Surely not only religion but all gods are made by humans, imagined by humans. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes was right when he said, "If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses.” But at the same time, humans may be god-made in the sense of imagined by the gods; perhaps horses were conceived by gods in the form of horses.
Most of our religions are man-made, in the full sexist sense of the word, since men have, throughout recorded history, recorded and preserved in writing primarily the religions of men, ignoring the religions made by women, who generally did not have access to writing.
Some religions are women-made, and if horses have religions (as I believe they do—they certainly see things that we don’t see), those religions may well have been invented by gods in the form of horses. To run along for a moment beside Xenophanes, we would have to admit that the fact that men (sic) in Africa and men in Norway constructed their gods quite differently suggests that they are not all painting their portraits of a single subject sitting for them in the middle of the cosmic room.
Yet Mircea Eliade, and other historians of religion of his ilk, argued that, despite the patent differences between different cultural constructions of their gods, there is a latent universal substratum that is the same everywhere; that the persistent patterns in religions all over the world suggest that we are all looking at the same thing, an image reflected in different sorts of mirrors, and that that one thing therefore exists, in all the forms in which it is depicted. Few historians of religions today still take this approach, though it is widely assumed in the more popular constructions of comparative religions.
A better idea, I think, is captured by several of India’s many philosophies of reality and illusion, which suggest that we do indeed create god (and therefore religion) in our imaginations, as we create all of our reality, but that at the same time god creates us in god’s imagination, that god is, like us, constantly dreaming into existence a reality that includes us imagining god. We are mutually dreaming, mutually existing.
A modified, slightly rationalized, version of this belief would be the assertion that, although we do not make god ex nihilo, nor does god make us ex nihilo, we are the ones who bring god fully to life, while god in turn is what brings us truly to life, makes us fully alive to the phenomenal world, dream world though it may be.
This is not an idea that is easy for people trained in Western philosophical ideas to swallow, and it all depends upon how you define god, but for me it is rich in meaning.
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