God and gods: Are They All the Same?

Short answer: NO. Not by a long mile. The long answer follows and gives you at least some ideas of what to look into for research, so please, consider it carefully.

Back when I talked about Scholastic’s Spirit Animals, I quoted from a post by Cheah Kit Sun. In it, he wrote about author Guy Gavriel Kay’s series where the protagonists follow three ostensibly monotheistic religions. I am going to quote from his article again today, and from others as well. Be forewarned, this is going to be a long answer to the title question.

Per Mr. Cheah’s piece:

For a belief to be deemed a heresy, it must deny a core tenant of the doctrine of the parent faith. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Christianity can see why Gnosticism and the Brethren of the Free Spirit were condemned as heresies. But when there is no doctrine, how can there be heresy?

Looking at history, we see that when the dominant religion has no core doctrine, the opposite occurs. Instead of a foreign doctrine being condemned as heresy, it is instead incorporated into the dominant culture, thus augmenting the power of both.

Alexander the Great presented himself as a living god, and curried favour with the gods of the regions he conquered. In Greece, he held sacrifices, games and festivals in honour of Greek gods. In Egypt, he adopted the trappings of Egyptian religion, calling himself the son of ‘Zeus-Ammon’, a hybrid of the Greek god Zeus and the Eyptian god Amun-Ra. Similarly, certain Roman emperors became objects of worship, equals with the Roman pantheon. When the Romans conquered new lands, they subsumed foreign deities into their pantheon. Thus Greek gods were absorbed into the Roman pantheon, and later certain Egyptian deities as well.

Beyond Europe, the same story played out all over the world. Hindu gods appear in Buddhist scriptures, such as Hayagriva, Saraswati and Indra, resulting from their shared origin in India. Greco-Buddhism emerged from trade between Hellenistic and Buddhist cultures, possibly influencing the appearance of Fujin and Hariti. Daoist deities are freely worshipped alongside Buddhas in Chinese cultures. When Buddhism took root in Japan, Shinto deities were integrated into Japanese Buddhism, leading to shinbutsu shugo, the syncretism of the kami and the Buddhas. In the Akkadian Empire, King Sargon installed his daughter Enheduanna as High Priestess at the Temple of Nanna. Among Enheduanna’s duties was to syncretise the religious traditions of Akkad and Sumer, legitimising Sargon’s dominion in the religious and cultural spheres.

Against this historical backdrop, we can see how radical the Abrahamic religions must have appeared to the pagans of their time. Pagans with no core doctrine saw no difficulty in incorporating foreign gods into their own worship. The doctrine of Buddhism acknowledges the existence of gods, and believers have little trouble incorporating the worship of local deities alongside the Buddhas. In contrast, the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—denied all other gods but their own. From a purely cultural perspective, this ensured that their doctrine would be transmitted over centuries and millennia, free from foreign influences that might dilute the teachings.

So what does this mean for, say, Marvel Comics when Thor Odinson shows up? I have seen it said by fans that the arrival of gods in the Marvel Universe surely must have shaken Christians out of their belief in one God. To which I asked and still ask, “Why on Earth would you think that?”

Christianity holds that certain gods were very likely demonic – usually the ones that demanded human sacrifice. Others may not have been demonic but they surely were not omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent (present everywhere, at all times), nor omnipotent (all-powerful). Despite being called the All-Father and possessing a type of farsight, Odin is absolutely powerless to stop Ragnarok in the original myths. If you look closely enough at the myths, his attempts to stop it or slow it down simply facilitate the Twilight of the Gods. (Seriously, why was pitching the Midgard Serpent into the sea a good idea? Or chaining up Fenris? At least Hel was pretty much satisfied with her realm of the dead.) Then you get to how he chained up Loki, his own blood brother, and you wonder why the heck Odin was actually thinking that THIS would be a good idea, let alone something to stop Ragnarok.

