Skip to main content

Xenophanes’s God

 


If cattle and lions could paint, they would depict gods in their own images. And worship them too, of course. Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher, said that long, long ago. We create our gods in our own images. Xenophanes was disturbed by the behaviour of many of the gods in his religion. These gods had too many conspicuous weaknesses and vices. They were lascivious, jealous, scheming and cruel. They behaved just like the men who created them. Just like the mediocre Greek men and women.

Xenophanes, being a wide traveller, was aware of other cultures and their gods. In contrast with those gods, Xenophanes thought that his own gods were silly and childish. And very Greek to boot. Soon he observed that all the gods he knew were very similar to their creators. The gods of the Ethiopians were black and flat-nosed. The Thracian gods had blue eyes and red hair.

Xenophanes longed to replace the entire Greek pantheon with one God. He imagined a God without human shape and gender. Why would a God have a metabolic system and excretory organs? Why the penis or the vagina? Xenophanes thought of God as a mind that perceives. A consciousness. A dignified one at that. Not a lecher like Zeus, for example. Not a vindictive flame like Hera. But a noble consciousness that had no desires or wants.

Xenophanes marked the beginning of a tradition of questioning popular beliefs. That was 26 centuries ago. Xenophanes lived approximately from 570 to 475 BCE. Mankind came a long way from those days. We moved by leaps and bounds from the perverted darkness of religions to the glaring brilliance of science and technology. From the blatant narcissism of theology to the disarming modesty of Enlightenment. And in the recent past we liberated mankind from its self-obsessions and put it in a sacred pursuit of eco-systems and the environment and heavenly bodies.

Yet some of us – too many of us, perhaps – still cling to the ancient idols for various reasons. Dominant among the motives is politics, apparently – nothing to do with religion really. Let us consider just one example. Sabarimala.

Sabarimala is a Hindu temple in Kerala whose presiding deity is Ayyappan who is a celibate. Being a celibate (and very human-like), Ayyappan presumably does not like young women who may be potential threats to his chastity. A group of five women lawyers filed a petition in 2006 in the Kerala High Court challenging the same Court’s earlier defence of the tradition. Ten years later the case moved to the Supreme Court of India and in 2018 the apex court judged against gender discrimination and allowed entry of women in Sabarimala temple. This was followed by massive protests in Kerala against the verdict. The BJP with the Congress in tandem opposed the Court’s verdict and sought to perpetuate gender discrimination in the name of tradition. The Supreme Court accepted a review petition and a larger bench is studying the case further.

There is nothing to study. The case is obviously political rather than religious. Women of all age groups were actually entering the temple before this controversy started. In the first five days of every month, young mothers used to enter the temple for a religious ritual called ‘rice-feeding’ of the child. The Kerala High Court accepted this as a fact and evidence. The high priest (tantri) of the temple admitted that film shootings used to take place in the temple premises and female actresses not only entered the restricted areas but also danced there for the films.

Kerala is a state that walked ahead of most other people when it comes to breaking traditions. Many evils practised in the name of traditions like caste system and child marriage were all eradicated from the state long ago because of a radical iconoclasm that runs naturally in Malayali veins. Yet what is happening now with Ayyappan? Why is Kerala walking backward towards the darkness which Xenophanes questioned 26 centuries ago?

Since the answer is obvious, I don’t intend to mention it here. I wish we had more Xenophaneses and less politicians in the country.

PS. This is powered by #BlogchatterA2Z

Previous post in this series: Will, the Tyrant

Tomorrow: Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Monkeys

 

Comments

  1. Absolutely we need more Xenophanes in our country or the way we are moving our gods can't save us.. as it is the king of god narad runs away at every given opportunity. Loved your argument in the post and the conclusion too.
    Deepika Sharma

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Since gods are pawns in the hands of politicians and religious leaders, they will continue to do absurd things until the common person becomes enlightened which is a distant possibility.

      Delete
  2. A very good post. Even after so many years of 'progress' people of the quality of Xenophanes are missed in the world today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our progress has been blinkered. We saw only linear truths.

      Delete
  3. What a brilliant and interesting post!
    I am reading a book on Greek mythology and most of the Greek Gods have such unpardonable vices.
    We need Xenophanes in our country to stop such things like the Sabarimala incident from happening.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most pantheon religions have very human-like gods. Some of our own gods are no better than the Greek ones.

      Delete
  4. This reminded me of Voltaire's "we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a pasha, like a sultan whom one may provoke or appease."
    Which means that every century produces its fair share of Xenophanes but their logic and reasoning fade in the blinding light of power.
    Even 'evolved' intelligences can fall prey to power (like Osho) and lose their way.
    What do we do about this mortal ego?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed even highly evolved souls are misled by crap when they become devotees.

      Delete
  5. What an apt post in the times where the Xenophanes do not seem to be found anywhere to put some sense that is much needed in current times. I had visited Kerala few times and had visited many temples but I was unaware about the rice -feeding ceremony and film shootings. Glad to have known this through your post. I loved reading the post a lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kerala is progressive in many ways. But when it comes to religion, people tend to be the same anywhere.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...