Progressive deification

I note certain movements, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, that straddle the borderline between an organized religion and a sort of philosophical society. Each is in its origins a grouping with a historical culture and way of life based on the teachings of a presumed historical person who did not teach in terms of an invisible deity but who has, nevertheless, in the centuries since his death been deified in the minds of followers, and of whom (quite improperly) they raise great statues, often with the most costly adornment. Whether the mindset that tends to deify individual human beings whom they revere, as is or was officially the cases of the emperors of Japan and formerly of China, is peculiar to the far east might seem a possibility; however, the fact that the Roman emperors were at one period treated as gods, or (in the cases of Nero and Caligula) demanded to be so treated, would suggest otherwise. So would the Egyptian cult by which the Pharaoh was treated as a deity.

My own reaction to this phenomenon is that there is a very strong tendency among the common majority of ordinary human beings to raise up to an absurd height — to put on a pedestal, as the saying goes — anybody out of the ordinary who catches their attention, and then to enslave themselves to the one they have raised up.

This is not limited to religious figures as illustrated by the fate of the Buddha, or of Brian in the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian (where they say he is the messiah, and he says he isn't, and they say only one who truly is says he isn't, so he ends up saying he is); in contemporary popular culture the masses do it to celebrities, whether they be in the worlds of pop music, sport, acting in movies or TV drama serials, or the more popular members of the royal family (there was one, sadly no longer, supreme example). The adulation by their fans of such figures has all the same elements as religious experience — which only goes to support my position that religious experience is in the mind of the individual, because it is obviously foolishly self-serving to attempt to argue that when a young woman faints in adoration of Justin Timberlake it is just emotional overload, but when she faints in adoration of Jesus it is a miracle.