Buckle your seat belts. This will be a long journey. Most of you will only agree with some of it, some of you with none of it. But we have to start somewhere, so let's try for a definition.
What is a god? Note this isn't "what is THE God?" or "what is Your God/Goddess/Higher Power/(Pick your term)? Humans have had something they referred to as a God for, near as we can tell, about as long as we've had history. I'm going back before even that, because somehow we came up with the concept. Concepts need definitions. It must be something with power, meaning more than you have, either individually or collectively, or we'd all be gods. I'm going to argue straight out that none of us actually are a god, no matter our opinion of ourselves.
I'm also going to argue that the concept took billions of years to emerge. From what we believe we know about this universe, it's been around since what we call the Big Bang, about 14 billion years. And don't ask those folks what came before or how or why. Let's arbitrarily call the Big Bang the start. Atoms grew from protons, electrons and neutrons, and changed into other kinds of atoms, which combined with yet others to make molecules, and so forth. "Things" formed, collected more and more "stuff", grew and grew, formed into planets and stars, organized into solar systems, further organized into galaxies, though as far as anybody can currently prove, stayed within one single universe. We may know better when somebody can explore a black hole and tell us all about it. If we're still around then. I'm not holding my breath about that. So I'm working with what we've got.
For a very very long time nothing existed which could claim to be life. And then it did, in some perfect confluence of chemistry, energy, and time. Life evolved, became more complex. Eventually some version of a mind emerged, and its creation finally prepared the way to invent a version of what it called God. Feel free if you must to say that all this time the real God was the creative force behind everything. Until minds came along, whatever was happening wasn't recognized, simply experienced, more or less. Somewhere along this timeline 'self" and "other" emerged, along with "food-approach" and "predator-flee", eventually mate/not mate and other concepts. At some point awareness turned further outward from the self, possibly upwards to the sky and the visible universe, and more complicated and confusing concepts were born. Things existed which could not be reached nor controlled by their observers in any way, but they seemed to have power, enough to bring light and dark, storms, cold, warmth. In many cases, they meant life and death. In other words, God. God equaled what was good and bad, what had power. God was to be identified, coveted, appeased. All this was another very long and varied process.
Some humans conferred godhood on other humans, often called kings or queens, or given similar status, with others designated as priests recognized as capable of interpreting commands, including worship parameters and offerings. With god-hood represented by power, kings won their titles through battles, or inherited them, and showed proof of their positions by exerising their powers over others, and by their possessions of sparkly shiny things others didn't have. Think gold, gems, elaborate weapons when metalworking was invented. On parallel tracks, quenss had powers over health and births, with knowledge of plants. Many societies didn't have gender roles in their deities so both men and women were healers, warriors and designated as gods or goddesses for their powers.
Once it was realized mere humans didn't actually have the powers demanded of gods, aside from the power to kill and destroy, an elevated level of deities was invented, given all the powers demanded by humans in order to grant ideal lives to their subjects, providing, of course, that their subjects earned them. Former gods and godesses were now mere royalty. In trying to figure out how to earn their new deities' bounty, humans gave their gods all the characteristics of themselves, all our good and evil characteristics. We invented them in our own images, but with the powers we wanted them to grant us,like controlling the weather, the harvests, life and death. When those were not granted we invented more and more complex reasons why not, and gave priests more say in how we had to behave in order to demand what we wanted. True earthly power transferred to those who could be thought to control their gods.
No human has the power we want to control in our gods. Because controlling supreme power is what we want in our designated gods, and we need the means to control gods in order to have that power, we try everything to gain that control. Offerings of wealth, lives, food, behvioral changes, all have been given. None work except coincidentally. We fear to believe our actions fail, so it must be the gods at fault. New gods come along, are tested, fail or pass with no reason. Religions and philosophies rise and fall, get replaced, those fall. Eventually, on some terrible day, somebody dares to cry out that there actually are no gods. Somehow if we can't control them they do not exist. We have never given up on the idea that we ourselves must be gods, have that power.
On that precipice is where our species stands today. We have not the power to answer the question, though not because we haven't always been trying. Some are positive their opinion is THE ONLY RIGHT ONE, no matter what it is on the subject. We will never know, not while we live, and possibly not afterwards. We will, however, continue to fight over the question, battle for the impossible power, try to prove we are correct. What we will prove is we are merely human.
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