Which religion has the best God?

James White, one of my Facebook active friends, launched an interesting conversation yesterday by asking: “In your opinion, which religion has the best God?” In a knee-jerk reaction, I misread the topic and responded, thinking “which [God] has the best religion,” and then formulating a would-be humorous answer that I posted on line. I have since re-read the question and today, I will attempt to address it more thoughtfully. First of all, the question itself creates a premise that different religions call for different Gods. That's alright with me, Allah is different than the Christian God, and is probably different than Yahweh, Zeus or Ahura Mazda (Zoroastrianism.) This is an important point that must be established before we go any further; we're quite fortunate to having a whole bunch of Gods and Goddesses available to us for spiritual needs.

Without getting into the minute details today, I would like to offer a simple overview. First, I think the Gods of the Talmud and Islam are not fun guys at all. They are old, stubborn, vengeful and violent. Satan, the God of satanism is not better either, plus he is extremely negative, so that puts him off my top list. Then there's the modern Christian God, that is a team deal between the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit (some sort of Intellectual Property Attorney) that is obviously breaking ranks with monotheism and creating more confusion than what's needed.

Even though they add a woman (Mary) to the top team, the Catholic Gods become more confusing, plus they condone guilt and pedophilia, which disqualify them by my book. We have the Mormon God and its plethora of prophets (including Jesus, who's been demoted) but that's not cost effective (10% of one's gross income.) Beside compassion, I don't think Buddha offers much since I don't believe in re-incarnation, for the simple reason that I can't remember what I was doing before I was born.

That brings me next to Hinduism which offer a bunch of colorful Gods that I find likeable but don't understand, and since we are now into polytheism, I'd say that my favorite are the thirty-three Greek gods and their Roman counterparts. First they are very diverse, they're specialized and they are acting as human with special powers which makes them very accessible to me, but unfortunately, just like the mini-cassette, they're no longer available. As in the song “American Pie”, they probably caught the “last train for the Coast...”