Like a Caress

 Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 88

In my imagined book "Ramadan in Winter" I hope to include a chapter that's speculatively entitled "The Wrong Metaphor." The notion being all religions are products of metaphor, because how could they not be? How can we be told that God, no matter how you perceive her/him/it/they are beyond our understanding, but then insist that you know exactly what that God wants, especially when it comes to  imposing penalties on the disenfranchised in society (and thus giving lie to the words and desires of the founders of religions, most of whom were revolutionaries concerned with the suffering of the underclasses and the helpless). Not only do we forget that we've made use of metaphor, but we also don't think of the fact that the metaphor that we, at least with monotheistic religions, settled on - the angry king - is a terrible metaphor. Maybe if we went back to our earliest days and returned to the female divine, we might actually be a lot better behaved, more tolerant and kind and compassionate, and less intent on taking the cruelty that we learned from the angry male god and imposing it on others. This reminds me of Thycydides's Melian Dialogue from his Peloponnesian War. The Melians try and reason with the invading Athenians but to no avail. The Athenians make one of the great might makes right arguments in history. When the Melians propose that the gods might be angry about the Athenians using their power to punish the weak simply because they are powerful, the Athenians simply respond that it's from the gods that they learned that power itself justifies its application. Sadly, maybe we are all Melians.