Mysticism
When I was in college, a friend told me about a book she was reading. The overall premise was this: that all the major world religions are basically the same.
I nodded in agreement at the time, because it certainly sounds like a reasonable thing to think. Now, I find this point of view to be puzzling, because in letter and in spirit, it's completely wrong. I would agree that all major religions have probably been designed (yes, I'm an "argument from design" person) to solve the same basic problem of the human condition: to address our origins, to set ethical standards, and to figure out what happens after we die. But the major religions are decidedly not the same.
I'm fond of picking on Christianity, but that's only because I grew up in a predominantly Christian country, and that's the religion with which I am the most familiar. If you pick on Christianity, though, there's a good chance you're indirectly picking on Judaism. You're most certainly picking on Mormonism. All of these are so interrelated that it actually makes some sense, on the surface, to claim that they're all roughly the same thing.
The notion that all religions are essentially equal to each other is a relatively modern concept. People toss around this point of view in order to undermine the credence of all religions. If they're all basically the same, what value is there in any one of them? Atheists have all kinds of crazy ideas they like to espouse, usually in an effort to make faith seem redundant or unnecessary. This feels odd to me, since you don't really need "crazy ideas" (or ideas that aren't backed by evidence) in order to make any one particular faith seem implausible.
I pick on Christianity, but there's at least some parts of the ideology that are admirable and, if misinterpreted, could lead to positive effects in our world. When you consider the whole "love each other" thing, it seems that Jesus was basically a freaky beatnik idealist type who ended up on the wrong side of the Roman law and got crucified. Mohammed was a warrior who assembled an army in Medina and took Mecca by force from the Quraysh. Most Muslims might be peaceful, but it's not a religion with a cornerstone of peace.
They have two different prophets, who taught and believed two radically different things, who represented two different and irreconciable monotheistic entities, in two different epochs in history, in two different parts of the world, for completely different reasons. So no, these two are not the same thing.
I don't believe Christian scripture is literally true, save for the part about Jesus of Nazareth existing and being crucified by Pilate. For years I have heard arguments about why the other stories can or cannot be true, but none of these arguments satisfy me.
Take the "argument from design" as one example. The reality we observe is complicated enough that it wouldn't have happened without some kind of divine grand plan. Conclusion? There must be a creator, who is God. This argument typically confuses me, because it's put forth by Christians trying to argue that their God must be real. Even if you establish that there must be a creator for reality to exist as it does, nothing about that argument would inescapably point to the Christian God as being the creator. Atheists would argue for evolution, but that argument, on its own merits, doesn't really establish that any one particular religion isn't true. (Unless those religious beliefs are incompatible with evolution.)
Let's take the "first cause" argument as another example. Christians say that in order for the world to exist, something has to have started it, and that something points to the inevitability of a creator. A non-believer would argue that this doesn't actually solve the problem; you're just trading uncertainly about where we came from for the uncertainty of where this "creator" came from. ("If God made us, then who made God?") But then a Christian could counter that God exists outside of our reality, and time is a property of our reality, and since cause and effect require a temporal dimension to make any sense, then God doesn't need to have been created.
And so on. These arguments can go on for a long time, in circles, without actually getting anywhere and without either side saying anything truly conclusive. None of these has ever convinced me.
So, what does convince me?
Before I go any further, consider the notion of joint probability. This says that probability of any two things being true together is the product of the probabilities of the two things.
I just gave you the answer to the question I'm about to pose, but here's a thought experiment. Consider that you're investigating a homicide. There's a witness who saw a suspect leaving the scene of the crime around the time the murder was supposed to have taken place, and while they didn't get a good look, they're pretty sure the suspect wasn't white, and was "most likely black".
So, which of these two options is more likely to be true?
In general, the chance of X being true is more likely than the chance of X and Y being true. The chance that you flip a coin and it lands heads is 50%, but the chance that you flip it twice and it lands heads both times is 25% (50% x 50%).
It's reasonably simple to apply this logic to Mormonism. If you're a Mormon, you believe that everything in the Christian Bible is true, plus all of the stuff that's written in the book of Mormon. You can do the same thought experiment from the standpoint of probability. Which is more likely?
