A false god is any finite and limited thing, any desire, any ideology, any program, any belief, that has been elevated to the level of a divine universal. And our pantheon today is just as rich as that of any age, perhaps moreso.

    Our rituals, our displays, and our fervor are just as earnest in the modern era as those of our ancestors. And I don’t mean all this metaphorically. This is what false gods are, what they have always been. How the gods are conceived or personified or identified or ritualized, and what devotion to them means, changes from age to age and culture to culture. All peoples find acceptable ways of monunentalizing and conceptualizing their gods within the language, conditions, conventions, and artistic and social displays of their time.

    But the underlying nature of the gods, and the underlying nature of what they mean to their followers does not change very much through the ages, because people change very little, and it is only modern hubris that imagines people today are so very different from those they are only some scant generations away from.

    The state can be a god, safety can be a god, the home can be a god, diet or exercise can be a god, rationality and money and generosity and risk and fashion and sex and respectability can be a god. Look through the actual lists of the gods of many cultures and you will find a list of all the things those cultures valued, and they’re the same things that we value today. And it’s quite clear that many of these cultures were quite aware of the ritualized and iconographic nature of their gods. Why else have so many of them and such specific gods? Gods of poetry, archery, housekeeping, sexual conquest, generosity to beggars, vengeance for jilted lovers, oratory, strategic planning, wine, celebration, field work, the environment, justice, just about anything you could imagine. All the things people value. 

   Are we really so different, except by cultural convention? We set up avatars of our ideals and give them our reverence and make sacrifices to them of our time and goods so that we may enjoy their blessings. All gods say the same thing. Give me your devotion, make me first in your life. This value isn’t just a thing, this is the thing. Build your life upon it and you will be rewarded. 

   The symbology of the gods was well understood in ancient times, and if not always analyzed, was fully articulated through story and ritual. And sometimes it was analyzed, even hundreds of generations ago. Socrates in 400 BC had a long conversation with a priest where they remarked on the fact that to most Greeks the myths were understood to be largely metaphor and symbolism, but no less true or defining of human life for all that. Devotion to a god, an ideal, and a praxis; something we represent to ourselves with an avatar of what we wish to be and pursue through a path of devotion, and the proclamation of the superiority and divinity of our ideal and our desire to embody it.

   Whether the religious nature of such devotion, ritual, and proclamation is understood or not, it happens, and it does its work. The functionality is contained in the activity, even when its nature is not fully, consciously understood. The NBA doesn’t literally exist as a thing, although it has personified avatars we revere as its representatives. Despite not being an actual thing in any sense, it is quite real and quite powerful in the world that humans inhabit, which is as much humanity itself and its desires, beliefs, values, conventions, inventions, and ideals as it is any physical reality. The world we inhabit isn’t merely a physical place, it is a social place. We live within one another, and within what we all value and believe in. 

    The key insight of the idea of a false god is twofold. First, is the realization that a god may not have the power over its domain that it has claimed. Devotion to that god may not give you the proper pathway to understanding and competence within that realm of being, nor a means to become the envisioned ideal. In this way one god may defeat and supplant another within their realm, if they prove themselves the stronger, often through the success or failure of their followers, whether that be the god of a nation or the god of specific personal interest or devotion.

   Better gods replace less adequate and successful gods through a kind of empirical testing process, much as specific scientific and psychological theories are tested and replaced by stronger, more effective ones. The previous gods were adequate and true enough, but proved false in the testing as they fell before truer, more powerful, more adequate gods. 

    The second and far more abstract and theoretical sense of false godhood is the challenge that comes from Judaism, which questions not merely the adequacy of the gods but rather the entire conception of the elevation of the finite to the level of the infinite. Nothing less than the ultimate deserves to be elevated to the level of the divine. Only that which contains all and orders all can be truly set in the place of worship and avoid idolatry.