APOLLO, THE TRUE GOD?

APOLLO, THE TRUE GOD?
by Jack Buno
If one wanted to consider a God whose past existence proved itself by endowing our present day society with great accomplishment, we would consider Apollo, the god of the Greeks. The words spoken by the oracle at his temple in Delphi, were completely responsible, in a very direct way, for almost all [if not all] of our western philosophy.
One could ask why we do not choose to worship the name of a God whose followers propagated no Dogma, instead of the capricious Gods we presently use to justify our religious wars. We use these same gods to justify with blatant prejudice, our Greed, Pride, Avarice, and Jealousy. Wouldn’t we do better by dispelling the false teachings of our dim_faced gods whose worshipers hate each other, and replace them with this simplest of Gods, whose simple words defined the truth, without doctrine [two phrases below]. It was thru a simple revealing to one humble man, calling him, with his self_admitted ignorance, ‘the wisest man in Athens’ , that set this devout seeker of truth on a path of discovery that eventually led to his death; and because of his principled death the ability to reason by questioning, was passed down to us.
Not before, nor after, has there been any more simple defining of the truths necessary for ‘enlightenment’ than was inscribed on his temple walls; ‘KNOW THYSELF’ and ‘NOTHING IN EXCESS’. Millions of books since, have not added one mote of clarity to this simplicity of truth attributed to this stone god.
The story goes; it was reported to Socrates, that the Oracle had told one of the citizens ‘There is none wiser in Athens than Socrates’. This created a questioning by him, whose results echo down thru history, and today has its influence in most of us; we call it Western philosophy.
Socrates saw, as he thought of it, this ‘Holy Proclamation,’ as an instrument that could be used to prove or disprove the existence of the Gods. If he could prove the God's proclamation wrong, and find someone wiser than himself, he would have the evidence he sought which would prove the Gods fallibility. It would be an easy quest, he thought, to prove a God wrong that said he was the wisest man in Athens. All he had to do was prove to himself, that the inadequacy he felt concerning his own lack of understanding, was well founded, and ‘the God’ would be proven wrong; hence, a wrong God, means no god! Socrates died as a direct result of his subsequent questioning, a punishment for seeking someone that could answer the questions he could not answer himself. He was possibly the first man to find death for asking questions. He willingly drank the poison as demanded by those that chose not to question even their own beliefs. While it is true that we no longer tell those that dissent to drink poison, we kill them instead in the name of our God, by losing the horrors of war on innocent people, and we justify it by calling them ‘infidels’; a name that boasts our God as better than theirs.
This forgotten stone god from the distant past, holds no laureates with the modern Holies, in spite of the profound effect of his words [thru the Oracle] on our society. Today he remains only as a god of stone, relegated to the fading memories of history that record our stumbling and dismal path towards Enlightenment; a state of existence in which we have failed miserably as a race. After these thousands of years of knowing better, we still cling to the shallow satisfactions we derive from our ignorance. Money and War in the name of God!
Apollo is not the name of my God, I really don’t know his name; but what I did learn from him, is still perfected, using only the two directives; Nothing in Excess; and Know Thyself.