Not being religious, of course, I don't have the luxury of certainty. Intellectually, I happen to think that nothing about religion can be established as fact without any uncertainty. Faith requires doubt. If your faith is based on believing in the history of your religion to a 100% certainty, then you have no faith.
This thought experiment gets a little harder to swallow for a lot more people when you apply the argument to Christianity and Judaism. It is the same problem as with the Mormons: in order to believe in the Christian religion, you first have to accept that all of Judaism is true. Most of the Christian Bible is just the Hebrew Bible, with some Christian writings tacked onto the end.
This is where things get tricky for me. When I first started studying Christianity, and started dabbling in the practices of being a Christian, I ignored the entirety of the Old Testament since, as I told myself, "I'm not trying to be Jewish". I didn't feel there was anything necessarily wrong with Judaism, but does one really have to accept Judaism and Christianity in order to be Christian? If you're going to accept the Hebrew Bible, doesn't that mean you're Jewish, but choosing to interpret the whole thing with a Christian bent?
In the end, I couldn't get away from the connection between the two. When you dig deep enough, Christianity simply cannot exist in a vacuum that doesn't include its Jewish roots. This leads me to a bigger set of problems than the ones that Christianity poses on its own. The bridge between the two is tenuous, and Judaism itself is highly problematic.
Recently, someone asked me if I thought that Jesus was the Messiah. (They didn't use those words, but that's basically the question they were asking.) I replied that I didn't think there ever was supposed to be a Messiah in the first place. To answer "yes" or "no" to that question is really to give credence to ancient Israelite mythos. Just because some tribe of people living in Canaan a few thousand years ago wrote a whole bunch of stuff about a God of theirs, and a couple of passages talk about some future "Messiah", what assurance do I have that they were correct?
You could argue that it was because Jesus eventually came and fulfilled the prophecies. This is where things get really unconvincing. Among a few other things, people point to passages in the book of Isaiah. Chapter 7 talks about a great man being born to a virgin, but this passage, while it does mention a virgin birth, is not talking about the Messiah. In context, it's about something completely different. (As most people know, since it's oft-discussed in our secular society, the whole "virgin" thing, as an error in translation from the Hebrew "alma" to the Greek "parthenos", is also in dispute.) Chapter 53 talks about a man who suffered for the good of all the people, but again, this passage, when read in its entirety, is clearly not saying anything about the Messiah. It's not as though the text has been changed from the Hebrew Bible to the Christian one so as to appear to be about Jesus; in both versions, the stories are patently, unambiguously not about the Messiah.
I'd like to believe that Christians are doing more than reading something that claims Jesus was prophesized by some passages in Isaiah, flipping to read the two or three verses, accepting the words as being about Jesus, then closing the book and going on about their days. But they must be, because citation of these passages persists.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that ancient Israelites thought that the future Messiah would be a warrior, a king among men who would kick out the foreigners and make Israel a sovereign nation again. In the last year, President Trump declared that the United States would now recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. I wondered, fleetingly, if Trump was doing this as a first step in a grand plan to step into the Messiah's shoes. Of course, for that to be the case, Trump would have to be educated and informed enough to understand what I'm saying here. I'd guess that the chances of this are unlikely.
Just because the prophecies quoted in the Hebrew Bible don't seem to be about Jesus doesn't have anything to do with the veracity of Judaism. By the same token, there are some pretty horrible things in the Old Testament; people are quick to point out that God seems to encourage, or at least passively tolerate, the Israelites killing entire cities of men, raping their women, and enslaving their children. But, just because you don't like something, doesn't mean that it isn't true. The atrocities of the Hebrew Bible are not enough to make us question its historicity. If anything, given how atrocious all of human history is, this actually makes it more likely, simply because it's more consistent with history than some imagined utopia.
At its inception, the notion that Hashem, the God of the Israelites, is somehow the one true God, or the only God among many who should be worshipped, seems unlikely.
