How Many Gods Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?
Two: one to hold the bulb and the other to rotate the planet.
None: why bother with a light bulb when all you need to do is say, "Let there be light!".
I'm sure there are probably other punch lines (and you are welcome to put any you know in a comment if you feel so inclined), but the real purpose of this post, having got your attention, is to think about the concept of gods.
Over the years, since humans first began to think and talk about gods, the concept has changed considerably. The omnipotent, multi-purpose, all-encompassing gods of today have not always been around, or rather, before I fall foul of an indignant believer, I should say that humans did not think and talk about such gods until fairly recently (on a scale of thousands of years).
I don't know how comprehensive or accurate it is, but I came across this list of gods* a while ago. There are something over 2800 of them. Click in the list to zoom in.
There are many in this list that I've never heard of. Kinyras (the god of metalwork) was a new one on me. A quick scan of the list let's me conclude that it's a safe bet the vast majority of them have fallen into disuse. Some kind of built-in-obsolescence perhaps? Probably not. Built-in-obsolescence is hardly a desirable attribute in a deity, which suggests the obsolescence was not deliberate, but rather something to which they were all prone,
So did these obsolete gods actually exist? Do they still exist but have somehow lost their power? Or were they just figments of imagination, dreamed up to meet a human need?
We live in a world full of the results of human imagination. If I ignore the coconut palms which I can see through my window, everything I can see is human-made; the product of someone's imagination. We just can't avoid using it. Imagination rules our world. Even the coconut palms have 'steps' cut into their trunks.
Human beans are an imaginative lot, and it's not confined to imagining objects which didn't exist beforehand, or even objects that can't physically exist in our world, like the impossible triangle. We use our imagination to come up with all sorts of ideas to explain things we don't understand. Sometimes we get it right first time, but mostly we don't. We have to adjust our imagined answers when we find the errors in them. Or, if we are particularly attached to an idea, and don't want to accept there's anything wrong with it, we have to find ways to pretend the errors don't exist or explain them away. We're quite good at using our imagination to do that too.
So perhaps the real, but boring answer to the question 'how many gods does it take to screw in a light bulb' is this:
'How long have you got? Use your imagination to think up a god who could cause the light bulb to screw itself into the socket - and bingo! You've found the One!'.
How Long by Ace
Listen on Posterous
* I think the original list was produced by Luke Muehlhauser but I can't find it at his website.
I googled it and found the rather cool Zoom-in list here.
How Long by Ace available at Amazon
Book recommendation: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (Sir!)
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