RELIGION How man created God
(And,yes, he does look like Peter Ustinov)
Ialways pictured God as a cross between Peter Ustinov and Laurence Olivier – a stern yet benign old party in a white beard and toga, sitting on a throne on a cloud, exuding wisdom and laying down the law as required.
As Reza Aslan discusses in his wideranging study, which takes in the Egyptians, Romans, Indians, Persians, Hebrews and Arabs, most people have seen the Almighty in a similar fashion, as ‘a human being but with superhuman powers’.
Whether God is called Jove, Jehovah, Jupiter or Zeus, he is the all-powerful patriarch, dispatching lightning bolts, tempests, floods, and literally cooking up a storm as he creates the Cosmos. Likewise, he always fashions human beings ‘in his image’, and in his legendary rages and mercy he ‘exhibits the full range of human emotions and qualities, good and bad’.
In Western cultures, God embodies what is essentially the feudal system. He is the Lord of the Manor, surrounded by knights and emissaries (angels), enemies (devils) and ordinary suffering humanity is at the bottom of the pile.
‘The Earth is a middle ground layered between the dome of the sky and the shallow bowl of the underworld,’ says Aslan. This is the structure of the universe shared by Dante, Milton and JRRTolki en.
The earliest attempts to imagine God may be found in Palaeolithic cave paintings – abstract shapes and the odd ‘humanoid figure’, like a scary face fashioned from the knots of tree bark. There is also a fondness for horses, bulls, jackals, birds with supernatural qualities – God as ‘the Lord of Beasts’, in league with wild nature.
Religion, whether pagan, Christian or Islamic, acknowledges a sense that there is something ‘beyond the manifest world’, a magical personage helping us ‘to adapt and survive in a hostile environment… fostering cohesion and maintaining solidarity among primitive societies’.
It began, argues Aslan, because things didn’t go well during the Neolithic Age, when we stopped being hunters and gatherers, settled in villages and towns and developed agriculture. People caught infectious diseases and died younger of starvation. God was called upon to help command the weather, the growth of the crops, feed and heal the faithful. There were blood sacrifices to propitiate him, in shrines and temples built by masons and artisans. Public festivals and ceremonies evolved.
How quickly it went wrong. God may ostensibly be the source of love, solace and protection but religion far too often exacerbates ‘our bias and bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence’. As Aslan concludes: ‘Religion has probably disturbed man as much as it has cheered him.’
Indeed, Jupiter and Zeus were sexual philanderers and rapists – hardly good role models. Egyptian pharaohs preferred the cult of death to that of life. The Old Testament is not exactly happy-clappy. In 2 Kings 2: 23-24, God, like a mad political despot, has 42 children mauled to death by bears ‘simply because they had teased one of his prophets for being bald’.
Personally, I still prefer Peter Ustinov.
God may ostensibly be the source of love, solace and protection, but religion far too often exacerbates ‘our bias and bigotry’