A Bedtime Story for a Little God Date Thursday, April 25, 2024 - 11:53 AM PST Topic Religion Come on Keiki – time for bed. Oh, you’re not sleepy? How about a story then? What would you like to hear? How about the one about how Grandpa Ku separated Po from Ao (yin from yang) to allow the universe to be created? Oh, I’m sorry. Of course you've heard that one a million times. How about when your cousin Pele turned her sister into a rock for messing around with her boyfriend? You don’t like Pele? Yes, I know she used to throw rocks at you sweetie, but she didn’t mean anything by it. You know how she gets. Oh, you want to hear something pretend? How about something that starts with "In a land far, far away"? Will that work? Ok, I know a few of those. Lie down and get comfortable. This one's called "The Imaginary God." Are you ready? Ok, here we go. Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a family of Gods just like us. I know there's no other Gods hunny, this is pretend. Now shoosh and listen. They had a mean old uncle named Hades, kinda like your uncle Kanaloa only way meaner and without tentacles. He lived underground like uncle Kane, but in this far away land, the underground is not such a nice place to be. In this far away land the underground is full of fire and lava like your cousin Pele's house, but Hades isn’t quite as psych… um… eccentric as your cousin, so he didn't like it as much. Hades was naturally jealous of his brothers Zeus and Poseidon, since they got to live in the clouds and the water and he had to live in the ground, so he fashioned a wicked plan to get back at them. These Gods had a flock of tame humans that they all shared and looked after. I know humans are wild kiddo, but these Gods had tame ones – now quit interrupting me. All of the Gods shared their pets, and everyone was happy. The humans loved their gods and the Gods loved their humans (except sometimes when the humans would leave dead critters on their altars – but all pets do stuff like that sometimes, who knows why). So Hades decided he wanted all of the pets to himself. He knew he wasn’t good looking or charming like his brothers, so he needed another way. He was wandering around his domain one day and heard some shadows moaning for Chronus and Rhea to help them. Now Chronus and Rhea were Hades's parents. Hades knew they'd been dead for years and so they couldn't help these poor souls. But that gave Hades an idea. He did one of the weird time shifty things that your daddy does to creep us all out at parties, and found a group of gullible Israelites to test his plan on. He wrote a bunch of rules on some stone tablets and then watched as the prophet spread the word and all the humans started believing in a god they couldn't see. Excited by the success of his experiment, Hades went back to his world and plotted and schemed and plotted and schemed, and when he was done he had a plan that could not fail. He found an unsuspecting virgin and made her have a baby and then played with that kid's mind until he was old enough to start talking to people. The kid told them about a god that they couldn't see, who loved them and wouldn't do mean things to them for fun. Of course, the humans loved this idea and a whole movement grew around this new imaginary God. The other gods laughed at this of course. And pretty much ignored the kid for a while. He was getting to be a bit of a hippie, and most of their pets thought he was just a raving lunatic. Hades however saw something dangerous happening. The imaginary god movement was growing faster than he had thought – and one of the silly things he had written on the stones for that crazy prophet to find was that there was only ONE god. Hades knew that if this caught on, and all of the humans started believing this, then they would stop giving us their Mana – and we all know how painful it is to a God when our pets stop believing in us. So Hades went out into the desert to find his hippie and see what he could do about this. The hippie was starving himself in the desert as hippies have been known to do, and he was a little delirious by this time. Hades tested him a few times to see how he would react to certain things, and every time the hippie said "I will not be tempted by you Satan." No I don't know why he called Hades "Satan", maybe no one had taught the hippie the names of the real Gods. On the third time, Hades knew what he had to do. He began to cultivate his image in the minds of the humans as a scary beast with horns and a tail and big scary glowing eyes. He would be the wicked nemesis of the imaginary god, and make sure that they would remember him even if they decided there was only one God. He would become this Satan that the hippie spoke of. Around this time, Zeus and the rest of the family began to see the danger posed by the hippie. The Gods had their humans kill the hippie in the most painful way they could imagine, hoping that this would discourage other humans from giving their attention to the imaginary god. Unfortunately, their plan backfired and more and more humans started to believe that there was only one god. Slowly this drained away the Mana from the real gods until they didn’t have enough Mana to leave Po. The years passed, and more and more humans started to give all their Mana to the imaginary god. The humans began killing each other to convince the other ones that the imaginary god was the only one. Even those that loved their gods gave them up for fear of being killed. A mighty army was created of humans whose sole purpose was to make people give up their gods. The army called themselves The Missionaries. They spread across the earth, converting or killing any human they came in contact with, and by this time there was no God with enough Mana to stop them. No god, that is, except Hades. Hades knew he had screwed up really bad, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He knew he couldn't smite down the Missionaries. He didn't have nearly enough Mana to do that, since the imaginary god's followers would burn anyone who even thought about giving him any. But since he was the only God with enough Mana to leave Po, he had to do something. So he began to slowly, over centuries, try to convince the humans that there were never any Gods at all. No Gods would be better than letting them kill each other over his mistake. Hades was mean, and Hades was jealous, but Hades was not the wicked creature that the hippie had portrayed him as to the other humans. So little by little the humans began to give less and less Mana to the imaginary god, and slowly a few humans even started remembering a little about the real ones. It was still not enough for them to leave Po, but it was better than nothing. But as the imaginary god faded, so did Hades, and pretty soon the humans walked on the earth alone. They no longer had anyone to ask for miracles, and nobody to smack them around when they weren't following their destiny, and nobody to give their Mana to. And all that misdirected Mana led to confusion and cultures died. Hades found that, although he had succeeded in getting the Missionaries to stop killing humans, without Gods to tell them what was good or bad, the humans continued to kill each other for no reason at all. So that, my dear child is how we came to be back in Po again for all these years. And that is why you have not seen the earth yet. Yes I know I told you it was make believe, but you should know by now that there are no make believe stories. Yes Hades is your uncule Kanaloa, you're a very smart kid. Now curl up and go to sleep. Aww, don’t worry Keiki, I've been talking to your cousin, and Gramma Hina has a plan. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=434