Thursday, September 20, 2007

Gods With Flaws

I realize that a lot of my comments recently have been about God. I promise to tone them down after this, but when I get on a roll about something it's always hard to stop. Still, this is the final post of God-talk that I really wanted to get out there. With that said, here goes amazing!

One of the biggest problems I have with most organized religion is the idea that God is flawless. It just seems a bit odd to me that something can be absolutely perfect in every conceivable way. I say this because, in many ways, perfection is a matter of perception. The human mind (and I'm assuming that you religious people believe the soul is in some how connected to the mind) is a difference engine. It notices patterns, nothing more. The beauty of this is that it gives all of us the ability to function as individuals, and therefor, we can come to different conclusions about the same thing. For example, what I believe is beautiful, you may not. What I think is funny, you may not. What I find 100% correct, you may not. If this is the case, how can God possibly be perfect? If my idea of perfection is different from yours, how can you argue with me that he is perfect when clearly you and I have very different ideas on almost everything?

This is why I really enjoy the idea of Flawed Gods. The Greeks had this one down perfectly. Even their God of Gods, Zeus, was imperfect. Every God had his or her own pros and cons, each feeding off the other and creating not one perfect God, but instead a community of imperfect Gods that worked off of each other to do their bidding. Greek mythology is cool like that. It has a lot of interesting stories to it, and many of the Gods are no better than you or I. In fact, I think I'd be pretty good at ruling Mount Olympus.

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