Growing up, I used to think that the first Christians (I didn't know they were Jews until much later) discovered God, that He spoke to them, and suddenly, religion started to spread throughout the world. Before this, I thought, people were just walking around on the planet fighting each other, making babies, and eating berries off of trees. Certainly, before God spoke to them, no human beings ever set their sights on the heavens and wonder what came after this life, or where they came from.
It's the constant error of people in modern civilization to believe that we are somehow more advanced than the people of prehistoric civilizations. How were the pyramids in Egypt constructed? Certainly the primitive Egyptians weren't clever enough to figure out how to stack massive blocks of stone on top of each other to such great heights, to assemble such great structures. They must have had help from aliens. (And my tongue in cheek remark is meant to refer to extraterrestrial aliens, as posited by the History Channel...not Jewish "aliens".)
The ancient Egyptians figured out how to solve this problem, much in same way that we have figured out how to build skyscrapers today, even though our technology is slightly more advanced. And they had gods, who were typically amalgamations of animals and humans. There was Bastet, a cat goddess who was revered by mothers for keeping mice out of their children's food. There was Taweret, the woman-hippo who was thought to protect pregnant women. (And who was prominently featured on the television show "Lost" in the form of a massive statue.) And Sobek, the crocodile-headed god who was worshipped in order to protect mothers and children from getting snatched away by crocodiles when they were washing clothes or tending other business down by the Nile. The list goes on.
While you could dismiss all of these as being hyperlocal superstitions, the ancient Egyptians had a hierarchy to their list of gods. It's difficult to piece together from the scant evidence we have, but for at least one large faction of priests, it seems that Amun-Ra was the God In Charge, with other gods serving below this one. And while this hierarchy might seem odd to Christians, what exactly are angels but a hierarchy of beings serving God? While the Egyptians had Isis, the Jews had Gabriel.
So I've mentioned the Egyptians, but they were far from the only powerful civilization during the Bronze Age. They were not the only civilization that worshipped a god. The Hittites had Ḫannaḫanna. The Aryans had Ahura Mazda. The Babylonians had Marduk. The Sumerians had Enlil. The Mycenaeans (precursors to the Greeks) had Zeus. The Assyrians had Ashur. The Moabites had Chemosh. The Ammonites had Ashtar. The Minoans had a goddess whose name we do not know. This is only to name a subset of the peoples who existed. And all peoples at this time are only a subset of all of those in history.
And around this time, while the Eygyptians are paying tribute to an anthropomorphic cat, the people living in the region of Canaan, some of whom would later be the Israelites, worshipped gods: among them El, Baal, and Yam. The stories of the Jewish patriarchs in Genesis, Abraham and Jacob, describe them interacting with a god named "El" during their formative years living in Canaan. These stories are interesting; Abraham shares a meal with El, face-to-face, shortly before this El destroys Sodom and Gomorrah for their sexual immorality. (Evidently, all of the young children were sexually immoral in this city as well.) Jacob has a dream about El visiting him in a dream, standing over him and offering him protection in exchange for devotion. Later Jacob wrestles with El in some kind of all-night spar. Later Hebrews would claim that no mortal could see the face of Hashem and live, which makes these accounts all the more puzzling.
Despite the fact that Hashem has promised Canaan to Abraham, Jacob and his ilk decide to GTFO and move to Egypt, where they are eventually enslaved for mating too excessively. Moses comes centuries later; the burning bush insists, repeatedly, that he is the same God of Abraham and Jacob, and for the sake of the continuity of the narrative, this is a relief. But one wonders why the man-god who ate with Abraham and wrestled with Jacob has suddenly become a botanical conflagration. (Yes, I went to college, so I have fancy words.)
Most of the major civilizations of the Bronze Age collapse around the 12th century BCE. It is around this time in history that we might feasibly place the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt amidst historical record. Cities are being attacked by a roaving band of pirates called the "sea peoples". The Philistines may have been among them, and this could explain the tale of David and Goliath around this time, although I've never seen a man who is 12 feet tall. Whatever might have happened, it is around this time that the Israelites go from being nomadic slaves to one of the larger political and millitary forces in the region. They are God's chosen people, but in the next 1000 years they succumb to the Babylonians and later the Romans.
