Where does the concept of an Omni-everything god come from?

[Keevan_Colton]

The title says it all, I'm curious to know though I cant seem to find any real answer despite much google-fu. So I put it to the denizens of SLAM, where does the concept of an omni-potent/scient/benevolent/icecream&sprinkles god come from and why is it equated with the abrahamic judeo-christian-islamic god?

[nickolay1]

Though I am by no means an expert on this, my guess is that primitive humans simply could not find any other explanation for various natural events. Grouping possible causes into one is what initiated the process. The human tendency to anthropomorphize things concluded it.

[Keevan_Colton]

Though I am by no means an expert on this, my guess is that primitive humans simply could not find any other explanation for various natural events. Grouping possible causes into one is what initiated the process. The human tendency to anthropomorphize things concluded it.

Why wasnt Zeus or Odin or Osiris or any other of those gods omni-everything then?

[nickolay1]

Interesting question. Perhaps this somehow related to the various societies which created them? My original statement applied mainly to abrahamic religions themselves.

[Ryushikaze]

Because they weren't the only.

The idea of an omni-everything god comes from the rise of monotheism. Your god is better than everyone else's, so they're cooler than everything else, and as such, become omni.

The best examples I can think of are the Shiva-ites and the other 'head god' sects of India, who simply turned everyone else's gods into a lesser aspect of their own, more powerful diety (It's also an interesting form of apologetics. I'm not sure how many of you have seen it in practice, but if you've ever seen the "God appeared as many gods to many people" argument in action before, it's the same thing all over again).

In short, it boils down in a lot of ways to 'my god could create your god for breakfast' as a result of the monotheistic movements wished to assert their patron diety over the gods of other people, even people whose basic religion was the same, but who followed a different patron.

[Ariphaos]

The title says it all, I'm curious to know though I cant seem to find any real answer despite much google-fu. So I put it to the denizens of SLAM, where does the concept of an omni-potent/scient/benevolent/icecream&sprinkles god come from and why is it equated with the abrahamic judeo-christian-islamic god?

It appears to have started with Mithras, or around that time. The basic gist is, over a few centuries of observations, it was noted among scholars that the entirety of the celestial sphere was, in fact, moving (this was due to the wobble of Earth's axis during its orbits). They surmised that the being that was doing this must be phenomenally powerful in comparison to the other gods.

Why it got associated with Mithras, I am not sure. It bled into Christianity, as much of Mithraism did.

[Elfdart]

It came from Persia. It caught on because it offered one-stop shopping for religion. Instead of prayers to many different gods on many different occasions, you can do it all at once!

[Winston Blake]

On a psychological level, i expect it's a holdover from childhood. To a young child, their parents are omniscient and omnipotent. There's a great sense of security in this. However, as they grow older, kids realise their parents (and by extension, the world based around those parents) are flawed mortal, fallible beings, just like themselves. An omniplural (neologism ftw) Father or Mother figure returns a person to that sense of a childhood 'Garden of Eden' before the 'Fall of Man'. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

[Winston Blake]

Grrr,

"are flawed mortal, fallible beings"
"are flawed. Simply mortal, fallible beings"

Also, throw in 'ineffable' to "To a young child, their parents are omniscient and omnipotent."

[Patrick Degan]

There are two basic types of belief: natural and revealed religion.

Natural religion is essentially a game of similies with the observed world. Earth-mother worship, for example, derives from primitive people viewing the changing cycles of the seasons, the appearance of the moon and tides, and the growth of crops with a woman's own fertility/birth cycles and thus a natural assumption that the Earth is a Giant Mother enters into the collective consciousness. Pantheism and polytheism are more complex outgrowths in which particular natural forces end up personified by a deity-figure, but again those gods and goddesses are all related to a particular natural force which people observed but didn't have the science to explain more rationally.

Revealed religion, on the other hand, is somebody either getting drunk off his ass after a fifteen-day bender or eating too many of the funny mushrooms or inhaling something which causes his braincells to imitate a bag of popcorn and as a result hearing his own voice reverberating in his own skull a bit too much. He takes his own ego-projection to be God and spends the rest of his life trying to spread the Word. If he gets a large following of people with swords backing him up, that's where the trouble begins.

(ADDENDUM —there is also the form of "revealed religion" which is of course nothing but a bullshit confidence scam which in a few cases grows into something far bigger than first imagined. See L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology)

It was purely unintentional that it did so, but the movie The Ten Commandments illustrates this perfectly by way of Cecil B. DeMille having had Charleton Heston dub the Voice of God while also portraying Moses (albeit electronically slowed and reverbed in the dub). For all we know in reality, the only voice Moses ever heard on that mountain was his own during an hallucinatory fit.