Virtually every culture, around the world and across time, has some kind of religious/mythological belief system. Where did we come from? How are we to live? Those basic questions gave rise to hundreds, even thousands, of myths to give the answers (see: the entire Masks of God series I spent months of my life reading). In an anthropological/psychological sense, God did not create man. Man created the gods. And in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, we didn’t just create them as concepts in the sky; they are corporeal beings and they need us, our prayers and our tributes, to thrive. But we as Americans haven’t been giving them what they need for a long time now. What idols do we regard with something close to reverence today? TVs. Our phones. Our computers. And that has given rise to new gods in competition for our devotion with the old ones…
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