Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter.  You write:
 
"If we believe that God resides within us, that should
make us feel strengthened, resilient, confident. I began
to add that it would convey a feeling of responsibility
and disposition to behave "ethically", but that would
depend on the characteristics we attribute to God. In a
polytheistic, pantheistic setting, in contrast, humans would
feel more vulnerable, unsure who they were as individuals. 
To get along in life, one would strategize, propitiate the
various gods / forces of nature to gain the benefit of their
powers for individual projects. Ethics would then appear
to be composed by and for human society......rules of living
_......without a close connection to the gods, the source
of power."

I find your observation about monotheism perceptive and
persuasive. Your explanation of polytheistic ethics seems
to me to be corroborated by modern intellectual history 
(1600-2000), where the abrogation of monotheism, as
exemplified by Locke. Hume and Mill, made room for the
emergence of (Benthamite) utilitarianism - to use your
words: "Ethics .... composed by and for human society,
rules of living without a close connection to the gods."
That's very well put.

I like to think of religion in terms of the analogy of the
convex lens, as in the classical camera (obscura), I consider
the visible God of Genesis who created the world and
superintended Eden, who instructed Noah to build the Ark,
who commanded Abraham to take Isaac to the summit of Moriah,
I consider the Olympians as well as the Christ who "sitteth
at the right hand of God" to be projections into the cosmos,
of the human spirits who prayed to them.  While the Bible
states affirmatively that God made man in his own image, the
converse also is obviously true.

I read the creation myth of Genesis as the essay of a
grown-up child describing how he or she would create the 
world if it were his or her responsibility to do so. Since
Charles Darwin strikes me as the grown-up child par excellence,
I have no difficulty in reconciling the two creation myths that
preoccupy contemporary consciousness.

I interpret Spinozas pantheism as a demonstration that the
spiritual optics that serve to project individual consciousness
into or onto the cosmos, may also serve, since object and image
are interchangeable, to project the cosmos into the human spirit,
where it appears as Substance or God.

No, I have not been drinking any ink, and I have no intention
of doing so, but I should be charmed if my do-it-yourself theology
made you laugh.

Jochen