In New York state during the '50s and '60s, every ninth grader took a class called "Citizenship Education".  My Cit Ed teacher at Holland Patent Central High School was Mr Kuchler, a decent guy and good teacher who had the unfortunate habit of using his extended middle finger rather than his index finger to point out things on the board, which caused a lot of snickering in class.  The standard Cit Ed curriculum included the structure of our government, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and a fair amount of anti-Russian material including a set of weekly magazines, each issue dedicated to the history and culture of one of the Warsaw Pact countries complete with jokes and cartoons, all emphasizing the misery of the people under godless socialism.

I think Mr Kuchler took seriously his responsibility to nurture good citizenship in his charges.  I don't recall that we spent much class time on the mandated McCarthyist propaganda, but when it came time to talk about freedom of religion, he devoted a couple of weeks to an overview of the major world religions.  I'm pretty sure this was on his own initiative, because we didn't have printed class materials to support this unit, just mimeographed pages of Mr K's notes with a recommended reading list for more information.

That's when I first learned that the Muslims' Allah is simply the Arabic name for the same God of Abraham and Moses venerated by Jews and Christians, when I was introduced to the basic principles of Buddhism, and when I heard the astonishing factoid that there were more Hindu gods than Hindu worshippers, which even at that credulous age and from the mouth of a trusted teacher I found impossible to believe.

I've since learned enough to convince me that Mr K didn't just pull that claim out of his ass.  To Hindus 330 million is a number endowed with great mystical significance, and in ancient tradition it's the precise count of the gods.  Although there are about 850 million Hindus living now, in 1959 that population was probably not much over 300 million, so he wasn't out of line to pass it to us students as a simple statement of fact.  It was actually a pretty effective pedagogical device, having grabbed my attention strongly enough to be remembered half a century later after just about every other detail of that class has faded.  But I'm sure that no believer living or dead could have enumerated 330 million deities, and that no list of their names has ever existed.  I'd say it's just one of those magic numbers meant to evoke a feeling of unimaginable size, like "gazillion".

Gazillion is probably as good an estimate of the actual number of gods venerated by humans as anyone's likely to come up with.  Consider another article of Hindu belief, that every being is an avatar of Brahman, that is, an aspect of the supreme divinity that underlies and incorporates all reality.  By this standard, to count the divine beings you'd have to count every human living or dead, every caterpillar, every tree, every organism that has lived or will live.  Even if we assume that each divine spark is recycled in an endless round of reincarnations and that our planet Earth is the only living world in the history of space and time, even if we draw an arbitrary line to distinguish between sentient and non-sentient beings and grant divinity only to those to whom we're willing to concede the quality of self-awareness, we're talking about a very large number.

Of course, most people would reserve the word "god" to designate those beings that Hindus would call devas, immortal beings with superhuman, even supernatural, abilities.  These gods may or may not take an interest in human affairs.  If not indifferent, they may be either protective or threatening or both in turns.  They may have wide-ranging powers or act only within prescribed spheres of influence.  They may be organized in hierarchies, and may form alliances and rivalries.

And there are gazillions of them.

Every human culture has had its gods, every isolated tribe its own mythos to explain whatever mysteries are hidden from simple understanding.  Every force of nature -- the sea and sky, wind, fire, vegetation, animals preying and preyed upon -- falls under the dominion of one or more gods.  Each river, waterfall, mountain, forest or lake may have a resident deity.  Every aspect of human life -- love, death, war, each art and craft -- is overseen by its own divine patron.

Over the course of human history, scattered cultures and civilizations have met, clashed, intermingled and coalesced into ever larger and more cohesive groupings, to the point that in our own lifetimes we're witnessing the emergence of the first global monoculture and the rapid extinction of microcultures by the thousands.  The gods themselves haven't been immune from this process, as reflected in the mytho-historical records of many traditions -- the Aesir absorbing the Vanir of the Norse pantheon, the Olympians superseding their chthonic predecessors in ancient Greece, the Hebrews waging a war of extermination against the Philistine sects, local dieties in the Himalayan kingdoms becoming assimilated into Buddhism as bodhisattvas, Christianity adopting pagan rituals and customs and renaming local gods into saints as it expanded from the Levant into northern Europe.