So Odin is not all-powerful (omnipotent). He is not all-knowing (omniscient) and he is not everywhere at once sustaining every breath you and I take, nor keeping all that is in existence in existence (omnipresence). Ergo, Odin’s power is limited. He is also into human sacrifice in the original Norse religion, so, probably not a nice dude.

For Christians in the MCU, learning that the Asgardians weren’t gods but were long-lived aliens from another world? The mass answer they would have for that would be, “Well that explains quite a bit but it leaves the little matter of, you know, blood eagles and spearing your favorites dead as a human sacrifice open to question. Thor, did you know your dad had people doing that? Because we would sincerely like an answer in case someone decides to start that practice up again.”

Or how about Khonshu, the god Moon Knight serves? For now, based on what little I know of him from the comics and not the original myths, he would probably be relegated by Christians to a “Do Not Touch even if he isn’t going to hurt you” because you would have to look into what was demanded in worship of him and whether or not he would count as a neutral party that could be dealt with by a Christian. Last time I checked, too, Marc Spector didn’t worship Khonshu. Worked for and dealt with him, yes, but worship? More often it sounds like he wants to kick Khonshu’s butt – and not without reason.

None of this isn’t to say that there would not be Christians who would lose their faith when the “old gods” reappeared in the MCU, but most Christians would just shrug and go about their business. Christians believe that God alone is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent (as well as all-good), and no other spirit has His power. But that does not mean Christians dismiss other powers existing in the world. Per John C. Wright’s article here:

If the unseen world is like the natural world, a neutral realm from which evidence can be gathered, then we are like scientists attempting to study a far island beyond Australia from which few travelers return, or the far side of the moon, beyond reach of ground-based telescopes. Nature does not lie, but she does not volunteer information either.

If the supernatural world is like a foreign realm, a realm at war, some provinces of which are held in enemy hands, then we are like spies peering at the promised land, perhaps hearing reports of fruitful fields flowing with milk and honey, perhaps hearing of walled cities crewed by giants and mighty men impossible to overcome. Unlike Nature, enemies mean to deceive.

So suppose we hear a report that Christ is a girl, or some other oddity of the unseen world never heard before.

Should we use a standard less rigorous than scientists or spies?

A scientist hearing of the furry but egg-laying platypus from Australia meets something as far beyond his experience as the Abominable Snow Man. He would be wise to wait for confirmation.

Likewise, a spy in a realm hostile to him runs the risk of being fooled by counterspies, falling pray to deliberate disinformation. The enemy would be delighted to mislead the unwary, to create division and confusion.

Spies would be wise to be more wary than scientists, for the platypus and yeti are not actively attempting to ensnare the naturalist with falsehoods. A monotreme is not using his utmost cunning to convince biologists to misname mammal or marsupial.

In the case of reports of the Unseen World, abundant warning exists, from the lips of Christ Himself, to eschew false Christs, or false reports claiming Christ is here or there. We have been told the Devil disguises himself as an angel of light. We need not be told that card-sharps and mountebanks pretend to have spirit medium powers to gull the gullible.

We have been told foes will attempt to fool us, so we are fools to ignore the warning.

In this case, I suggest we give deference to the reports preserved by institutional tradition as confirmatory witnesses. These, in tern, can be buttressed, if need be, by any number of reports easy enough to find of ghost sightings, faith healings, near-death-experiences.

With this in mind, being as prudent as possible, what is wise for a skeptic to believe about the unseen world, that is, the world he cannot see?

That there is such a world is not open to openminded doubt.

Ghosts sightings, visitations of spirits, signs of wonder, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead are things encountered commonly enough in current days and in history that only someone ideologically committed to rejecting all such reports rejects them. Eyewitnesses supported by every indicia of honest testimony, sane men with no reason to lie, have seen or done such things as cannot be explained by skeptics.

Christians are not supposed to turn their brain off with their faith. Some do, which is unfortunate, but humans are going to be human no matter what. It happens and there is no stopping it. So, supposing for a moment that the Christian denizens of the Marvel Cinematic Universe see Thor on television or get rescued by him. What will be the reaction of most of them be (beyond “Thank you,” if they have the presence of mind to say as much, provided they are not girls drooling over Thor’s good looks and confidence)?

