Some Schmo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 5:39 am
I've been thinking a lot about how people make up their own gods and referring to their creation as "god", a.k.a. the one everyone is talking about when they refer to "god." (Side note: isn't it interesting people will say "god" like it's an external entity everyone one is familiar with? It's like me making up a word like "smarkoff" and saying it as though everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about when in reality, they have no idea).
I think this is a very important point that is too rarely made in discussions about issues such as atheism, and you have hit the nail right on the head.
The problem is that most of the people one meets in advanced western countries have been brought up within the broad tradition of what are often called the 'Abrahamic religions'* - Judaism, Christianity and Islam, most frequently the second of these. All three have for centuries agreed that the universe, including all the creatures in it, was created and is sustained by a single all-powerful and all-seeing entity, who is the source of the moral order and by various means makes his nature and his will known to mankind. In English this entity may be called 'God' - a term that may have come from pre-Germanic words meaning 'what one offers libations to', or 'what one invokes'. Religious Jews and Muslims use other terms, whether in an English language context or in Hebrew or Arabic, but whatever term used in a person's own religious community, the impression is given that both the speaker and the hearer understand that term as referring to some well-known, well-defined and unambiguous thing like "The President of the United States of America".
But a few minutes conversation with different believers, even members of the same sect, will usually reveal that no such consensus really exists. There often seem to be as many different referents of a term like 'god' as there are believers. To avoid getting entangled in the false assumption that the 'god' (or whatever') referred to by some particular believer is, well, just
God, I tend in any reply to their claims to use the term 'your deity' or 'the deity of your religion'. For some reason, that sometimes seems to annoy the hell out of people - which reassures me that they may be beginning to realise that the solid ground on which they thought they stood is nothing like so firm as they thought it was.
Of course this problem only occurs in a severe form in cultures where the Abrahamic religions dominate. Large parts of humanity live in cultures where it is taken for granted that the universe is full of many powerful but non-material beings who may require or at least accept human worship. In such cultures it may seem bizarre that the Abrahamic deity is said to claim that he is the only deity around.
This little scene from the sitcom My Name is Earl captures something about the cultural encounters this may lead to:
Darnell: He's going to be okay, right, doc?
Indian doctor: Define "okay."
Catalina: Not dead.
Doctor: I don't know.
Randy: Can't you tell us anything good about Earl?
Doctor: He has a fantastic mustache and, praise be to Ganesh it was unharmed. Other than that, all we can do is pray. I bet you wish you had more than one god now, uh?
* So called because all of them agree on the important role ascribed to the (almost certainly) mythical figure of Abraham in their origins.
