Divinity

I was tickled by these two excerpts on the whole concept of pantheon of gods. So get on board for a tongue in cheek ride.

In his novel, Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson made this very amusing point about the pantheon of Greek gods:

“And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn’t even fully a god—he’s half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.”

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari said that one of the big projects of humankind will be to “acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus”. Did that sound arrogant and/or crazy? Then let Harari define divinity for you:

“Divinity isn’t a vague metaphysical quality. And it isn’t the same as omnipotence. When speaking of upgrading humans into gods, think more in terms of Greek gods or Hindu devas rather than the omnipotent biblical sky father. Our descendants would still have their foibles, kinks and limitations, just as Zeus and Indra had theirs. But they could love, hate, create and destroy on a much grander scale than us.”

Remember this line from the song by the band, Talking Heads:

“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

How boring. But divinity is where we are headed, and divinity is all “Greek gods or Hindu devas”, then we sure won’t be bored. After all, aren’t the tales of the Greek gods and Hindu devas so much more fun than those from the book about the “biblical sky father”?