uberkuh

There used to be a thousand gods.
They ruled antiquity.
What are the odds?

The fear and hope of countless sods
Lay shrouded in mystery.
There used to be a thousand gods.

All but one were damned as frauds.
There were so many.
What are the odds?

From fires to floods,
They cursed iniquity.
There used to be a thousand gods.

Every race lauds
Its chosen divinity.
What are the odds?

A million synods
Voted what to believe.
There used to be a thousand gods.
What are the odds?

—

This form of poetry is called a villanelle. I learned about it last night and wanted to try my hand at it. It’s not that hard to make.

Polytheism used to be all the rage. Monotheism became popular because people were lazy and didn’t want to pray a thousand times to a thousand different gods. Oh, we need rain today? Let’s pray to Rain God. Oh, we need sunshine tomorrow? Let’s pray to Sun God. And so it goes. It gets old, I imagine. The only semi-reasonable solution is to consolidate your deities into one gigantic, all-powerful savior. Now you can pray for everything at once and your one awesome god will take care of it all with his infinite capacity and goodness.

Yet, even when you have decided to worship only one god, you can still find a thousand other gods. This absurdity of worshiping one out of a thousand gods is what inspired this poem. One of the silliest presumptions of any monotheist is that his or her chosen god is the only true or existing god.

How does anyone know that other gods don’t exist? Maybe they do. Maybe they sit up in Heaven together and play games with our minds. Can’t you see Zeus, Odin, and Jesus sitting around a cloud-filled roulette wheel, betting on when some poor sap will kick the bucket or lose his marbles from some preordained misfortune?

If anyone tries to tell you that only one god exists, ask that person how he or she came to know such privileged information and why the rest of the world is still so confused. It’s a good question. And faith is not the answer. It’s avoidance of it.

Inspired by a recent set of surveys conducted by world-renowned atheist Sam Harris, I conducted one of my own. Here are my results.

You might point out to a Christian sometime that some things just don’t add up in the Bible. “There are contradictions everywhere,” you might argue. But you would be wasting your time, because logic rarely ever applies to a Christian. To a Christian, the Bible is infallible, plain and simple. It never makes a mistake. It can’t, because it was written by God and God never makes a mistake. And it never lies, because God would never tell one of his creations only part of the truth (even though, by definition, he always knows more than we can comprehend).

So it makes sense that the Bible has to be perfect, right? Wrong, and here’s why. The Bible was written by imperfect people. The Bible was, according to it, dictated to imperfect people by a perfect God, either directly or indirectly through the medium of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is a tiny little invisibile translation device that gets implanted into the base of a person’s skull the moment he or she converts to Christianity. Convert and get a free upgrade!

And because the Bible was written by imperfect people, it has to have some imperfections of its own, either injected into it by a poor speller with a fifth-grade education, which was all-too-common in the days before No Child Left Behind, or about it as it got communicated to millions and millions of people around the world in many different languages. Somewhere along the way, you know, without a doubt, that some idiot fucked up somewhere and made a mistake when interpreting a story that came to be included in the Bible. Or, worse, it’s probably the case that the star of a story in the Bible embellished that story to ensure future fame.

For instance, suppose that Jonah never actually lived inside of a whale. Suppose the truth of the matter is that Jonah got his leg bitten off by a shark and lived to tell about it. Only, to tell about it and prove to his friends and family that his manhood remained intact, he had to transform his story into, shall we say, a tall tale and boast that it wasn’t only his leg that got swallowed up inside the mouth of a gigantic sea creature. It was his entire body! And that gigantic sea creature wasn’t a shark the size of his camel. No! It was a gigantic killer whale the size of his house!

But it really doesn’t matter what happened, because something, somewhere in the Bible is bound to be wrong, even if just a little bit. You know it and I know it. And if you really press a Christian to admit it, he or she will tell you that he or she knows it. Because it’s common sense that people make mistakes and nothing God says or does can cure that. Obviously.