My god, your god, their gods

Public television is trying to entertain us with a three-night series called “God in America” and two-third into it, I've failed to be excited. Instead, I'm regularly falling asleep as I desperately try to watch it. After tonight, when it's over I'll share my two-cent with you on that massive – and so far lackluster - undertaking, but for the moment I wanted to reflect on the logical link there might be between the multiple number of religions and the huge variety of gods that must populate them.

That's right; when religions are different, their respective gods can't be the same. If they were, they'd be smart and tell the fighting factions to chill off and see them exactly the same way. So like in consumer goods, my conclusion is that we're dominated by hundreds of gods all vying for domination and in the meantime, crass market share. Each time a new god comes up on the radar screen he also comes up with a promise, or a key feature, that's intended to draw crowds.

As an example, when Christianity came on the market after splintering from Judaism, its “unique selling proposition” was eternal life, and each time a new god reveals himself, he's got to up the ante in order to make his mark and take market share away from the rest. Of course, since the advent of the telephone, television and twitter we haven't seen many new gods and religions come around. Perhaps the market is saturated or it may also be that it takes far too much creativity these days to compete against cable television, the internet and Facebook. In fact, it could also be that Facebook has now become the new religion, but no one knows about it, yet...