nd flattering a being with
no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to
invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck.
And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal,
becomes capricious and cruel.

When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines, the
cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nachon, and the holy object was
in danger of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang forward to
save it and was struck dead for his pains. Now, if he was struck dead by
the sheer holiness of the tabu object, the holiness stored inside it
like so much electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting
accident, and no more.[68:1] But when it is made into the deliberate act
of an anthropomorphic god, who strikes a well-intentioned man dead in
explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element has
been introduced into the ethics of that religion. A being who is the
moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite.

Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, as was done in
agricultural rites all through the Aegean area, is in itself an
intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those
emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropomorphic god
of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so
modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften
its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. This result was
intensified by another well-meant effort at elevation. The leading
tribes of central Greece were, as we have mentioned, apt to count their
descent from some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes unknown
and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. Sometimes he was a local god
or river. When the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity
among these innumerable local gods, the original tribal ancestor tended,
naturally enough, to be identified with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The
unfortunate Olympians, whose system really aimed at purer morals and
condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with a crowd of consorts that
would put Solomon to shame.

Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the
attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods.
The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If
Zeus had only gone further and become completely, on