God, Allah, Jahweh,whatever you want to call Him. I mean look at it. These are different models of the same god. Despite their many similarities, their theology is quite different. Anyone who studies these traditions can see how they contradict. The god of the Hebrews was so undefinable that his very name was a mystical thing, closely guarded for its potence. Since the children of Israel never really describe God himself, we are forced to ascertain his nature through his actions. The general impression I get of God in the old testament is a vengeful smiting, plague sending, earth flooding fellow. Governed by tribal morality (i.e. brutal to outsiders), the god of Abraham was a jealous fellow and demanded obediance of a vast array of laws. Then a fellow called Jesus comes on the scene in a troublesome area of the Roman empire . He has some revolutionary notions about God. God doesnt want pedantic repition of formulae. That is totally missing the point. Tounge in cheek charades just wont do. God wants your love.
If you love the transient things of the world you are evil, but if you give up your worldly possessions and dedicate yourself to loving god and one another things will be fantastic. This idea is so catchy among the common people (most of whom didn’t have (m)any worldly possessions to start with) that many movers and shakers in the Jewish community are getting worried. You cant go defining god as you like, it challenges traditions. Besides which, communism is scary for business owners. Well for reasons which remain unclear, the Romans get involved and decide the best way to dispel a movement is to kill its head. This turned out to be a fatal error. Lucky for first century Christians that they had a wealth of mythology surrounding them of resurrected saviors. Christians adapted Jesus’s adaptation of the Hebrew god to the hellenized world. Rather than being undefined, a sort of void of infinite potential, god gets tied up in the world of Platonic forms. He gets all of these superlatives added to him, until he becomes this sort of iconic everything. As Jesus probably hadn’t planned on people replacing the formulaeic dogmatic rituals he had just sacrificed his life to tear down with new ones, later Christians were left to their own devices, and adapted a set of ceremonies from various cults of the period. People were drinking wine to symbolize the blood of the slain savior long before Jesus was a twinkle in Joseph’s eye, they just prayed to Isis , not God. The Christian God does not act, at least not very often or in any big showy way, but we do know alot about him. God goes all soft on humanity in the Christian view (though there is reason to believe that what began as a Jewish spin off was later opened to gentiles by a radical (even for christians) named Paul) Still, God isnt the same fire and brimstone fellow. He’s not so big on the rules, the ceremonies are kept simple, just follow the golden rule and the rest will fall into place. God has not finished his transformation yet. Returning to the desert, the harsh realities of life in Arabia molded God into something more like the original but with a neat twist. Jahweh is a dogmatic diety bent on his people taking over the world, the Christian God is trying to spread through ideas rather than blood, anyone can be a Christian, only a descendent of Abraham can be a Jew. Islam combines these two. The people of Allah will conquer the earth, and anyone who wants to can be of that people. Allah’s ritual demands are similar to those of Jahweh, but his attitude toward outsiders is initially far more Christian.
Such variety… One god. Throughout history there have been THOUSANDS of Gods. They cant all be right. Greeks and Romans dealt with this by having a whole bunch of Gods, any native god can be correllated to someone in the pantheon. We dealt with it by killing God.
A figure appears further up the road. He approaches quickly, though he seems to merely be walking. The stranger continues, hurriedly,
God is dead. We grew out of him. He was some big scary boogey man, designed to frighten peasants into subjugation. Every form of religion is merely another form of control, another man bending the masses to his will. Yet people still cling to this limiting paradigm. They are not strong enough to look at the world on their own. Without some overarching scheme of morality, they’re lost, life becomes meaningless. Well, life is meaningless, get used to it. We’re just making up the rules as we go along, why pull god into the arbitrary decisions of man? You ever hear a man back up his argument with god, you know he’s on a shaky foundation. So cut the crap, its your own damn life, live it! Don’t let some asshole dictate the path of happiness. You can build your own perspective, and you don’t need some antiquated rock.