If you're tiring of how sardonic I'm being about the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, I can cut to the chase and offer the main point: the events in the Hebrew Bible are all a little difficult to swallow as literal truth. Yes, the accounts of the Creation and the Flood are difficult to accept, and these are the most hotly debated topics. But even if you could make a rock-solid case that those events are literally true, you have a long parade of events that come afterwards that are almost as difficult to make sense of. And they stand side by side with all other accounts of all other gods that existed around this time in history. From around this time, The Epic of Gilgamesh has a similar story of creation and a flood, starring a different God and featuring a different ensemble cast of humans and demigods, so why should we assume the Israelites wrote the correct version?
Looking back, I shouldn't be surprised that the Charleton Heston version of The Ten Commandments, like the Hebrew Bible, doesn't make any mention of the Egyptians even having gods of their own. This is at best misleading; it wasn't a battle of the only thing versus nothing; it was the battle of one god against another. Contrary to what I thought as a naïve and impressionable youth, the ancient Israelites did not invent religion. They were not the first people to be "contacted" by some kind of divine higher power. Religion has probably existed among human beings as long as human beings have existed. Or, at least since our primate ancestors started ceremoniously burying their dead.
Scientology is a more modern religion born of a mythos based in science fiction. I've had limited interactions with them, but when they're recruiting on the streets, they offer to analyze you with one of their meter machines, figure out your problems, and devise solutions for you. They offer the tip of the tip of an iceberg; they're offering initiation into a community that will solve your problems. The whole thing about extraterrestrial souls living on earth and inhabiting the bodies of humans and causing human suffering is an origin story that they only tell you about well after you've become part of the church. At this point, it becomes almost impossible to back out, either intellectually or socially. In this way, the people roaming the streets handing out pamphlets about faith in Jesus helping you avoid Hell are doing roughly the same thing: condense the message into its primal form, and once the recipient has accepted that simple premise, then you can spring all of the other stuff onto them.
Most people "know" that Scientology is silly, and there's no truth to it. Scientology is a modern-day mythology, in that it can be easily discredited by available evidence. But if you wait a few generations, all first-hand accounts from people that might discredit it will become impossible, and the written history available can be argued to have been tampered with, either for or against the matter. Once enough time passes, it becomes impossible to truly substantiate either position, and this is when mythology becomes religion. When all people cease to believe in a religion, either because all of those people die or it becomes culturally irrelevant, it comes full circle and again becomes mythology. Religion, then, is merely mythology with active mindshare among the living, aged to the point where it has become impossible to discredit.
The notion of an eternal being who is passively observing the human species over the ages (for this thought experiment, you could call it God, if you like) makes you wonder what this entity might make of us. Certainly it must think humans are odd. We continually reinvent our God or gods, changing them as time marches on and as nations rise and fall. Despite this dynamism being a constant of world religion, each group seems to think its own interpretation is objectively correct. This entity certainly can't think that we humans in the United States at this time in history have devised anything new or novel, like nothing that has ever existed. It wouldn't possibly think that we were correct, while everyone else was wrong.
People like to make use of ambiguities of the past in order to argue that one religious claim or another may or may not be true. I prefer to make use of the ambiguities of the future. In 40 million years, the earth will probably still exist much in the way as it does today. Let's assume that life still exists. Human beings will be gone, or will have evolved into something drastically different than we are now. But suppose that some form of intelligent life exists, and has prospered to fill the niche that we humans currently occupy so comfortably. All of our current languages, all current texts, will have been obliterated by the forces of history. That includes all copies of the Bible. What does our Christian God do then? He has to re-enact this same story we have all over again. He has to send his son, again, to die horrifically and save these new beings from sin. It assumes that they have a concept of sin. It assumes (perhaps incorrectly) that ideas spread through their culture via story, just as it does in ours. It assumes that these future beings will torture each other as we do. It has to assume that a story of self-sacrifice and resurrection will have some kind of spiritual significance to them. Would it?
It doesn't really matter who their Gods are. Or what their stories are. They will be drastically different from our own. But all religions are basically the same anyway.
