Prelude to William Hopper's "The Heathen's Guide to World Religions" - Highly recommended book for those who wish to enjoy sarcastic wit and excellent references as well as resources.
In the beginning we humans lived in the wild and ate whatever was slower or stupider than we were. At this time, we invented a thing called a “god.” The god was made from the mightiest elements mankind could see: fire, thunder, lightning… all the big, scary stuff we didn’t understand but knew was powerful.
As there were so many things that were powerful, we found we couldn’t settle for just one god. So we made a whole slew of them, each god representing a different big, scary thing. We understood little about these gods, except for the simple fact that in their Infinite Wisdom they had decided they didn’t need to eat us. As we found this good, we honoured and worshipped these gods.
As time passed and humans prospered on Earth, we learned much about the way the planet actually worked. Over and over again we humans were put in the awkward position of looking at things like storm clouds and saying “Wait a minute...that’s not a god. That’s a high ridge of barometric pressure coming in from the cooler coastal region.”
But there were still a lot of things we didn’t understand. So, rather than waste more time and effort deifying every new enigma we ran across, we decided to simplify the whole mess by creating a single, omnipresent ‘God’ on whom we could throw all the mysteries of the universe until such time as our descendants could look at them and say, “Wait a minute...that’s not God. That’s...”
These days we’ve solved so many of life’s mysteries that we’re running out of things to call ‘God.’ Between mapping the human genome, quantum physics, and cheese that you can spray from a can, we almost lack the ability to perceive anything as being more powerful than we are.
This whole scenario has led to a broader, more contemporary theological search that requires a lot of time and dedicated effort on the part of religious leaders worldwide. Representatives from every faith are now struggling to place ‘God’ in our new, technologically advanced society. As a result of this crisis of faith leaders from all the world’s religions are trying to meet this challenge through prayer, hard work, and a sincere scholastic inquiry. As all this finally gets these guys the hell out of our way, the rest of us now have the chance to think for ourselves.
And so the era of the Heathen begins...
