God
People often ask me “Do you believe in God?” and I say “Which God?”
Medusa?
Jesus?
Buddha?
Satan?
You know? Any of the thousands and thousands of gods that are out there-
No, I don’t see any compelling evidence to believe in a god.
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I think, in my personal opinion, and I’m not a great philosopher in this respect but my personal opinion is that religion is probably an attempt — an early attempt, a primitive attempt to explain the world, and the easiest way to do is to invent an agency that is all-powerful and can do all these things that you don’t understand.
You’re walking along a path, a rock hits you in the back of the head..
Perfectly clear day, you look around, you say. “somebody threw that rock”.
Well, if nobody threw the rock then there must be a rock God or something like that, who throws rocks and hits you in the back of the head.
You gotta have an explanation for it. We human beings and all animals, when you come down to it, they want to have an explanation of the world around them.
I do tricks — I do slight-of-hand tricks for dogs and make them nuts! You know, you do a thing like fake throw a ball and the dog goes nuts when he goes to look where it is because we spoiled his expectation of the world. It has spoiled the dog’s expectation of the world and it really worries them; you see them actually confused!
They’re worried, they’re really grieved by it, they’re bothered by it.
It challenges the dogs in a way that they’ve never been challenged before because their expectations of the real world have not been met. And that’s what happens with people; they want an explanation. And inventing a god, or a series of gods, a whole panoply of gods, a panorama of gods if you will — is a very easy way to do it.
“Oh, I don’t have think about rain because that is the rain god and that’s how water comes down out of the sky”.
A god is just the easy way to do it, in my opinion.
