Should God Grow Up?

by Richard May

God and gods are clearly at least in part mythical. But the question remains does the word "God" also refer to something real, but probably not a physical phenomenon, in addition to its mythical meanings. I'm not certain that the word "God" has an agreed upon definition in the sense of Western scientific concepts, but this does not necessarily mean that it is meaningless. Perhaps the concept of "God" needs to be further refined and developed, as the concepts of matter and energy have not remained unchanged in the past several thousand years.

Astrophysics and astronomy no longer claim that the Earth is supported by a stack of tortoises. But one is supposed to think that if a god exists, then it must possess the anthropomorphically projected personality of Zeus or some tribal god of ancient desert nomads named Yahveh, who kindly ordered the genocide of every man, woman and child of the Canaanites and in Deuteronomy 22 allegedly said that it was just fine to stone your bride to death with a bunch of the guys, if she was not found to be a virgin on your wedding night. Though hardly modern the Yoga sutras of Patanjali and Buddhism did rather better than this primitive tribal anthropomorphic stupidity of proclaiming a god more violent than even men. Most religionists apparently think they have a complete understanding of the "word of God", when we don't even have an complete understanding of the word of men.

May-Tzu