Just wondering if there has ever been a god who is not a downright bastard.
I was watching Clash of the Titans the other night and was struck by what bastards the Olympic Gods were.
First King Acrisius of Argos is annoyed because Zeus impregnated his daughter so he casts her and her son Persius off into the sea. Zues releases the Kraken to destroy the city and kill everyone in it.
Thetis is mad because Persius cut off the hand of her son Calibos, so she decrees that Princess Andromeda, the daughter of Queen Cassiopeia needs to be sacrificed to the Titan or the whole city will be destroyed and so on.
Thinking about it, I realized that there don’t seem to be any gods that aren’t total assholes.
The Judeo/Christian god gets pissed so he floods the earth killing every living thing except for Noah and his family and two of every kind of animal.
The god of Islam says that you should kill disbelievers wherever you find them.
Of all the gods I’ve read about, heard about, looked into I haven’t found one yet that is worthy of respect, much less worship.
So can anyone point me to a diety that isn’t a total asshole. We as a species need to hurry up and outgrow the silly need for religion and gods.
I think some of the Wiccan gods might actually fit the bill… they never tell people to kill any others. The eternal god and goddess who keep the seasons cycling, don’t have time for much mayhem. They certainly aren’t into provoking unrest. Although they don’t necessarily have human needs first in mind, they aren’t arbitrary or cruel with us either. They are forces of nature, whose interests lie in protecting the whole of nature, including us…so many Wiccans believe, anyway.
Seems like some of the minor Greek gods were pretty innocuous, or were just acting as the messenger. Eros (Cupid) may have caused some trouble, but it was virtually always at the behest of the other gods.
I think Jesus was pretty ok too. He was a little hung up on the meek thing, but the loving everyone deal wasn’t too bad a place to start. Buddha had something similar going on. Of course, you have to first accept the god status of these guys, as opposed to prophet.
If you believe in the divinity of Jesus, and stick only to what he is quoted as having said in the gospels, he seems like a decent Joe. One out of six of his sayings point out that being wealthy tends to make you an asshole; while a third of the parables do. He’s only marginally okay with blind obedience to the government. He seeks to help out the underprivileged. He parties (water into wine). I’d hang out with him.
Get ready to duck; the mighty fist of the righteous is about to strike.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a story where one of the major three (Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma) were intentionally harmful to innocent humans. But there’s so many stories and variations on stories, that I might have missed a few.
But, I suppose if you have gods which have any sort of power, given the amount of innocent human suffering in the world, you could say all gods are at least guilty of reckless indifference.
Not to get too hung up on facts in the pit, but do you have a reliable cite for this, or is this just some garbage you’ve heard and believed without verifying it?
Depends on the Buddhist. Some Buddhists venerate him as a deity, others just treat him as a really, really neat guy with some groovy ideas. Buddhism is not a single homogeneous religion.
Athena’s pretty good that way. Even when someone challenged her directly, she just went, “Prove it.”
… of course, then Arachne libeled the entire pantheon. Apparently, with truths, but still, giving the middle finger like that directly in front of a god is asking to be darwinated.
Hell, just the fact that he was playing both sides of the whole Moses/Pharaoh conflict. The Pharaoh wanted to let Moses’ people go, but God kept hardening his heart. The entire conflict was unnecessary, and the Pharaoh’s people suffered just because God wouldn’t allow the Pharaoh his free will.
And we all know what he did to Job as part of a bet with the devil, who was hanging around in heaven for no known reason. What did Job do to ask for it? He was unsinkably faithful. Then God cusses him out just for asking why.
And that hilarious joke God played on Abraham, making him think he had to kill his son? And Abraham was totally going to do it. Haw, haw. Have fun staring at each other over the dinner table, you two. Pointless cruelty in service of God’s ego.
And believers keep making excuses for him. You don’t know him the way I do. Oh, he only does it because he loves us. He made the rainbow for us after he done it.
That’s why Wicca isn’t taken seriously as a real religion. I’m being a little facetious, but the fact is that religions that are actually ancient in origin reflect the senseless cruelty of the natural world with which people had to contend. Deities that aren’t total pricks reflect the spiritual needs of modern people whose families won’t get wiped out in one bad crop. It’s a Nerf religion.
First the idea of the Hindu gods not harming innocent people is all very well but must be seen through the prism of Hindu morality. Innocent didn’t necessarily mean morally blameless, it just meant not involved. You didn’t have to be a bad person to get the gods to fuck with you, just caught up in their activities (Arjunna in the Bhagavad Gita springs to mind - “no, don’t get all pacifist, kill those Kuru fuckers!” quoth Krishna).
Also the gods had their dark aspects. Whilst Shiva was a fairly nice guy, Rudra as his dark aspect wasn’t (similarly for Parvati and Kali/Durga).
Just popped in to mention this, from an anthropological standpoint: Many of the ‘dead’ religions we see today (Greek, Norse, and various asian ‘mythology’) are the victim of victors. One of the first things that happens when a religion is overthrown is that their stories are either edited or downright re-written to make the deities and heroes within much less ‘deific’ and much more ‘bastardly’. When we read about the attrocities of, say, Zeus or Odin, we’re definately getting a filtered view through the lens of whomever did the later translations.
I don’t think the Krishna thing counts - the whole point of the Mahabharat was that the Pandavs had made every effort, up to and including giving up their entire kingdom but five towns, to prevent war. Only in the end when there was no choice and Duryodhan was bent on conquest did it get to that point, and even then, Krisha did not fight. besides, the question was not “Are there any pacifistic gods” but “Is there a god that wasn’t a complete bastard?”
I’d say Krishna was a statesman and not a warrior, or only a warrior when needed. He was a politician and clever but fair and kind as well.
Ok, so there are lots of gods in Hindu mythology that wasn’t a bastard. If you start counting demigods or people that were elevated to the status of demigods there are a lot of people who seemed to sit around and enjoy the good life.