later on.  You are free to define these words as you wish. You are free to drop these words from your own person vocabulary if you wish.  I use the words today to refer to that to which human beings attribute divine and/or supernatural qualities. I hope you can accept my simple definition, at least for the sake of my message today.     

          In the description for this service in the Circuit Writer, which is our monthly newsletter, I included a quote from the French philosopher Voltaire. The quote was: “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”.  I then suggested that perhaps he should have said, “If Gods didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent Them”. 

          Voltaire also said,  “After God created man in his own image, man promptly returned the compliment”.  Whether or it was a compliment I am not sure. But there is not doubt that the gods we have created, or imagined, do mirror our own image, our culture, our desires, our needs and our environment.   

           I mention again the Aztec god Quetzalcoahtl, who took the shape of a feathered serpent. It seems natural that the Aztecs would imagine a god that reflected elements of the lush tropical rain forest of much of their empire.  To me it seems befitting that the ancient Greeks, whose cities tended to be on the coast, would create several water deities. Why wouldn’t the Romans, who apparently had an affinity for wine, imagine the god “Bacchus”, the God of wine?  Why wouldn’t the people of East Africa imagine a god who lives in the river and who personifies the grass fires and whirlwinds. Why wouldn’t the sea-bearing Nordic people imagine  Ran, the goddess who, with her net, pulled people to the bottom of the sea in whirlpools?  Why wouldn’t ancient people deify the sun, moon, stars, the thunder, the earth, the wind?  With little or no knowledge of science they naturally would seek an explanation by applying the supernatural and divine. Why wouldn’t the homeless Israelites create a god that gives them the deed to a promised land?  Or a god that hands down the law to a factious and developing nation.

Why wouldn’t the nomadic people of central Asia imagine a god of tents.  

          I am convinced that if circles had gods, they would be round. If lemons had gods, they would be bright yellow.  If zebras had gods, they would be stripped.  And if Unitarian Universalists had gods we would imagine them in our own image and they sit on an ad hoc committees to discuss the use of the word god.   

          It seems to me that people who condemn and judge have gods that condemn and judge.  It seems to me that people who are angry at the world have gods that are angry at the world.  It also seems to me that people who relish glorious battle to achieve domination have gods who do the same.  On the other hand, people who show compassion and forgiveness have gods who are compassionate and forgiving.  

          There is a book in the Marathon County library titled “Encyclopedia of Gods”.  It contains information on over 2,500 deities that humans have created.  There are serious, mean spirited gods, trickster gods, punitive gods, compassionate gods, animal gods, and as you might expect, gods for just about anything humans think they need gods for.  There are many creations gods. There are also many fertility goddesses, goddess images that predate the many male god images that have dominated the pantheon of humankind.

 There are gods of the underworld, gods of misfortune, of drought, of war, of literature, of fresh water, of weather, of wealth, of luck, of learning, of justice, of destiny, and so on. 

          It is not hard to imagine why human beings imagine gods.

Our need to explain our very existence seems to be the most pervasive reason.  Fear is another, especially the fear of death.  Hope is another reason, especially the hope of eternal bliss. Or the hope that a god will intervene and cure us, help us through a crisis, get someone elected  and,  even more crucial, help the Packers make it to the super bowl.   The need to explain what we once could not through science has also resulted in many deities and related myths.  A desire to control and dominate others is another reason.  We use gods to threaten people in the same way we us the Bogie Man and Santa Claus to threaten children. We believe in gods because our ancestors did.  We believe in gods in order to make the false true and true false.  We also need gods so we can point to a higher power to affirm our own political beliefs and actions.         

          On July 29, 1994   Dr. John Bayard Britton of Florida and his bodyguard will killed by Paul Hill, a former Presbyterian minister.  Hill shot them both with a shotgun because Dr. Britton  was performing abortions at a Pensacola clinic.  Hill was charged with murder, found guilty, and was executed by lethal injection in 2003.   On his way to the execution Hill smiled saying “I expect a great reward in heaven, I am looking for glory”.  In his defense of human life Hill had destroyed two human lives.  I hardly call that glory.

          On Sept 11, 2001, four airplanes crashed in the United States, two into the World Trade towers, one in a Pennsylvania field one into the Pentagon.  Those who commandeered those planes were willing to sacrifice not only their own lives but the lives of many others. They apparently did this not only to make a political statement but to get their unearthly reward as well.

          Neither Hall nor the men who took over those planes carried out those atrocities because they  had been tempted by a Satan, by a  Devil or by evil.  They were, on the other hand, tempted by their belief that they were doing their god’s work.  They were all deeply religious people whose adherence to their religion, to their faith, and to their god is considered virtuous by many.       

          I would now like to throw out several statistics.  Some of these statistics come from polls such as Gallup and the New York Times. Other statistics are contained in other sources that I have used for today’s message.  After the service you are welcome to look at my sources.  Remember that polling is not an exact science and the results usually have disclaimers as to a margin of error. 

          Depending on the sources, anywhere between  86-96 % of Americans believe in “God”.  81% believe in Heaven. 70% believe in the Devil and 69% believe in Hell.   93% of Americans believe that the phrase “In God We Trust” should remain on our coins.  90% believe that “under God” should remain in our pledge.

Those last two statistics come from a Fox News Poll so the results don’t surprise me.  

