Who Pulls the Strings?

The important question to ask in any religion is Who Pulls the Strings? The Jews say God controls everything but the Jews keep that god in a box: and they, the Jews, control the box. The Christians say that God controls everything, but all the evidence is controlled by priests: the Bible is gathered by priests, edited by priests, published by people connected to priests ... What independent verification do any of the claims have?

When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.

When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.

My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!

Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?

Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.

These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.

Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.