Personifying reality¶
“God is not a person; God is a mythic personification of reality. If we miss this we miss everything.” – Rudolf Bultmann
Monotheistic religions personify reality. They call it “God” and then start talking to it and imagine that it listens to them and answers them.
Atheists aren’t saying they don’t believe in reality, they just refuse to personalize reality.
If you define God like this, there is obviously one and only one God, the same for everybody. Everybody believes in reality. Some people just refuse to talk to it.
This approach of personifying reality was invented the the Jewish people. They were probably the first in history to cultivate a monotheistic religion.
One of the first things you need when you personify something, is a name.
The old Jews wrote the genial story where God (JHWH) meets Moses and asks him to tell the Pharao to “Let my people go”, and Moses asks back “when they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” and God answers “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) was genial .
More precisely, in the original text (according to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks) God actually replied “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”, which means ‘I will be what, where, or how I will be’. Sacks adds that “The essential element of the phrase is the dimension omitted by all the early Christian translations, namely the future tense. God is defining Himself as the Lord of history who is about to intervene in an unprecedented way, to liberate a group of slaves from the mightiest empire of the ancient world and lead them on a journey towards liberty.”
See The name of God.