“In the beginning God created the heavens” (14 billion B.C. [14,000,000,000] years ago) “and the earth” (4.5 billion B.C. [4,500,000,000] years ago).
The commonly held, condescending and modernistic view, taught in most college level “comparative religions” classes, is the bogus, presumptuous and pertinent truism that all of the world’s religions are ultimately a result of primitive superstitions or ancient ideas of human wisdom that were systematized in ancient civilizations, and the associated assumption that when you boil it all down and peel off the superficial details, all the world’s religions are either fundamentally the same or can be lumped into a short list of essentially similar belief systems.
That view fails to understand or appreciate the distinctiveness of one important outlier. The God of the Judeo-Christian beliefs is profoundly different and completely unique, and is clearly NOT a man-made God.
The many gods of the archaic world of Sumerian Uruk or of the proto-Greek world of the Homeric Iliad were little more than man-made “gods.” Those Man-made Gods are social fabrications which benefitted the priests and duped the unwary. They were humans with special “super hero” (or super villain) powers. On a deeper level, these mythological figures were often allegories of classical ideas and ideals, or more precisely they were those ideas and ideals, personified. The creative Greeks were careful to systematize the mythology of their gods into a more or less internally consistent “society of the gods” who lived in the fantasy kingdom of Zeus in the vicinity of Mount Olympus.
The practical ancient Romans adopted and adapted the pre-defined Etruscan gods and other regionally local gods (including the allegorical super-hero gods of the Greek and Phoenician traders sailing in the western Mediterranean). The eclectic Romans then superstitiously accepted and adapted any other “god” that anyone else proposed, because “one didn’t want to risk making some forgotten god mad” because he/she got ignored. The Romans ultimately and pantheistically accepted any proposed god, because “who knows.” For the Romans appeasing the gods was in the best interest of their well governed state republic. The practical Romans did NOT believe that their gods were particularly transcendent or metaphysical, so much as sneaky, “super power” human-ish characters who worked behind the scenes in this world effecting the weather and individual fates. They were unseen, but not really “other worldly.”
Beyond the Mediterranean, the many so-called “barbarian” peoples developed and worshiped or respected a wide variety of “gods” of nature, tree gods, wind gods, thunder and lightening gods, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. These western gods and those of eastern Asia and India (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etcetera) all more or less fit the man-made “all of the world’s religions are ultimately a result of primitive superstitions or ancient ideas of human wisdom that were systematized in those ancient civilizations, and the associated assumption that when you boil it all down and peel off the superficial details, all the world religions are either fundamentally the same or can be lumped into a short list of essentially similar belief systems” truism.
In one way or another all of those religions worship some aspect of the creation rather than acknowledging and worshiping the revealed creator of the cosmos. Being man-made elements of their respective societies, all of these ancient gods were actually parts of the created physical world which were routinely represented to their societies with man made tokens of wood, metal, or stone materials.
However, the outlier God of the Judeo-Christian beliefs is a profoundly different God, who does NOT fit into that condescending “superstitious myth or human wisdom” truism. The Hebrew God had created the physical world out of a void (ex nihilo, literally out of nothing). Hence the otherwise impossible Singularity (the Big Bang pre-condition) which precedes the “Big Bang,” the divine creation of the Cosmos. That God didn’t have a physical form, couldn’t be physically seen, and utterly transcended all of the created physical world. [The unique and atypical attributes of that God (and the persons of the Trinitarian Godhead) are listed in detail on https://christian-hx.fyi/the-unique-revealed-attributes-of-god/.]
The Judeo-Christian God is totally unlike the pagan gods of Israel’s neighbors or those of the rest of the world.
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