Yeah, I know I'm coming off the wall here. So thanks for asking.
When I first started studying cultural anthropology in the early 1990s, I read of totemic societies/cultures. Field work from the early 20th century in the hinterlands of civilization pretty much supported the notion that people create their own gods, their own totemic figures. Many cultures, especially the one I was involved with-- Chinese-- highly venerate ancestors. Gods, ghosts and ancestors-- every Chinese knows what they are and how important they are; and, I suspect, that's one reason the powers that be have worked so hard to dethrone all of them and replace them with the cult of Mao. (Mao certainly did his part: sending his revolutionaries on a multi-year quest to destroy the "4 Olds", break up villages and families, melt all the old iron... The powers that be really know what they're doing). But not only Chinese, for people around the world, these entities are as real as the day is long.
The power of the gods may be a direct result of the belief in them. Even
Star Trek in 1967 hit on this idea. Are they real because people believe or the other way around? As I noted above, I think it is a chicken or egg type question. But we really can't deny the power of these gods. Nowadays, in contemporary society, people worship devices (in the sense of absolute devotion) and work for companies that quite often use the names of old gods (as noted above, Nike, but there are many others). People worship, act, fall in line, murder, etc. all in the name of abstract entities-- that is, entities that we can't objectively measure (by one's hand or otherwise) but which have tremendous influence on the material and social world we inhabit. Take again Nike, for example. It is part of the S and P 500. I can't tell you how many companies draw names from the gods of yesteryear (supposedly). But some of the biggest certainly do: Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, Oracle...They are part of the S and P 500, which seems to me to be a symbol for/of the Roman Empire,
SPQR. This makes me think that the powers that be worship these old gods because the Roman empire
is the global empire, see
When Jesus abandoned America, or why TPTB prefer Pagan Gods.
I think humans are quite powerful; and I'm convinced via personal experience that we are spiritual beings. (Some of my smartest friends tell me that most people are simply NPCs-- but I'm not convinced). When that energy is collected and focused, it can, as they say, move mountains. Most Chinese (and many Americans if you really dig) believe that people who died unjustly or horribly persist to haunt us. Is it not possible that our own ancestors, locked in insane asylums, generated a horrible curse-- physically expressed as, for example, recent lethal injections, which seem to target the low-level followers of the pagan pantheon as they operate at nowhere near full spiritual strength under the spell of the pagan gods they unwittingly worship?
I still don't know how "they pulled it off" in the precise technical ways. Obviously, technologies-- unbeknownst to the public-- have been utilized. Jules Verne's characters found their 20,000-league submarine, thinking it was a wale.
The Great Eastern apparently washed up on shore. Objectively speaking, there must be a history to everything that has happened. Frankly, I think we break the spell of the gods by asking these questions. The new movie,
Napoleon, is hitting the theaters. Any reader here should be able to bust the drama apart and spot the impossibilities. To explore stolenhistory is a way to remove the old gods from the scene, to free us. That's why I point to Jesus-- not as an object of worship (which I think was and remains a manufactured and corrupting slave idolatry) but as he who said, "The kingdom of God is within you."
. Very cool to see local people on here! I’ve lurked for a long time, never posted til I saw your post just now.
