One of the least endearing characteristics of the gods comes in the form of the psycho-anthropology of the gods. Those beings in whom individuals reflect and whom the divine reflect the mortal; it’s a duality of mirrors beginning in the human psyche.
That which is the psychological in humanity becomes the anthropology of the divine. A sense of the personal in the non-personal, even, where the divine meets the mundane. Some of the most important individuals in this respect have been the thinkers who devote themselves to the study of human psychology.
While, others have been those who study the workings of the divine. Even others, they have given their lives to the ways of the history of the gods. Even others, they commit themselves to a diligent study of those without sense.
I recall a story of a man from India who was a polytheist and who considered Donald Trump worthy of worship to some degree. In this sense, we can sense the sense of nonsense. Its appeal to the merely flesh and meat.
The gods are not only something of falsity or untruth. Once one moves past those notions of the divine, to reduce them down to size to the mundane, we can look at the ideas of the gods as human productions, as they are; whether actualized prior to human imagination, all gods must be constructed by human ingenuity, regardless.
In that, to conceive of something from the Infinite Nothing or the Imaginarium upon which all creativity or system depends, one requires a mind to structure it into a coherence, all of a piece, in other words.
Once this all of a piece-ness is presented, then the gods are made whole for human comprehension, even the ideas of the incomprehensibility of the ways of many or some of the gods, these, too, attribute a human limitation as a valuation of the possibilities of the gods.
In a more direct way, as with the mounts of the deceased burping forth from the Imaginarium, the gods can be viewed without the fear. They do not require a sense of love projected outwards from them either.
Neither fear nor love come from the dead, far as I know; these senses of the divine as the imaginary helps clarification so much, as if a principle of simplicity to parse the known and the unknown in regards to the gods.
As Einstein remarked, “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
He rejected not only the childishness of the Bible or the word God; its primitivity and established reflection of human weaknesses. He rejected even temporally derived notions of a final purposes to humanity, as in a rejection of the idea of teleology, stating, “I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere,” while rejecting naïve realism too.
While a world out there must be taken in a serious manner, as the great theoretician rejected Kant’s idea of a rejection of objectivity of space as something ‘hardly to be taken seriously,’ a supporter of the Ethical Culture movement and a secular humanist.
Someone who said, “A Man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on Sympathy, Education and Social Ties; No religious basis is necessary. Man should indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.”
Someone who may remark as Noam Chomsky who stated on the question of God: As with Thomas Paine, if there is a God, then He is a Devil. Strong notion from powerful intellects, individuals of great influence in the history of intellectual thought.
The ideas of the gods as reflections of human beings are not new, nor can they be new, as these reflect more of the common ideas of the gods from generation to generation, as a mirror to the prejudices and self-perception of the people of a society. A society collapsed for a variety of reasons, as most have ended.
Always heed the words of Aurelius, ‘soon you will have forgotten all things, and all things will forgotten you,’ everything is temporary in this view, as with the societies and their gods. The gods as a formulation not as the weaknesses of society, but, rather, as the strengths of humanity externalized.
That which we wish was more. To posit a weakness of humanity in this view, it is as if to buy the Imaginarium as the reality. ‘Tis not fair wanderer, it is more human attributes considered strength – intelligence, powers over nature, beauty, leadership, presence and influence – taken to the Nth degree. So it is with all gods; this can be seen with the large finites of those traits or those Nths of traits made infinite, as in the Abrahamic God.
What this more realistically reflects is a sense of a psychological lack to some degree while deemed a properly strong one individually, something admirable, it is depersonalized apart from the individual personality.
While taken out of this context of the individual personality, it becomes part of the properties ‘out there’ in some abstraction because of its depersonalization from the individual. Following this depersonalization of the individual qualities, they become properties. These are taken once more as out in the world rather than simply in the mind.
This in-mindedness of them makes them a sort of psychological quality made objective property in the world. This property, in the most limited forms, becomes an anthropomorphic formulation of the god concept in which the gods reflects more of the individual form and capacities of the human being, which is where the traditional idea of the anthropomorphism of the gods inserts itself into human history after the gods have been inserted into human history by humans themselves.
Ones with infinite or omni-infinite capacities are claimed as fundamentally non-anthropomorphic. However, they are the anthropomorphic in the most important sense. It is an anthropomorphism in which this process of self-objectification through the making of a psychological quality as an objective property becomes something taken to the Nth degree.
Where, for example, the idea of the good nature of a human being, the benevolence of a human person, becomes divinized in the omni-benevolence of God. We can see this play out in the spatiality of human beings with the omnipotence of God.
With the ability to know things, as a virtue, this becomes omniscience. One time after another, these finite strengths of the human species become projected and made infinite, where there can be incalculable multiples of these infinities in which the ultimate is the omni-infinite, that which identifies with, inheres in, and constructs reality at the most fundamental levels and projects itself through all that exists and can exist as potential.
This externalization of the property becomes something once more reversed in which the finite becomes infinite, as the finite properties, formerly qualities, become infinite properties of God Himself. Once more, this becomes psychology, though, as God is made into a personal god with a personal identity.
A divine person, so a transcendent psychology, you see the process. It is a manner of inversion-externalization, where the finite and singular comprised of divisible, though unified, qualities, becomes properties, as these enter the objective world, formulate a divine character, made infinite, and then personal.
As follows: Name a psychological lack, objectify it as a property, externalize it as “out there” in the universe, then make it infinite and personalize it once more, so as to make an omni-infinite personality based on human lack. It’s a process of inversion-externalization.
Because the internal is made external, finite made infinite, and personal psychology made ‘divine’ psychology. All the pantheons of limited gods would be a self-limiting formulation going through the same process.
The gods are of use as much as we are them, whether Indian Hinduism or Pakistani Islam, not at all. Each of them come as one and the same operation while with individual, cultural, and people group manifestations, claimed as the objective truth for ever and always.
It’s not that we are the gods now; it’s that the gods were never here, but the gods have been a useful fiction. The question remaining: How much more useful is the fantasy?
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash