Ben Goren wrote:
> Dubh Ghall wrote:
>
> > As a child, I was taught that statues, idols, fetishes, etc,
> > were representations of gods, and no matter how much you
> > believed in them, they were still only representations.
>
> Not to be blunt or anything, but that's a very...well...childish
> approach to the topic.
>
> For a great many religious believers across a very broad spectrum
> of religions, ancient and modern, the artifacts are, indeed,
> real, living gods. Yes, it's bat**** insane, but it's what they
> believe. And, to be honest, believing in non-cor****eal gods is
> every bit as bat**** insane; it just adds a rather feeble
> rhetorical device to the believer's quiver.
>
> And it's not just inanimate objects that experience apotheosis:
> almost every emperor you can name was also a god, and many animals
> (the actual animals, not their spirit force or whatever) are gods
> as well.
>
> That they're all perfectly mundane real-world objects is
> completely irrelevant. To True Believers (TM) they're gods endowed
> with magical properties of some sort or another, and that's all it
> takes to make them gods.
>
> Gods of no consequence whatsoever beyond whatever goes on in
> the deluded minds of their wor****pers, to be sure...but gods
> nonetheless.
>
> Your only other intellectually honest option is to claim that
> Osiris, Mithra, Bacchus, Jesus, Adonis, Dionysus, and the like
> aren't gods either, because /they're/ only representations of
> mystical fairy-tale beings that don't actually exist no matter how
> much you believe in them. And while there's a great deal of truth
> to that approach, it's an extremely counter-productive one from a
> linguistic perspective. Tell somebody that Zeus isn't a god, and
> they'll wonder what you've been smoking.
Saying that "Zeus isn't a god" is different than saying "Zeus is a god
that doesn't exist." Where I agree with Dubh Ghall is that you can look
at a statue that John Doe claims "this is a god" and say "that statue
exists but the god that it's supposed to represent does not and thus the
statue is not a god" just as you can say "the word 'Zeus' exists but the
god that it's supposed to represent does not."
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