The grumpy old man in the sky

The Judeo-Christian stories have many parallels in older mythologies. Creation stories, talking serpents, virgin births…you can find it all in other sources. The Epic of Gelgamesh is older than Genesis, and in it you’ll find a Garden of Eden type of place, an Adam and Eve type of relationship between a man and a woman, a man made of clay, and then there’s the story of Utnapishtim who survived a great flood by building a big boat for himself and a bunch of animals. I personally think that it’s all related--sometimes directly--and stems from a desire to make sense of the world and our experience, and perhaps our experience of things that are beyond our sensory perceptions and our intellectual capacities. I don’t know if there is more to life than meets the eye, but if there is, I don’t think any particular religion or mythology purely reflects that reality. I think if there is such a reality, then it is greater than our storytelling abilities. But our stories may help us conceptualize and talk about an experience that otherwise may be so personal as to escape most of our efforts to express it in any way. But I think if you concretize the stories, you remove the transcendent reality they may point to. The Greek gods may seem all too human if we read their stories as if they were meant to be taken as history rather than literature. And I would say the same thing of the Christian god. All these people running around saying what “he” wants, thinks and feels and what offends “his” nostrils… I wonder if they realize that they often sound like they’re describing a grumpy old man.