Whereas 88% of Americans believe in a Soul, only 61 % of Europeans do.  25% of Americans are either Evangelical Christians or Fundamentalists.  Some 40% of Americans believe that god speaks directly to them.   83% of Americans support the teaching of creationism.  79% believe a person can believe in evolution but still believe that “God”  created humans and is directly involved in their lives, which means they are theists.  Over 90% of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president. 

          French mathematician Blaise Pascal pondered that even though the odds of god’s existence is long, it is best to believe in god.

According to Pascal, if you believe in god and you end up being right, you are saved. But if you believe in god and it turns our that you are wrong, it doesn’t matter.   However, if you are a non-believer and it turns out that you are wrong, you suffer the damnation of Hell.  On the other hand, if you don’t believe in god, and you are right, then if doesn’t matter.

While Pascal mathematical approach is tongue-in-cheek it seems like sound reasoning.  

           But Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, responds to his contention by saying that believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy.  We can decide to go to church,  recite a creed or swear on a stack of Bibles but those actions do not make us believe any thing if we don’t.  We can act as if we believe, deluding ourselves and others that we do,  but do we really believe? 

            A couple of weeks ago a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed.  It was rush hour so there was a lot of traffic.

Several people were killed and many more were injured. Some are still missing.  The day after the tragedy I was watching a television newscast with an on-the-scene reporter. The reporter was interviewing a man who had narrowly escaped death and injury.  Twice the reporter said to the man “somebody was watching over you”.  First, I do not consider that kind of a comment as evidence of unbiased and professional reporting.

Second, does the reporter mean to imply that that “somebody” who was watching over this man was not watching over those who were killed and injured? What was it about that man that caused special attention? Was it because he was a Catholic and rest were  Lutherans?

          I pose that question with both sarcasm and concern, noting that not long ago the Pope declared that Roman Catholicism is the one true faith.  But he is not the first or the last to claim that their god-faith is the one and only true faith. I have a colleague who belongs to an Assembly of God church, which is either evangelical or fundamentalist, I’m not sure.  He tells me that only people of that particular Christian faith will be saved.

          Elie Wiesel is a well-known author who survived the concentrations camps of World War Two.  He writes that many victims, before the were exterminated, asked the same question.

Where is god?  They wondered why god was not watching, why he allowed such  atrocities to happen, what had they done to deserve such treatment?  Those are all very good questions and I would be the last to tell someone in that situation that there is no god.

 Even though they were questioning god’s motives,  they still believed in god.  And that belief must have helped many of them face their horrible deaths. 

          I have often heard people say there are two things in life we can’t avoid, death and taxes.  I don’t know of anyone off hand who has created a god to help deal with taxes but there are millions of  people who have imagined gods who can help them  face death with a promise of eternal bliss.

           Which brings me to the god many have fashioned after Yahweh,  the ancient god from the Hebrew Bible.

          Just as the civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas were polytheist so too were many of the ancient civilizations of what we commonly call Biblical times.   However, there arose a movement, especially favored by Moses,  to abandon the worship of multiple gods in order to form a monotheist faith.  In October I will be presenting a service centering on Moses.  The god Moses credited with helping him deliver the enslaved Israelites from Egypt is the prototype of the god many still imagine today.   

          I have mentioned to you before that it is fascinating to me how the Hebrew and Christian Bibles were pieced together. I also mentioned that to treat this as a topic for a 25 minute message would be impossible.

 But spare me a couple of minutes to at least address

the compilation of the Hebrew Bible so we can set the backdrop for the god that millions of people still worship today.

          Several sources have contributed to the creation of the god of the Hebrew Bible.  One is the source called the “J” source. Those authors used the word Yahweh, or Jehovah, when referring to their god.  Another source is the “E” source whose authors used the word Elohim when referring to gods. Yes, I said gods. Elohim is a plural form of the word. There are also the Priestly sources, the Deuteronomists and redactors, or editors.

These sources were all writing at different times and with different agendas. At times, when reading the Hebrew Bible, you will read a couple of verses from one source which is followed by a couple of lines from another source, which is then followed by a third sources.

Many people had a hand in crafting eating the god that many believe in today.  If only they knew how powerful their words would be.  Sticks and stone may break my  bones but words, words can be  even more powerful.

           We cannot deny that many people find the strength to get through life in their belief in gods. They center themselves in words and myths that surround those gods.  Neither can we deny that people find hope in their belief in gods. The myths that they imagine tell of ordinary people and their relationships with each other and with their gods.  But if we leave out the supernatural, we can’t deny that many of these myths can offer us lessons for life.

          What we can deny, however, without a divine being, a god, there is no reason to be moral.  It is true; people will sometimes base their benevolent actions on gods, saying things like “it’s the Christian thing to do”.  It is also true that people act moral now to score points with their gods/   But true morality is its own reward.  History has shown us that imagining gods does not necessarily make humankind more moral.  It fact, in many cases, it has the opposite affect.  

          The fact that humans continue to imagine gods is counterintuitive to evolution.  It simple hasn’t worked.  We must evolve further. Too many resources have been used to build monuments to gods. Too much inhumanity has been justified. Too much oppression has been fostered.  Too many fingers have been pointed, too many judgments have been made, and too many ideas have been condemned.  And worst of all, too many lives have been lost.