Throughout history human beings have believed in gods—thousands of them. And just as past cultures—many great and lasting civilizations—have all but slipped from our memory, so have the gods they worshiped.While today's dominant religions fixate on (and wage wars over) a few prominent deities, we would be wise to remember that billions of people from past centuries believed in—and devoted their lives to—entirely different gods. When civilizations lost their dominance, collapsed and were eventually overshadowed by others, so the gods they worshipped died out, and lost their relevance. If these deities are remembered in the present at all, they are thought only to be quaint relics of a distant, more primitive people.
This fact, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates that gods are human inventions, and live only so long as groups bound by common belief survive. Gods live solely in the minds of men and women, and are conjured up to serve very human personal and political needs.
Consider the following compilation of gods in whom people have believed over the course of human history. By no means an exhaustive list, it nevertheless serves as a reminder that gods have always been, and continue to be, human creations.
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
~ THOMAS JEFFERSON
Pick a god; any god
Wow! That's pretty comprehensive, Norm! And a very good point.
It's also interesting to note how many of these gods are the same god in different guises. I don't mean this in the profound sense that many Christians would like to believe - that they're all aspects of the One True God. I mean that even Yaweh and Jesus are just agglomerations of STORIES ABOUT previously worshipped gods. Christianity ADOPTED these tales and claimed them for its own. For instance the relationships between the stories of Jesus and those of Balder, which predate them. And the cult of Mithras. And all the sun gods there have ever been. The whole notion of "gods" goes back to Stone Age animism and the Christian god is just the same as all the others with the notable exception that he is claimed to be the only true god. Well that's a bit like claiming the Starbucks I'm sitting in is the Only True Starbucks. Why should I believe that? After all, it looks the same as all the others!