People worship over 2,500 different “gods” today. They can’t
all be right so the logical assumption is that all of them are wrong.
Of course they are, they are all man made. It's fine to use
them metaphorically to understand things which cannot be understood, but it's
not OK to take them literally. That's exclusionary toward anyone who is not
like you.
The reason people worship the particular god that they do is
almost 100% a function of the family and the culture they were born into. I was
born into a “Christian” family and dutifully marched into Sunday school singing
“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war”, a rather odd song to align
with the prince of peace, I thought. We marched in behind a boy carrying a pole
with a cross on top and the figure of a man, dead and bleeding, nailed to it.
Even then it seemed incongruous that my culture thought many other religious
symbolisms to be barbaric.
We take on the culture, customs, and religion we are born
into. Early childhood indoctrination locks us in. It’s the reason we wear the
clothes we wear, eat the foods we eat, cheer for the sports we do, and parrot
back the programming we learn in school. Things like the revisionist history of
our own country. All about the bad “Indians” the European Americans
victoriously battled to create our great country. It was one of the worst
genocides in history. The blood is on our hands as we slap ourselves on the
back for our wonderful deeds of land theft and murder.
It’s all early childhood indoctrination with a definite spin
to favor and flatter the audience for which it is intended.
It is only when we are able to step back out of the forest
and see the world as a whole, like an alien looking down from the moon, that we
can make some progress. But when we are raised with religious prejudice and
geographic nationalism, specific labels that divide and separate us, and we
accept only those with similar gang sign, we are unable to move forward.
We are all more alike than different yet we spend most of our
lives in denial of that fact, eagerly building walls that separate us from ourselves.
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