Is it God, or Something Less Than God?

There are instances from history and the Bible itself where one might rightly ask, "Is this really God speaking, or is it the wish of a less than godly scribe or soothsayer? The most obvious contrast is the God that taught the ancient Hebrews not to commit murder and to take care of their fellow humans in need, and the god that commanded them to commit acts of genocide against the Canaanites. The two voices are incompatible, and the Book of Ruth proves that at least one strong element among the ancient Hebrew community did not believe God's moral writ ended with the Hebrews themselves. Certainly by the time of the Books of the Prophets, Jewish prophets did not invoke the bloodthirsty god found in the Book of Joshua, but the just God who wanted human beings to liberate themselves from self-destructive and community-destroying moral blindness. Now going back to a more primitive era in Hebrew tribal religion, I do not dismiss the possibility that there were men who thought themselves divinely inspired who commanded the ancient Hebrews to war on their neighbors to acquire more land, but such "holy" men might have been clinically mad, or else, they were obeying something their then highly limited understanding of science left them to deduce had to be "God". We Americans do ourselves great cognitive harm in summarily dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrial life having visited the Earth in the past, much less in the present. If a technologically advanced being or beings visited ancient peoples in the Near East, those peoples could not be blamed for confusing these beings with God or his angels. If such were to have happened, we could well suspect that these visitors might run the same gamut of moral conscience to which we humans (as a species) are apt. Some might have brought messages of peace and love, and others might have sought to manipulate humans to do their will if there was something they materially needed from the Earth. If these extraterrestrials were in competition with each other, they might even resort to using their worshipful humans to commit acts of war in their "divine honor". Whatever one might choose to believe, it does not sit well that the One True God would ever have wanted human beings to commit acts of violence against each other (except in the dire necessity of self defense or in the defense of a person's loved ones and community). So laying aside the alternate possibilities that it could have been alien agents provocateur or simply charismatic sociopathic soothsayers who managed to convince their followers that god wanted them to go out and kill, this is a moral question not only of recent vintage, where philosophers most often address it to distressing historical and contemporary acts such as the Crusades and Jihads. Gnostic Christians asked the same thing: if God is Love, and murder is the worst denial of the Truth of Love, then instances in scripture where there is some sort of "divine" being telling people to make war on others must be a false god. The Gnostics called these false gods, or usurpers of the Earth, "Aeons". The Aeons were guilty of preventing the moral progress of humankind on Earth in order to maintain their power. Aeons posed as god and used humans to create political situations that suited the purposes of the Aeons but otherwise brought misery and injustice to most of the planet's inhabitants. The Gnostics ("Knowers") sought to use meditation, exegetical analysis and revelatory techniques to overthrow this deception so that their members could perceive the One True God and the true will of God on Earth, which they believed was thoroughly that of compassion and social justice. In this way, their minds and ultimately their souls could be freed from the trap created by the Aeons, who embroiled humans in deceptively justified conflicts that held back true enlightenment and the fulfillment of humankind's moral growth. So, while many orthodox faiths deride the Gnostics today as the "lunatic fringe" of the Ancient World, I find myself thinking that anyone who believes their god has told them to go slaughter their neighbors is the real member of the fringe of lunacy.