They are going to ask him questions. They are going to want to know the limits of his power as a god. Because their God is not limited in any sense, and while they will not (all) need that reminder, they will be curious about just how much Thor can do with his power and what he cannot do with it.

You might get a character like the Crusader from the comics, who tried to fight Thor as a false god and broke his sword doing it. But the main problem with the Crusader character as written (according to his file in one of the omnibus character books I have read) is that he’s ignoring everything I mentioned above. He is taking Way Two of “to doubt at all is to sin,” since he thinks Thor claiming to be a god is somehow a challenge to God Himself. The writers for the Crusader apparently did not realize that while Thor can claim up and down to be a god and do great feats, since he has not demanded worship or adoration upon returning to Earth, he is not challenging God. Thor’s power is also patently limited to storms and a few other notable feats, which is nothing like the omnipotence of God. In the MCU, it is also made blatantly clear that he is an alien from outer space or at least another dimension. Ergo, for most Christians, the reaction will be a shrug and a “Hi, Thor! How’s Asgard?” or “Thank you for rescuing my child,” or something along those lines. Thor will be regarded as just another celebrity, if a very powerful one who does lots of good work in a variety of places.

What I would like to see is someone write a story where Thor at least considers converting to Christianity. Now that would be fun, hilarious, and kind of the entire point of his humiliating lesson in the first place. When you look at Thor and how he changes after coming to live among humans, he comes across – among other things – as a recently Christianized Norseman who ends up in the position of being a missionary to his people.

Although making Thor king of Asgard would limit the number of possible stories to tell with him as the lead character, a very plausible in-universe reason for his refusal to leave Midgard and go home is that he prefers mortal humanity to immortal Asgard. In other words, like the Norsemen of old, he prefers the God Who died a humiliating death to the gods who are fated to kill each other to make way for a new pantheon. Like Guthrum in The Ballad of the White Horse*, Marvel’s Thor learns the value of humility and Christian virtue essentially by being conquered by it. Shot down to the humble Earth he has to get along without his power and be confronted with mortality.

It makes him think and become a better man – and not necessarily the kind of better man Odin wanted (there’s that lack of omniscience coming back to bite the All-Father in the butt again, I see). Thor deciding that he would rather stay with mortal and at least nominally Christian men rather than go back to Asgard means he is what might be called a neutral or perhaps even an allied power subservient to Christ, at least as Christians think of such things. It means you can legitimately ask Thor for a hand and thank him for his help, but no veneration is required and certainly no adoration (which would require a sacrifice offered to him, by the way).

This is where the DC film writers fell on their face with Superman in Man of Steel, BvS, and Justice League (among other tales). Many people might look at Superman and think he is a god, sure, but most Christians will not. And like Thor, Superman prefers humanity to any type of godhood. He was raised by Methodist parents and is listed as a Methodist – a Christian – in the comics. The minute you have a Christian claiming to be God or a god is the minute most of his Christian brethren either start looking for the exit or wondering if they can have him committed, because no, sir, that is demonstrably not true.

Superman’s vast powers are still obviously limited, to the point that people trying to sell him as a god-type character make Christians want to facepalm. Superman is not omniscient or omnipresent. I do not care if Supes can reverse time or fly around the world in seconds. That is not omnipresence, that is insane levels of super speed. The Blackbird jet could circle the globe in around three hours, so Superman doing it himself in minutes is impressive. I might even be a little jealous, if I wanted to fly. But worship him? Sir, are you taking some kind of drug? I think you might need a psychological evaluation….

Christians, as Mr. Wright points out, consider the world of the unseen to be a world at war. It might be a cold war or a hot one, depending on the time and place, but the fact remains that there are factions there that will humanity’s destruction, either en masse or on an individual basis, like Gwynn ap Nudd did to St. Collen. That goes for Fae as much as demons. Considering the number of Fae, yokai, and other spirits that thrive on murder, it is not hard to see them as being allied with the Bad Guy and not worth contacting or leaving oneself open to discussion with over tea. Not willingly, at least.

