Seen some people floating the idea that “the gods” (all deities? Maybe just Greek Deities?) don’t require our consent because they have big important stuff to do that we couldn’t possibly understand and they might need to do things to us or through us because of their job.
1. They have important things to do
2. They cannot do it without us
3. They do not need to maintain good will with us. Trashing our households and violating our consent is a smart thing to do.
I’m going to start here: the gods can do whatever they like and no one can stop them. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to do things that run contrary to their aims. Their actions still have natural consequences.
I am dead sure these people had authoritarian parents and believe that, without someone to punish us, we’d all go completely nuts. Maybe they’ve been on such a tight leash their entire lives that they haven’t gotten as far as imagining the consequences of being All Powerful and also a dickhead.
Consider college students who have never previously been left without adult supervision, and who, given that taste of freedom, immediately proceed to get alcohol poisoning, flunk out of school, or any number of other idiotic things. They go utterly wild like that because the only reason anyone ever gave them was “or else.” And now that there is no one with a stick threatening them, they must encounter, for the very first time, the idea that bad things happen when you make stupid decisions, even if no external being is there to punish you.
If deities need humans for their plans (which the Big Important Thing theory states that they do) then they shouldn’t mistreat them. Theologians come up with notions of why deities can or do behave badly. Theologians try to come up with complex explanations. Normal people wander off and convert to another religion. In the past, maybe clergy could solve this by working with the local government and instituting laws forcing people to follow that religion. But did this, historically, solve the problem? No. And we have the ruins to prove it.
If you try to modify a child’s behavior through violence, the child will escalate, becoming increasingly rebellious. Eventually, they’ll move out, and bit by bit, you’ll lose contact with them, BECAUSE YOU ABUSED THEM. Adults are not different.
Christianity is declining. Even now, the word, “sinful” has positive connotations for most people, and the word “heretic” is something people proudly apply to themselves. Years of portraying the deity as a malignant narcissist have taken their toll. Hell has taken its toll.
Being perceived as cruel has negative consequences for the deity’s cultus. And that’s fine, so long as you don’t need humans for anything.
But if you need humans, how they see you, and how they feel about you, matters.
A. You need humans and should maintain a good relationship with them through open lines of communication and building good will or
B. You don’t need humans, and have no real excuse for mistreating them.
Why do people experience deities in that way?
Deities, I think, are sublime in nature, and they get translated to us through our own symbolic language. If the recipient of the message has a maladaptive understanding of power, that will taint how they hear the deity.
In conclusion: people need therapy before they need mystical training. Yikes.
