“Human beings think of the gods as havng been born, wearing clothes, speaking and having bodies like their own. Ethiopians say the gods are black with snub-noses. Thracians say they have blue eyes and red hair. If cows and horses had hands they would draw pictures of the gods looking like cows and horses!” Xenophanes

“Personality is a limitation; therefore God as we understand Him has no personality. Prayer is our address to God. How can we address someone who has no personality? I address God as if He were a person, though I know that he is not.” Tolstoy

What happens when impersonal objects are given a human form and personality? What happens when a mountain, river, ocean, famine or art are given the history of a human life?

Humans are naturally a species that creates and follows reason. Within the habitat of the human mind values and meaning are as real as the flesh and bones that contain them. But outside of the human mind there are no values or reasons for anything, they just are and anything from stars to atoms, chromosomes to computers, mythology to science are all subject to the same callously indifferent laws of creation, evolution and destruction.

But humans are still persistent in finding out what makes the universe tick, the whats, whys and hows of things. These details are important because they are part of what make us human and give us a unique advantage over our environment. Of course, in the past when logic could not read all the information humans had to fill in the gaps with things more easly understood, like human nature. Winds became cheeks that blow, celestial objects were born and died cyclically and ancestor spirits spirits lived on throught the landscape.

We now have gods that govern human activities like healing, art, industry, law, cooking, cleaning etc and more wild gods for the landscape, seasons, fertility and so on. Human gods, those that govern human culture and civilisation are easy to understand as their realms are in the human domain and so represent human conventions easily.

More wild divinities that represent qualities throughout Nature and Cosmos are beyond human conventions and so when they are given human form their images are unconventional, insane and even sinister. Their actions can be alien, their intent fickle and illogical. Perhaps a mountain shelters and nurtures a tribe but then it spews forth hot lava that wipes out a village. Or maybe another tribe suffers from drought, and then they are given rain which quenches their thirst but then they might be drowned. The gods, the Forces of Nature can seem more like temperamental children than sophisticaed intelligences.

Some religions may admit that their gods are as limited in understanding and ability as humans, they themselves may be just as fallible and mortal as us. But other religions will argue that their God or gods are infinitely all-loving and infallible which a limited human mind would not grasp. Logically speaking this may be possible as the finite human mind can only percieve reality in fragments, so anything infinite will not be percieved so a personal, infinite Being could be justified no matter the atrocities of the world since their actons would be beyond any models of human logic thrown at it.

That aside, to me the gods are symbols of reality that represent anything we need representing. The human mind is equipped to understand some things and not others, so sometimes we need artficial ´delusions´ like the ones religion gives us to placate an unsettled mind. In the mean time we need not be constricted by these ideas but should try our best to use them as spring boards so that help us to grow and evolve.

May the gods, God, Goddess, symbols, archetypes, ancestors, forces of nature, demons, angels, art, science, Truth, Love and Life BLESS YOU!!! :)