MAN-MADE
I did not exist until you believed in me. That is the power of faith. You, humans, belittle yourself in thinking you are nothing more than mortals, small people of little significance. But by believing you created me and all the others, the Gods. And in this way, this is both your and our creation story.
But I did exist before you did. I witnessed the birth of the universe, in all its magnificence, expanding from absolute compaction into speeding clouds of all the matter. I was a part of that, a passenger on a wave of motion, moving in all directions at once, confused and without purpose. I did not know my name, then, for I hadn’t been given any. I did not have mother or father to teach me right from wrong, I did not have brother nor sister for companionship. In fact, I was barely alive, and being spread out like that across galactic distances made me lethargic. There were eons when barely a thought passed my mind, and the occasional spectacle of supernovae hardly moved me. There were the nurseries of hot stars, spinning around stellar dust, breeding planets, and the comets moving in constellations of rocks with tails of ice, and the comets and the planets would collide, rendering the planets cratered, creating moons on-the-go. And the stars went from white to red, and from red to blue, and the years sped on, and I learned nothing.
Then, one day, a little planet emerged from a cloud of dust. It sat there prettily, waiting for the dust to clear, and in that warmth its icy surface melted to oceans of water. And the comets rained on it and gave it a moon to encircle it for company. And many years passed – I nearly forgot about the little blue planet as I was engrossed again in self-pity for being the only vaguely self-aware thing in the universe. But while I pitied myself, things started to happen deep inside the blue waters of this planet. Suddenly, where the ocean rifts produced the bubbling hot water, life began. I did not do anything for this to happen; rather, I was part of the process. Life started out of parts of me, little molecules colliding together, growing more complicated. And from these cells grew other things, all in due time – plants, and fishes, and amphibians, and small land animals, and dinosaurs. By this time, I enjoyed watching these living things crawl over the earth, spreading over its surface and conquering the skies. And then finally, millions of years later, there was the beginning of mankind. It was you who started to study the world, and your curiosity sparked my mind. I was ready to serve a purpose, ready to become a person of my own, but still I did not know who I was exactly. It was when you started to conglomerate that I began to glimpse my true nature, the one you instilled in me. You built churches for me, and prayed, and burned me incense, and through your stories I gathered who I was. And we evolved together, step by step, always gaining complexity. I must say, we have not always been the best of friends – I think because, no matter how much I care for you, there are limits to what I can do. When you say I am all-knowing, that is pretty close to the truth. I am in all living and non-living things, I am the universe, and therefore I know all, because I am all. But when you blame me for being all powerful and not having interfered in your suffering, that is far from the truth. I am a God, but I am ruled by physics and chemistry. You should ask your scientists; they know the universe is bound by laws. They know that energy can never be created nor destroyed. They know that everything is attracted to fall into chaos, that it is the most difficult thing to create something in this chaos-loving universe; that it is in fact only possible to create anything at the cost of more chaos elsewhere. You blame me for that, then I can only blame the chaos of our physics, by which we are both bound. And then I have blamed you too, for cruelties you committed in my name, burning witches and cities and engaging in crusades.
But perhaps I am not without function, although it is you who created me and not conversely. Because I am what connects us all. If you learn to see that, none of you will feel lonely, because none of you are ever really alone. If you learn to see that, none of you will fight any other, because you are all part of the same. And if you learn to see that, you will be a true part of this entire world and a true part of divinity.