Atheist Memes

I’m hesitant about the “minor” part. The father-sky-god idea is somewhat omnipresent in most proto-indo-european mythologies, with Zeus/Jupiter also being a weather god. It seems like the breakdown between sky-father and earth-mother was fairly common, with the sky-father sometimes being personified by weather, or the sun, or something similarly central, while the mother was associated with plants and growing things, and sometimes water. The reconstructed proto-indo-european word “dyeus” translates to sky-god and led to the latin cognate deus, which simply translates to “god.” Like “god,” it’s the generic word for a god that was then adopted by “monotheism” to mean a particular god, eg “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis .”

Gods, like kings and empires, rise and fall. And religious leaders, like politicians, want people to think that the current thing that they’re pushing for is the way it always was.

I know retcon is a pop culture term that hasn’t fully migrated into the mainstream, but it literally means retroactive continuity. It means rewriting or reinterpreting known “facts” (which may simply be accepted canon of stories or myths) in a way that suits the new intended interpretation. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and very much in line with Orwell’s idea of “He who controls the past controls the future.” Thus El was always Yahweh, despite the fact that Yahweh was El’s son and Ashera was El’s mother. Ashera was Yahweh’s consort for a while, too, because culture is a real time smorgasbord of stories that doesn’t need to be mutually compatible. Any inconsistency is either taken care of by the folks who edit the texts, or at worst get chalked up to “that was a misunderstanding of how things really are”.

I’m really continually amazed at the persistence of the idea that the dozens of Abrahamic religions are interpreted as being literally true given modern historical and archeological scholarship showing they’re no different than every other religion, but it does show that there’s a stickiness someplace in the individual and collective minds of humanity that we are still figuring out.