On the other hand, there are beneficial Fae like brownies and the elves from The Elves and the Shoemaker. There are Fae who simply play pranks or who warn people of things to come, like the Banshee that wails to signal an impending death. There are centaurs and satyrs who bow to Christ and acknowledge Him as Lord. Dragons have been Christian symbols as well as symbols of evil and there are several tales of good dragons in European fiction and fairy tales. We have fairy godmothers, blessed dolls that come to life, and other like things in “fairy stories,” as Tolkien called them too.

Now, do Christians go seeking these things? No. Bad idea. How do you know you have actually met a member of the Good People who is on God’s side? If they happen upon you and are helpful, then odds are they are at least neutral. Otherwise? At best, you are trapped in their realm for hundreds of years, happily married and with children. At worst, you end up dinner.

Thinking about this, something I would love to see is a story of a mother praying to her child’s guardian angel when said infant or toddler was swept off by the fairies and exchanged with a changeling. A desperate mother calling on her child’s guardian angel might soon have her child back none the worse for wear, while the Fae in question could end up with a very sore head.

Now for those countermeasures against the Fair Folk, such as iron scissors hung over a cradle in the shape of a cross to protect the child from being replaced by a changling. What makes you think the cross part was a mere Christianization, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis? The iron would keep a pranking or Seelie Fae away, while the cross would be a reminder of Whom the child ultimately belonged to and Whom the Fae would eventually have to answer to for the theft. Meanwhile, an Unseelie Fae would have a potent reminder of hands off, don’t touch, I am watching you.

Rowan crosses aren’t some secret pagan code in Christianity. That is Christianity taking a known anti-venom and making it a full-blown vaccine against any Fae unwise enough to pull a prank on someone wearing the cross. Because the cross has power, as Christians know straight from the mouth of God Himself.

Now, if you go out and seek the Fair Folk, then you are allowed to do that. Do not, however, expect the Almighty to help you if you outright tell Him you do not want His help. In cases like that, even Rowan or iron might not save you from the spirits you are playing with. If they can get you to lay it down or eat their food – gotcha! If you frequent the part of the road where the Redcap plies his trade for no other reason than to prove he’s not really there, GOTCHA! If you open yourself up with an Ouija board or séance – you would be safer palling around with the Fae. At least they can only eat you, not swindle your soul from you.

Contrary to common opinion, Christianity does not depend on fairies or vampires or anything else being strictly fictional. Oh, it would be nice, believe me, but some of these tales and their persistence across cultures argue for the possibility that the Good People exist. And if they exist and the folklore about the rules they live by are true, faith and rules-lawyering are viable weapons to have to hand, since no one said faith had to be the only way of chasing them off. If iron scissors in the shape of a cross over the door is recommended by more than one neighbor in my new neighborhood, it is going up there. And I will add some blessed salt around the place, too, along with a house blessing and maybe some pennies out where the loup-garou can count them. Just in case.

This is (one) reason why The Dresden Files strikes a lot of Catholic readers as having Catholic symbolism. It acknowledges that the unseen exists and there are factions therein at war with one another. It also does not say God doesn’t exist or is less powerful than He actually Is. Mab is not all-powerful, Titania not all-seeing, and even the Outsiders (if I have recalled their name correctly) have obvious limits. That is before you get to Kris Kringle and Odin, among others; they all exist under God, which means He made them as well as mankind.

Not His fault some of them went evil. Evil is a choice. It is also a lack rather than a thing; disease is an evil because it means you lack health. A lie is evil because the words used lack truth, are being used to divert from the truth, or to cause pain and harm, and so on and so forth. That is a simplistic definition and I – along with Alma T. C. Boykin – recommend you try The Hobbit Party for an in-depth treatment on evil. It is very helpful for worldbuilding at the same time it at least illuminates a view and understanding of evil.

