I am not surprised that there are so much disinformation, conspiracy theories, frauds, fraudulent claims of fraud right now. The reason is that as an immigrant, I am used to misconceptions and misinterpretations for years. The English we had learned in classroom is not the English people really use here; The stories of immigrants we were led to believe are different from the real immigrants’ life we have witnessed. This is life. We have understanding, misunderstanding, misunderstood understanding, understanding of what’s misunderstood. It’s a jungle out there, no matter how much our deceptive brain tries to convince us that the world is an ordered existence being catalogued like a well dusted library.
Once I heard this popular joke in a popular channel about the money god in an Asian culture. I love the comedian and have no intention to criticize him. However he ridicules such a deity and his jokes eventually lead to a disparaging conclusion. I think this is very much his ignorance, which causes the misconception about this divinity. It is not his fault, but I really want to let him know that he is mistaken in criticizing Asian cultures in that way. First, we live in the world of capitalism, where the power of capital is undisputed, if not entirely god like, at least something wielding immense influence in our life. The name “money god” is probably unsavory to the middle class palate. So what?
Second, “nearly all religions in the ancient world had a god or goddess associated with wealth, power, and financial success.” This is a direct quote from learnreligions.com. I guess in many cultures, the ritual towards the wealth god created frictions in the society. I can just imagine poor people carried their agriculture tools to smash the wealth god statues to pieces. So it had to be abandoned just to appease the agitated mob.
The thing is according to my relatives, there are kitchen god, stove god, stable god, god of silkworms, among which some people are still praying to the stove god right now and forgetting most of the other gods. It is reasonable to surmise that for many different peoples in the ancient time, every existence has a god behind it, like in Greek myth, like in Indian cultures.
As time passes by, many gods are forgotten and a few remain and consolidate. We are now living in an undiversified world as far as gods are concerned, same as languages.
Once I met a nice lady who refused to believe there are languages which are not alphabet based. I tried to explain that the Romanized alphabet is widespread right now, but in ancient times it is more common that written languages are lines of little pictures like in ancient Egypt, China, Maya etc. She was very polite about it, but I knew she was not convinced.
Haoyan Do 