blog.mikro2nd.net

Thank (some) God

As an atheist, whenever someone near me exclaims, "Oh God!" or "Good God", I'm prone to asking "Which one?" Mostly I manage to keep my mockery under my breath as it's just unkind and ungenerous. I'm quite happy to support people believing whatever nonsense they want to believe, as long as they don't try to push it on to me. After all, look at some of the nonsense I believe...

It amuses me to think of all the gods people have worshipped down through the centuries, and in all the places of the Earth, that were all considered to be The Divine — sometimes even the One True God — only to be discarded and deprecated as the new fashion wave came along and belief swung around in support of some new God. Perhaps even one called just "God". Who is, of course, the One True God.

On the rare occasions I feel compelled to call upon a Divine Being, I frequently choose Thoth. (Occasionally Tyr, but usually Thoth.) Thoth is that Ancient Egyptian one with the Ibis head. And today I learned something new about Thoth: He was the god of the Moon (i.e. time), wisdom, knowledge, writing and hieroglyphs (i.e. alphabet), science, magic (i.e. technology), art and judgement. In other words, the god of Cognition Enhancing Technologies, and, improbably, unaccountably, coincidentally and serendipitously, probably the most appropriate choice for one such as myself for whom these matters have become an abiding preoccupation.

How weird is that? It's almost enough to make me start believing in divine forces.