Centuries after the rapid expansion of Islam as far as Spain to the West and across central Asia to the borders of China, and the subsequent spread of Christianity to every continent in the wake of European exploration and conquest, about half the world's believers still adhere to some form of animist or polytheistic belief, such as Hinduism, Shinto, Wicca or other forms of neo-paganism, and surviving native traditions in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific island cultures.  Even under the ostensible monotheism of the Abrahamic traditions, Yahweh/Allah is surrounded by seraphim and jinni, and opposed by demons, all of whom would be indistinguishable from gods to an outsider.  The Christian pantheon includes a trinity of distinct aspects of the prime god, a god of evil, hosts of good and evil angels each with its own name and attributes, and, depending on the denomination, a semi-divine mother of god and thousands of saints capable of answering prayers and facilitating miracles.

Still gazillions after all these years.

And though they both profess to follow the same god that commanded Abraham to offer his son as a human sacrifice, I'm pretty sure that Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden would each deny that the god to whom he prays has anything in common with the other, and I'd bet my soul that any god that would answer the prayers of Fred Phelps isn't even on speaking terms with the god worshipped by Desmond Tutu or Mother Teresa.  The idea of a god is held in the minds of his or her believers, so in any assembly that's not a mind control cult you'll find perhaps as many different conceptions of the god being worshipped as there are congregants.

All of these gods, every one of them, are expressions of human imagination and creativity, subject to the limits of human conception, which is probably why just about all of them are created in something very like our own image.  Some may have arisen from the legendary exploits of ancestor heros, growing in wonder with each retelling over countless generations, or just sprung from the heads of master storytellers whiling away long winter nights.  Most of the important gods, though, probably originated in the need for answers to questions that had no answers except in stories -- how did the world begin?  what is fire?  how high is the sky? -- or to pass on important teachings and cautionary tales when word of mouth was the only way to transmit knowledge.

Because we now have tools and methods that can give us answers to so many questions, and media capable of storing and transmitting more knowledge than an individual could absorb in 330 million lifetimes, some think that we could easily do away with gods.  But there are still questions our tools can't help us answer -- is there a purpose to existence?  are consciousness and free will illusions?  are we part of something much bigger than we can perceive? 

Gods are metaphors, personifications of human passions, forces of nature, timeless wisdom, and they provide a means to give simple and poetic expression to complex ideas and realities.  If a mythmaker were to tell the tale of a sky god offended by pollution-spewing factories who takes revenge with plagues of floods, tornados and droughts, there's a symbolic truth in that story that resonates more powerfully with common human experience than all the climate change data and analyses that predict the same outcome.  On the other hand, the same story could be spun, has been spun, to say that the offense against the god is in acknowledging the human rights of women and gays.  The first version is a metaphor for demonstrable truth, the second is merely the propagation of a lie.  We're responsible for the gods we create and for the evils that we allow to be done in their names.

Because gods are not merely metaphors.  They are real in themselves, the same way that a symphony by Mozart or Beethoven is real.  A symphony has no fixed form, though it can be represented by scratchmarks on paper.  Sure, a physical recording of a performance can be made, but that's not the symphony.  It's an artifact that can be used to reproduce a single instance of that symphony, as interpreted by a particular conductor and executed by a particular assembly of musicians at a particular place and moment in time.  Does that mean the symphony isn't real?  A complex ordered pattern of interacting compression waves is generated by the vibrations of reeds, strung catgut, shaped brass, and taut membranes and propagated through oscillating molecules of air to effect sympathetic vibrations in the membranes and bones of an ear, thereby exciting patterned waves of electrical discharges among neurons to create the subjective experience of transcendant emotional states in the mind of a listener, all according to an idea conceived in the finest detail by the mind of a composer.  That's real.  Mind-to-mind communication of ineffable experience unbounded by distance in space or time.  That's the power of a god, even if the god's objective existence is only as an idea.

We can't create worlds, but we can imagine beings that can create worlds, just as we can imagine worlds that never were and ways to change the world as it is into something maybe a little better.  Gods are with us, whether we choose to honor them or not.  They occupy a niche in the ecology of consciousness.  They channel the power to affect the thoughts and actions of believers, and the lives and fates of non-believers as well.  Kurt Vonnegut said we are what we pretend to be, so we must choose carefully what we pretend to be.  I'd say that we're also what we believe, that the only beliefs that are really ours are the ones we choose, and we need to choose wisely what we honor with our belief.  It's just one of our responsibilities as good citizens, of the country, of the world, of the cosmos.