Given that relating to a living system is akin to relating
to a person, it makes sense that human societies create gods and have personal
relations with them. It’s the only way that we can represent to ourselves that
relationship with anything close to a sufficient degree of accuracy.
The gods as real.
Many times I have heard it stated that the gods are real.
But never what it is that real means.
Generally when we claim something is real we are claiming
that it is a correct or authentic instance of some category or class.
The velveteen rabbit was “real”. In his case it indicated
that he was not a toy any more, but was a living being, despite his appearance
as a toy. But any reader of the book knows that he was still a toy. What was
real, in the sense of animating the child’s relationsip with him, was the child’s
love for the toy. So in this example, which is perhaps the best known explicit
claim of reality for something that was never born or … , there are two things
being real might refer to. One is being a (real) living being despite the appearance
of being a human construct, and the other is being loved, which is to say being
an emotionally significant other to a human.
I guess either of these definitions could apply to a god.
Those who talk about the reality of gods generally claim that‘s not what they mean,
that the god has some kind of a priori reality. But in this case we ask again,
a real instance of what? A body? A living system? An aspect of the laws of
life?