Does this mean Christians can believe in Sasquatch or Bigfoot, the Snallygaster, or a skin walker? We can believe such things exist and are not to be trifled with, as Mr. Wright mentioned above. If you have not read Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas novels (I think it was in that series), in one book, Odd talks about a friend who encountered a creature with three heads while out camping after or on a hunt in the southwestern desert. The friend was a Native American and one of the creature’s three heads had belonged to a human.

Remembering his tribe’s custom of giving gifts to such creatures, the Native American gave it a cigarette. The entire time they smoked, the two heads debated replacing their third head with the Native American’s. In the end, they decided to leave him alone because he gave them a gift.

Wow, he must have been drinking that night, right? That was one possibility he considered. After all, he had had some liquor and a smoke on him, and it had been a long day.

Then the newspaper mentioned a headless corpse discovered in the desert in the general vicinity of where he had been camping that night. No evidence of who committed the murder was available, and there were no signs of it being dropped off. A head was found nearby but it didn’t match the corpse and showed signs of desiccation.

Some days, it is vastly preferable to have been drunk. But then, if he had been drunk, he might have ended up missing his head. Isn’t it a good thing he remembered to be polite and offer the gift of a smoke? I think so. Not being decapitated is a wonderful thing.

Does this mean all Christians believe in such things or would “be polite”? Not hardly, no. It does mean they might not dismiss such tales out of hand, however, and that the wise ones would remember “gifts and politeness are Good Things.” Because maybe a prayer would have chased the three-headed creature off. Then again, maybe it would not have done so. A gift isn’t a deal or a sacrifice, either, so a gift can be taken or left. It is not an act of homage or adoration; it is simple hospitality, as that was the Native American’s camp and therefore his place or “house.” The Hobbit Party* has a chapter on that too, if you are interested.

Hospitality has rules. The Fae live by rules. So do the old gods, as this article on practical polytheism explains. It is part of a series, so you might want to read all the parts. When your life is on the line, then knowing the rules can save it, and your characters might find it important. I also suggest this book reviewed by Mary Catelli, too.

Declan Finn’s Love at First Bite series goes into this fact about rules and their import in the world of the unseen as well. In the series, not all vampires are corrupt or can be held off by crucifixes. The rules for this are rooted in both folklore and religion, as for a religious item to have an effect on a vampire means that vampire has transgressed the moral law in some way. So, if your vampire helped murder people in a Soviet gulag? The rosary you carry is going to burn him badly, and holy water will hurt. If the vampire has been doing his or her best to live a virtuous life, the holy water will not harm them and they can say a rosary as well as touch one.

Now, it gets tricky if your vampire did something bad in their life that they cannot make up for in their afterlife. They might not be monsters and might even be on your side, but that crucifix is going to make them flinch. Throwing Stars of David will be painful, too. Stakes remain a universal way to kill a vampire and so does fire.

Which means anything sharp and wooden is going to do in your vamp, even if it is a tree branch, and a match in the wrong place at the wrong time will make them go up in smoke. That can be helpful fighting off several vamps with incendiary rounds or bombs, but it is going to make some battles tricky when you have friendly undead on your side. Part of the reason Christians can accept that the Fae have rules they need to live by? So do Christians.

Rules mean law and order from Above. That can work for or against you depending on whether you are for God or against Him. Because despite what you might have heard, there is no real happiness in going against, since it means you are only left with the one thing you loved above all others:

Yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is quoted as writing, “All that isolates damns; all that associates saves.” Associating requires rules like hospitality, being polite, and having boundaries. It requires these things because it requires self-ownership, just as freedom does. Freedom means not only that you own yourself, but that you must be polite and respect others’ freedom as well. That means you do not have a license to go around using others as objects for your own amusement or getting rid of them because they are in your way. Hence the command against adultery (which includes rape) and murder, not to mention the commandments against covetousness, since that can lead someone to decide to use another person or to kill them for sport or worse.