I nodded in agreement at the time, because it certainly sounds like a reasonable thing to think. Now, I find this point of view to be puzzling, because in letter and in spirit, it's completely wrong. I would agree that all major religions have probably been designed (yes, I'm an "argument from design" person) to solve the same basic problem of the human condition: to address our origins, to set ethical standards, and to figure out what happens after we die. But the major religions are decidedly not the same.
I'm fond of picking on Christianity, but that's only because I grew up in a predominantly Christian country, and that's the religion with which I am the most familiar. If you pick on Christianity, though, there's a good chance you're indirectly picking on Judaism. You're most certainly picking on Mormonism. All of these are so interrelated that it actually makes some sense, on the surface, to claim that they're all roughly the same thing.
The notion that all religions are essentially equal to each other is a relatively modern concept. People toss around this point of view in order to undermine the credence of all religions. If they're all basically the same, what value is there in any one of them? Atheists have all kinds of crazy ideas they like to espouse, usually in an effort to make faith seem redundant or unnecessary. This feels odd to me, since you don't really need "crazy ideas" (or ideas that aren't backed by evidence) in order to make any one particular faith seem implausible.
I pick on Christianity, but there's at least some parts of the ideology that are admirable and, if misinterpreted, could lead to positive effects in our world. When you consider the whole "love each other" thing, it seems that Jesus was basically a freaky beatnik idealist type who ended up on the wrong side of the Roman law and got crucified. Mohammed was a warrior who assembled an army in Medina and took Mecca by force from the Quraysh. Most Muslims might be peaceful, but it's not a religion with a cornerstone of peace.
They have two different prophets, who taught and believed two radically different things, who represented two different and irreconciable monotheistic entities, in two different epochs in history, in two different parts of the world, for completely different reasons. So no, these two are not the same thing.
I don't believe Christian scripture is literally true, save for the part about Jesus of Nazareth existing and being crucified by Pilate. For years I have heard arguments about why the other stories can or cannot be true, but none of these arguments satisfy me.
Take the "argument from design" as one example. The reality we observe is complicated enough that it wouldn't have happened without some kind of divine grand plan. Conclusion? There must be a creator, who is God. This argument typically confuses me, because it's put forth by Christians trying to argue that their God must be real. Even if you establish that there must be a creator for reality to exist as it does, nothing about that argument would inescapably point to the Christian God as being the creator. Atheists would argue for evolution, but that argument, on its own merits, doesn't really establish that any one particular religion isn't true. (Unless those religious beliefs are incompatible with evolution.)
Let's take the "first cause" argument as another example. Christians say that in order for the world to exist, something has to have started it, and that something points to the inevitability of a creator. A non-believer would argue that this doesn't actually solve the problem; you're just trading uncertainly about where we came from for the uncertainty of where this "creator" came from. ("If God made us, then who made God?") But then a Christian could counter that God exists outside of our reality, and time is a property of our reality, and since cause and effect require a temporal dimension to make any sense, then God doesn't need to have been created.
And so on. These arguments can go on for a long time, in circles, without actually getting anywhere and without either side saying anything truly conclusive. None of these has ever convinced me.
So, what does convince me?
Before I go any further, consider the notion of joint probability. This says that probability of any two things being true together is the product of the probabilities of the two things.
I just gave you the answer to the question I'm about to pose, but here's a thought experiment. Consider that you're investigating a homicide. There's a witness who saw a suspect leaving the scene of the crime around the time the murder was supposed to have taken place, and while they didn't get a good look, they're pretty sure the suspect wasn't white, and was "most likely black".
So, which of these two options is more likely to be true?
- The perpetrator of the crime was a black man.
- The perpetrator of the crime was a black man with a criminal record.
In general, the chance of X being true is more likely than the chance of X and Y being true. The chance that you flip a coin and it lands heads is 50%, but the chance that you flip it twice and it lands heads both times is 25% (50% x 50%).
It's reasonably simple to apply this logic to Mormonism. If you're a Mormon, you believe that everything in the Christian Bible is true, plus all of the stuff that's written in the book of Mormon. You can do the same thought experiment from the standpoint of probability. Which is more likely?
- Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God who came to earth to be killed to redeem the sins of the world.
- Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God who came to earth to be killed to redeem the sins of the world, but before dying he teleported to the continental United States and churned some butter with some white people who were living here at the time. (Or w/e the Mormons believe. Don't ask me.)
Not being religious, of course, I don't have the luxury of certainty. Intellectually, I happen to think that nothing about religion can be established as fact without any uncertainty. Faith requires doubt. If your faith is based on believing in the history of your religion to a 100% certainty, then you have no faith.
This thought experiment gets a little harder to swallow for a lot more people when you apply the argument to Christianity and Judaism. It is the same problem as with the Mormons: in order to believe in the Christian religion, you first have to accept that all of Judaism is true. Most of the Christian Bible is just the Hebrew Bible, with some Christian writings tacked onto the end.
This is where things get tricky for me. When I first started studying Christianity, and started dabbling in the practices of being a Christian, I ignored the entirety of the Old Testament since, as I told myself, "I'm not trying to be Jewish". I didn't feel there was anything necessarily wrong with Judaism, but does one really have to accept Judaism and Christianity in order to be Christian? If you're going to accept the Hebrew Bible, doesn't that mean you're Jewish, but choosing to interpret the whole thing with a Christian bent?
In the end, I couldn't get away from the connection between the two. When you dig deep enough, Christianity simply cannot exist in a vacuum that doesn't include its Jewish roots. This leads me to a bigger set of problems than the ones that Christianity poses on its own. The bridge between the two is tenuous, and Judaism itself is highly problematic.
Recently, someone asked me if I thought that Jesus was the Messiah. (They didn't use those words, but that's basically the question they were asking.) I replied that I didn't think there ever was supposed to be a Messiah in the first place. To answer "yes" or "no" to that question is really to give credence to ancient Israelite mythos. Just because some tribe of people living in Canaan a few thousand years ago wrote a whole bunch of stuff about a God of theirs, and a couple of passages talk about some future "Messiah", what assurance do I have that they were correct?
You could argue that it was because Jesus eventually came and fulfilled the prophecies. This is where things get really unconvincing. Among a few other things, people point to passages in the book of Isaiah. Chapter 7 talks about a great man being born to a virgin, but this passage, while it does mention a virgin birth, is not talking about the Messiah. In context, it's about something completely different. (As most people know, since it's oft-discussed in our secular society, the whole "virgin" thing, as an error in translation from the Hebrew "alma" to the Greek "parthenos", is also in dispute.) Chapter 53 talks about a man who suffered for the good of all the people, but again, this passage, when read in its entirety, is clearly not saying anything about the Messiah. It's not as though the text has been changed from the Hebrew Bible to the Christian one so as to appear to be about Jesus; in both versions, the stories are patently, unambiguously not about the Messiah.
I'd like to believe that Christians are doing more than reading something that claims Jesus was prophesized by some passages in Isaiah, flipping to read the two or three verses, accepting the words as being about Jesus, then closing the book and going on about their days. But they must be, because citation of these passages persists.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that ancient Israelites thought that the future Messiah would be a warrior, a king among men who would kick out the foreigners and make Israel a sovereign nation again. In the last year, President Trump declared that the United States would now recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. I wondered, fleetingly, if Trump was doing this as a first step in a grand plan to step into the Messiah's shoes. Of course, for that to be the case, Trump would have to be educated and informed enough to understand what I'm saying here. I'd guess that the chances of this are unlikely.
Just because the prophecies quoted in the Hebrew Bible don't seem to be about Jesus doesn't have anything to do with the veracity of Judaism. By the same token, there are some pretty horrible things in the Old Testament; people are quick to point out that God seems to encourage, or at least passively tolerate, the Israelites killing entire cities of men, raping their women, and enslaving their children. But, just because you don't like something, doesn't mean that it isn't true. The atrocities of the Hebrew Bible are not enough to make us question its historicity. If anything, given how atrocious all of human history is, this actually makes it more likely, simply because it's more consistent with history than some imagined utopia.
At its inception, the notion that Hashem, the God of the Israelites, is somehow the one true God, or the only God among many who should be worshipped, seems unlikely.
