Gods Without Godliness

"So, tell me what this Peter Jackson thing is about."

I was trying to start a conversation with my daughter while driving her home from a school event.  I knew that she was reading this Rick Riordan novel where the plot involved some teenagers and Greek mythology.

"What?"  My daughter seemed totally clueless about where I was heading.

"You know, that novel that recently became a movie, about these kids trying to save the world from these crazy Greek gods, or something like that..."

"Oh, you mean Percy Jackson!"  Oops.  Peter Jackson is the movie director who did the Lord of the Rings films.  I was close.

"Yeah, like, at the beginning of the story, Zeus lost his lightning bolt, and like, he thought that Poseidon stole it from him, because, like, Zeus and Poseidon did not like each other, and, like, like..."

I had been trying to get my daughter to stop saying "like" every time she's trying to tell a story, but it looked like it was like not working.

"So, you're saying that Zeus is a god, but he can't even find his own lightning bolt?  Sounds like someone I know who couldn't find her flute yesterday..."

"Dad, stop it!  So, anyways, Percy Jackson and these other teenagers were, like, demigods, but they didn't know about it until..."

"Demigods?  So you're saying that these Greek gods were having sex with humans and got young ladies pregnant?  So these Greek gods can actually lose things, not get along with each other, not know everything, and act like a bunch of dirty old men?  The story sounds like a soap opera to me."

My daughter ignored my religious rant, and continued on with how these half-humans ended up being trained at Camp Half-Blood, somewhere in New York, and how the story somehow ended with the lightning bolt eventually being returned back to Zeus.  Unfortunately, she, like, lost me pretty quickly, as my mind wandered and wondered about just how human-like these Greek gods are.  Am I glad that they're not actually running the universe!

Come to think of it, deities that are conceived by humans throughout history are mostly like these characters who supposedly live on Mount Olympus.  They are typically morally deficient, limited in knowledge, limited in power, and/or limited by the dimensions of time and space.  Such are the products of human conception.  It is therefore of little wonder that our self-existent, all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, eternal, righteous, and good God started the Ten Commandments with the directive,

"You shall have no other gods before me."  Exodus 20:3