Man-Like Gods
[At some point in the evolution of religion, gods] began to be credited with all sorts of prejudices, weaknesses, tastes, appetites and humours. They were given qualifies and attributes of men--generosity, pride, wrath, resolution, enterprise, perhaps, even a kind of tenderness. And of the beasts that men hunted--the wiliness of the fox, the ferocity of the sabre-toothed tiger, the huge strength of the mammoth, the courage of the lion, the foulness of the hyena. This way of thinking of the gods survives into our own time. The Yahweh of the Old Testament, still worshipped by millions, is called a lion therein, and the Devil, still feared, is a serpent and a dragon. In the New Testament Jesus is both a lion and a lamb. The God of the Episcopalians is an elderly British peer, courtly in manner, somewhat beefy, and, in New York, vaguely Jewish. --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930