Growing up, I used to think that the first Christians (I didn't know they were Jews until much later) discovered God, that He spoke to them, and suddenly, religion started to spread throughout the world. Before this, I thought, people were just walking around on the planet fighting each other, making babies, and eating berries off of trees. Certainly, before God spoke to them, no human beings ever set their sights on the heavens and wonder what came after this life, or where they came from.
It's the constant error of people in modern civilization to believe that we are somehow more advanced than the people of prehistoric civilizations. How were the pyramids in Egypt constructed? Certainly the primitive Egyptians weren't clever enough to figure out how to stack massive blocks of stone on top of each other to such great heights, to assemble such great structures. They must have had help from aliens. (And my tongue in cheek remark is meant to refer to extraterrestrial aliens, as posited by the History Channel...not Jewish "aliens".)
The ancient Egyptians figured out how to solve this problem, much in same way that we have figured out how to build skyscrapers today, even though our technology is slightly more advanced. And they had gods, who were typically amalgamations of animals and humans. There was Bastet, a cat goddess who was revered by mothers for keeping mice out of their children's food. There was Taweret, the woman-hippo who was thought to protect pregnant women. (And who was prominently featured on the television show "Lost" in the form of a massive statue.) And Sobek, the crocodile-headed god who was worshipped in order to protect mothers and children from getting snatched away by crocodiles when they were washing clothes or tending other business down by the Nile. The list goes on.
While you could dismiss all of these as being hyperlocal superstitions, the ancient Egyptians had a hierarchy to their list of gods. It's difficult to piece together from the scant evidence we have, but for at least one large faction of priests, it seems that Amun-Ra was the God In Charge, with other gods serving below this one. And while this hierarchy might seem odd to Christians, what exactly are angels but a hierarchy of beings serving God? While the Egyptians had Isis, the Jews had Gabriel.
So I've mentioned the Egyptians, but they were far from the only powerful civilization during the Bronze Age. They were not the only civilization that worshipped a god. The Hittites had Ḫannaḫanna. The Aryans had Ahura Mazda. The Babylonians had Marduk. The Sumerians had Enlil. The Mycenaeans (precursors to the Greeks) had Zeus. The Assyrians had Ashur. The Moabites had Chemosh. The Ammonites had Ashtar. The Minoans had a goddess whose name we do not know. This is only to name a subset of the peoples who existed. And all peoples at this time are only a subset of all of those in history.
And around this time, while the Eygyptians are paying tribute to an anthropomorphic cat, the people living in the region of Canaan, some of whom would later be the Israelites, worshipped gods: among them El, Baal, and Yam. The stories of the Jewish patriarchs in Genesis, Abraham and Jacob, describe them interacting with a god named "El" during their formative years living in Canaan. These stories are interesting; Abraham shares a meal with El, face-to-face, shortly before this El destroys Sodom and Gomorrah for their sexual immorality. (Evidently, all of the young children were sexually immoral in this city as well.) Jacob has a dream about El visiting him in a dream, standing over him and offering him protection in exchange for devotion. Later Jacob wrestles with El in some kind of all-night spar. Later Hebrews would claim that no mortal could see the face of Hashem and live, which makes these accounts all the more puzzling.
Despite the fact that Hashem has promised Canaan to Abraham, Jacob and his ilk decide to GTFO and move to Egypt, where they are eventually enslaved for mating too excessively. Moses comes centuries later; the burning bush insists, repeatedly, that he is the same God of Abraham and Jacob, and for the sake of the continuity of the narrative, this is a relief. But one wonders why the man-god who ate with Abraham and wrestled with Jacob has suddenly become a botanical conflagration. (Yes, I went to college, so I have fancy words.)
Most of the major civilizations of the Bronze Age collapse around the 12th century BCE. It is around this time in history that we might feasibly place the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt amidst historical record. Cities are being attacked by a roaving band of pirates called the "sea peoples". The Philistines may have been among them, and this could explain the tale of David and Goliath around this time, although I've never seen a man who is 12 feet tall. Whatever might have happened, it is around this time that the Israelites go from being nomadic slaves to one of the larger political and millitary forces in the region. They are God's chosen people, but in the next 1000 years they succumb to the Babylonians and later the Romans.
