Weird idea about the origins of gods

 

I've read a few short articles about how originally, Yahweh was not the chief or only god of Israel, but one of a pantheon of 70 children of El, the chief god worshipped in Canaan at the time. He was a minor storm god, and there was no omni-anything to him. He made mistakes, he changed his mind, he wasn't all-powerful or all-knowing and certainly wasn't all-loving. He was just the guy in charge of making sure it rained (but not TOO much). And he was at the same level of power and importance as his brother Baal. Yes, THAT Baal. The one that he keeps telling the Hebrews to stop worshipping, and punishing them when they don't obey. The Baal whose priests were challenged to a "whose god is the real O.G." contest by Elijah, where Baal's priests couldn't get any results but Yahweh sent a fireball to consume offering, altar, and all. And according to the story, the Israelites killed Baal's priests and followed only Yahweh after that.


And I wonder... maybe the first religious impulse that caused humans to invent gods was not the thought "I need an all-powerful master to tell me what to do", but "I need an all-powerful servant to do what I tell him". Less "I'm small and insignificant in a big scary universe full of powers and phenomena I don't understand, I must learn how to please the maker of these things" and more "The fucking harvest didn't produce enough food AGAIN this year. Harvest god, fix your shit or I'm gonna start sacrificing to the god of the people in the next valley over, THEY got plenty of food. What do you think I'm paying you for? No harvest, no lambs. Lambs are for gods that get RESULTS." 

When early humans called upon the gods, they damn well expected the gods to answer, and would drop 'em when they inevitably didn't.. As far as they could tell, sacrificing to the sun god on the longest night of the year was always followed by the daylight gradually coming back, so the sun god got to keep getting sacrifices... but when their tribe was defeated in battle, it was clear that their war god was worthless, so they stopped sacrificing to that useless fucker and tried asking the winner's god for help instead. Their only mistake was to switch for other gods rather than just admit that gods weren't real. And after all, it's not like they had any better options at the time. Since they didn't have science yet, they didn't have the means to ACTUALLY make the world less hostile to them, so they had to settle for asking imaginary friends to make it less hostile to them.

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