President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”

— Nabil Shaath, Palestinian foreign minister

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The ancient Greeks knew all about the capriciousness of the gods—the tragedies, dating back two-and-a-half millennia, are full of jealous, angry, cruel gods exacting revenge for real and imagined slights. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was all set to lead the Greek fleet across the Aegean Sea to get his niece Helen back, she whose face launched a thousand ships. But to launch and get underway, they needed the gods to grant a west wind. Which required Agamemnon to sacrifice his eldest daughter Iphigenia as appeasement to the goddess Artemis (Agamemnon had accidentally killed a deer in a grove sacred to her.) Got it so far? Watch the sacrifice of young Shireen Baratheon by her father in last year’s Game of Thrones and you’ll get the idea.

You might have thought that only having one god to deal with, rather than the multiple bickering gods of the Greeks, would have superseded the need to offer up one’s offspring. No such luck, Abraham was perfectly willing to sacrifice his son Isaac after God told him to in a dream. Turns out it was just a test; a ram appeared at the last second, saving the day for the kid. 

That’s gods for you. They like messing with us. Job’s trials were all about a bet God made with Satan. And then there was that nasty business of God’s Son getting crucified—somehow He was actually doing us a favor by fixing that, wiping out our Original Sin, something to do with an apple. It’s a long story.

Back to the Greeks. Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean philosopher, writing in the last century BC, commented on Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter per Artemis’ requirement: “Such is the terrible evil that religion was able to induce.” (Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.) In the Epicurean view, the gods were neither willing nor able to prevent evil. Voltaire used Lucretius’ line when trying to persuade the Prussian king to go secular.

More recently, in 2003 born-again George W. Bush invoked God to a Palestinian delegation, in justifying the invasion of two Middle East countries. See above.

All of which, the ancient and modern, might explain, at least to some extent, the global decline of religion, sub-Saharan Africa excepted. Here in the U.S., the number of people unaffiliated with any religion (“nones”) is growing by leaps and bounds, from 16 to nearly 23% in the seven years 2007-2014. Even outright atheism, long seen as the greatest hurdle for a presidential candidate to overcome, is growing. A slew of books published in the last few years, with such provocative titles as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or The God Delusion, can be found on best-seller lists.

Personally, I avoid the “atheist” label, for reasons I wrote about here. Briefly, to call myself an atheist, I’d need to know what theists mean by God (or gods—as Richard Dawkins observed, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”) But God is undefinable by definition, if I understand correctly. So I can’t know what it is I don’t believe in. 

(Pew Research Center)

Unless we’re talking about Baruch Spinoza’s non-transcendental god, the one Albert Einstein admired, “nature’s beautiful intelligibility” as it’s been called. Also known as the guiding principle of science. That’s a god I could vote for.

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.