If you're tiring of how sardonic I'm being about the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, I can cut to the chase and offer the main point: the events in the Hebrew Bible are all a little difficult to swallow as literal truth. Yes, the accounts of the Creation and the Flood are difficult to accept, and these are the most hotly debated topics. But even if you could make a rock-solid case that those events are literally true, you have a long parade of events that come afterwards that are almost as difficult to make sense of. And they stand side by side with all other accounts of all other gods that existed around this time in history. From around this time, The Epic of Gilgamesh has a similar story of creation and a flood, starring a different God and featuring a different ensemble cast of humans and demigods, so why should we assume the Israelites wrote the correct version?
Looking back, I shouldn't be surprised that the Charleton Heston version of The Ten Commandments, like the Hebrew Bible, doesn't make any mention of the Egyptians even having gods of their own. This is at best misleading; it wasn't a battle of the only thing versus nothing; it was the battle of one god against another. Contrary to what I thought as a naïve and impressionable youth, the ancient Israelites did not invent religion. They were not the first people to be "contacted" by some kind of divine higher power. Religion has probably existed among human beings as long as human beings have existed. Or, at least since our primate ancestors started ceremoniously burying their dead.
Scientology is a more modern religion born of a mythos based in science fiction. I've had limited interactions with them, but when they're recruiting on the streets, they offer to analyze you with one of their meter machines, figure out your problems, and devise solutions for you. They offer the tip of the tip of an iceberg; they're offering initiation into a community that will solve your problems. The whole thing about extraterrestrial souls living on earth and inhabiting the bodies of humans and causing human suffering is an origin story that they only tell you about well after you've become part of the church. At this point, it becomes almost impossible to back out, either intellectually or socially. In this way, the people roaming the streets handing out pamphlets about faith in Jesus helping you avoid Hell are doing roughly the same thing: condense the message into its primal form, and once the recipient has accepted that simple premise, then you can spring all of the other stuff onto them.
Most people "know" that Scientology is silly, and there's no truth to it. Scientology is a modern-day mythology, in that it can be easily discredited by available evidence. But if you wait a few generations, all first-hand accounts from people that might discredit it will become impossible, and the written history available can be argued to have been tampered with, either for or against the matter. Once enough time passes, it becomes impossible to truly substantiate either position, and this is when mythology becomes religion. When all people cease to believe in a religion, either because all of those people die or it becomes culturally irrelevant, it comes full circle and again becomes mythology. Religion, then, is merely mythology with active mindshare among the living, aged to the point where it has become impossible to discredit.
The notion of an eternal being who is passively observing the human species over the ages (for this thought experiment, you could call it God, if you like) makes you wonder what this entity might make of us. Certainly it must think humans are odd. We continually reinvent our God or gods, changing them as time marches on and as nations rise and fall. Despite this dynamism being a constant of world religion, each group seems to think its own interpretation is objectively correct. This entity certainly can't think that we humans in the United States at this time in history have devised anything new or novel, like nothing that has ever existed. It wouldn't possibly think that we were correct, while everyone else was wrong.
People like to make use of ambiguities of the past in order to argue that one religious claim or another may or may not be true. I prefer to make use of the ambiguities of the future. In 40 million years, the earth will probably still exist much in the way as it does today. Let's assume that life still exists. Human beings will be gone, or will have evolved into something drastically different than we are now. But suppose that some form of intelligent life exists, and has prospered to fill the niche that we humans currently occupy so comfortably. All of our current languages, all current texts, will have been obliterated by the forces of history. That includes all copies of the Bible. What does our Christian God do then? He has to re-enact this same story we have all over again. He has to send his son, again, to die horrifically and save these new beings from sin. It assumes that they have a concept of sin. It assumes (perhaps incorrectly) that ideas spread through their culture via story, just as it does in ours. It assumes that these future beings will torture each other as we do. It has to assume that a story of self-sacrifice and resurrection will have some kind of spiritual significance to them. Would it?
It doesn't really matter who their Gods are. Or what their stories are. They will be drastically different from our own. But all religions are basically the same anyway.