I’m going to go somewhere a little risky in this one. This is just stuff to think about.
I was watching The Atheist Experience with my husband a few weeks ago. (Okay, I was tuning in and out because my interest waxed and waned.) And my brain caught on a phrase that, when I went back and watched that part of the episode, turned out to be not exactly what was said, but it got me thinking.
The discussion was about people’s experience of the Christian God. And the caller was trying to explain his view of God, his final explanation being that the presence of the Holy Spirit helps people understand the Bible and their experiences of God, and this was the end of Secular Rarity’s response:
“You got a lot, lot more work ahead of you before you’re gonna get JMike and I, or anybody, in my opinion, to even move in the slightest. Because basically what you just told me is the exact same thing we were talking about at the beginning. You say everybody’s got the Holy Spirit, ‘hey, it’s not four years of seminary college and whatever’ but the problem is, every single person I talk to claims they have that relationship, claims they have that relationship with the Holy Spirit, claims it is in them, claims they have witnessed it do things in their lives, and yet they are ALL inconsistent when it comes to its attributes. And that’s a problem for the Christian but not a problem for the atheist, because it’s what we expect in a world where a god doesn’t exist.”
I guess that last sentence got to me, although it didn’t surprise me too much because polytheists are often forgotten in discussions like this. While it’s true that this discussion revolved around Christianity, the response from Secular Rarity seemed to say that if the Christian God doesn’t exist, then no god exists. I listened carefully: SR really did say “where a god doesn’t exist.”
But I started to think about this. What if the experiences are different because people are interacting with different gods without knowing it? I realize this idea ventures into territory that I strongly objected to when the priest who was trolling me at the start of this blog said, “Isis doesn’t exist.” (to which my usual response is, “How does he know if She never revealed Herself to him?”)
So maybe I’m out of line in saying this, but what if our experiences of the divine are colored by our cultural environment? Maybe when people in the United States, a heavily Christian nation (i.e. lots of Christians live here, not that it’s the official religion), have an experience of the divine, they immediately think of the Christian God just because it’s part of their cultural training. It certainly was for me. And when my immersion in Egyptophilia got to the point where I was open to it, I began having experiences with various Netjeru. Was that a coincidence? Was I really being comforted by Aset, Hathor and Nephthys? Did Sekhmet really “hit me upside the head with a two-by-four”? (Not literally, I hasten to add.) I don’t know. I mean, when I’m brutally honest, as I have to be here, I don’t 100 percent know. But I will say this: My first experience with Sekhmet was IN NO WAY like my first experience with Aset, which in turn weren’t really like my experiences with Jesus when I was Christian.
So how does everyone know they were interacting with the Christian God? If you don’t have that experience with other gods, then you have nothing to compare it to.
It might be an interesting experiment for someone (or an army of someones) to compile accounts of everyone’s experiences with the divine, group them by similarity, and then try to guess which god they were interacting with. (Someone who is not me. I have enough on my plate, thanks. But I’ll follow anyone who takes this up.)
Anyway, those are my thoughts for today. To anyone I may have offended with this post, I apologize. And I do feel strange suggesting this, given my history, but for those of us who can, at least at times, be somewhat rational about this topic, you gotta admit this is hard to ignore.
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment. Be well.
Kemetic vs. Atheist 
I guess I’ve never thought of myself as a polytheist but technically I guess I am. As my brother once put it, how do we know that all gods don’t exist? My earliest experiences were with ghosts and visions, but even at 3 yrs old, I knew that a god existed. We didn’t go to church until I was 5. That’s when I heard about Jesus, and liked what I heard. But the entity who walked and listened to me was JC. I had assumed it was GOD. But my issue with the church (a very fundamentalist one) was that they limited everything to the big 3, while I already knew that more existed. I had past life memories galore in which I was a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Catholic friar, a priestess in Egypt, etc. Eventually, I turned to a Native American teacher for help with the hauntings in my house after my mother’s death. I had a professional grief counselor who had taken me on guided meditations to “my teacher” and those journeys resulted in some interactions with a pillar of light who identified as Jesus. But my grief counselor did not believe in hauntings or that there was anything harmful in the spirit world, and generally was a Buddhist. In the NA teachings I was introduced to other spirits in the natural world – Mother Earth, Father Sky, the spirits of the 4 directions etc. The healing I received was noticeable even to my grief counselor, which prompted her to meet my NA teacher. But her middle class friends did not think she should be associating with his type, so she sought out Michael Harner’s Institute for Shamanic Studies and sponsored a beginners workshop. That was where things really started coming together for me. Interestingly, when I took my first journey to meet my “teacher” I did not recognize him. It wasn’t Jesus, but an embodiment of Plato. Talk about weird. But my Shamanic studies opened up my world. It was like coming home. It didn’t negate the Christian big 3 for me, just added to it. How do we know that all gods aren’t real? What if a different set guide us in each lifetime? As Sir Terry Pratchett wrote, a god exists so long as someone believes. So who is correct? What if all are? I figure when we cross over again, it will be a surprise.
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You too have had an interesting religious and spiritual journey. Wow. Also, I’m interested enough in the shamanic references to do some Google searches. I know you’ve mentioned them before.
I too believe that all gods exist, although I would respectfully hope that some of them (say, the Aztec ones) aren’t worshiped in the same way they used to be.
Sir Terry and my Kemetic temple are in agreement about the existence of the gods. A common feature in some of my rites is the line, “For as You live, I live. And as I live, You live.”
I like to think that all the different pantheons have a system of communication between them – that they alert each other when a believer of another faith crosses over, for instance. Like you said, we’ll see what happens when our time comes.
Thank you for your very thoughtful response, my friend.
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