Rules are there for a reason. Too often people think the Ten Commandments are nothing but prohibitions. They aren’t – as one priest I know pointed out, if you have a law against theft and everyone obeys it because they believe they should, then you do not need to fear that anyone will steal from you, right? If, and I stress if, large numbers of people abided by laws against theft then there would be no reason to fear it would occur. Depending on where you lived in the U.S. some decades back, people didn’t even lock their doors precisely because everyone in the area followed the “Thou shalt not steal” rule (which got some people killed, when criminals came to the area and found doors unlocked).

Once upon a time churches never locked their doors, since no one would steal from a church. Certainly, there were people who stole from churches in that bygone era. It wasn’t a universally observed law in all places – but in a number of locales, it was tacitly acknowledged that churches were off limits for thievery. Priests and religious were also not to be mishandled or killed, either. Guess where the observance of those rules has gone in the time between then and now?

In A Man for All Seasons*, Thomas More points out that the laws of England are like hedges or fences behind which a man can hide. “I’d give the devil himself benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake,” he tells his prospective son-in-law Will Roper. The problem with Christians who want to cut down all the laws to see morality triumph is that they cut down the very fences that protect them from unseen foes and give them places to shelter when storms blow up (or the war on the other side of the barrier goes hot again).

Of course, the reverse happens when atheists decide to purge society of all rules but theirs as well. Millions dead from Nazi Germany to modern day China and how many rules were broken or ripped up in the process? How many Things let loose? The Mist, for all its faults, is based around someone getting the idea to poke into the unseen world and unleashing hell. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood* has an artificial being seeking godhood, and he got as far as he did because he found or convinced various people who believed the fences were in the way and thus needed to be torn down to help him achieve his goal.

“Rules for thee but not for me” works until your own rules are suddenly applied to you. For when you have, as Thomas More put it in A Man for All Seasons, cut down all the laws and the devil turns around to face you then where do you think you are going to hide? You have uprooted, destroyed, or otherwise removed all the good cover and hiding places. You have disarmed everyone, including yourself. There is nothing between you and “the lidless Eye” of Mordor.

Good job breaking it, jerk. Now we have to scrape together whatever we can salvage to make a shelter and use stones to defend ourselves. Cute.

Yes, this applies to the 1960s and all the warnings from Christians at the time and to the present. You can disagree with the reasons but the results speak for themselves; name me a church that can be left unlocked, or a town where no one locks their doors these days. Name me a place where children are safe to play outside (or are allowed to play outside without CPS being called down on their parents), or a place where a woman can walk home without fear of being molested. Name me a town where old men can walk down the street without being hit from behind in someone’s idea of a sick game, or a place where you can go to give a lecture and not be shouted down and have things thrown at you because you used words people have demanded be verboten.

What happens when the limits are gone? When no one fears God and thinks all gods are the same? When there is no order that enforces respect for individuals, all hell breaks loose. And hell in your fiction can include old gods, vampires, Fae, skinwalkers, and Bigfoot. Just like the real world does.

No, not all gods are made equal. Neither is all worship. But we will get into that next week. For now, remember: Laws of hospitality and morality are not just prohibitions. They are protections – armor and weapons. Defenses you can call upon to protect yourself and others with you. Break the rules, and you might be the only one who gets hurt.

Tear the rules down, though, and it is open season on everyone. Including you.

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If you liked this article, friend Caroline Furlong on Facebook or follow her here at www.carolinefurlong.wordpress.com. Her stories have been published in Cirsova’s Summer Special and Unbound III: Goodbye, Earth. She has also had stories published in the Planetary Anthology Series. Another story was released in Cirsova Magazine’s Summer Issue in 2020, and she had a story published in Storyhack Magazine’s 7th Issue, Cirsova Magazine’s 2021 Summer Issue, and another may be read over at Ember Journal. Vol. 1* and Vol. 2* of her series – The Guardian Cycle – is available in paperback and ebook as well. So is her first YA novel, Debris, which can be purchased in ebook and paperback here* and here*. Order them today!

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