Gods in the hands of Benevolent People

This is from my livejournal community, Temple of Thought, and expresses my personal feelings about religion. It's just something I began to formulate after meditating on the present states of religion and spirituality and I call this branch of thought 'Pantheonism' - the etymological meaning is "Belief in many Gods", but here I mean the construction of a personal set of values, ideals, and gods to follow. Here are my thoughts:

The Theory:
In years long past, people have found a need to attribute all phenomenon to divine entities called 'gods' and then formulated belief systems around what pleased and angered these gods. Gods, in all forms and throughout all times, exist to help human beings to rationalize the world around them. They are our protectors, our teachers, our adversaries, our guardians, our tempters, our creators, and our destroyers and they do exist but only in the minds of those who believe in them. However, this does not make them any less real. All deities of today and days long past were created by human beings to help human beings come to terms with their own inner spirituality; in short, gods were created by humans and not the other way around. Anything can be idolized to the form of religious status: Nature, animals, ideas, personifications of abstract notions like Love and Death, upholders of different positions and teachings like Art and Science, supreme protectors and personal guardians are few examples of the gods of the ages. The important thing is, these creatures of thought and ideals are important to us, and help us to explain things otherwise unexplainable.

The Problem:
There are actually two major points on religion that have been called out by the world today. In this world of science and rationality, we humans have learned how to explain things without religious mysticism and organized churches to tell us why everything is as it is. There is no hand that raises the sun, one cannot sail off the edge of the earth, wrong doers and ne'er-do-wells do not get smote even when we think they should, raindrops are not tears, snowflakes are not dandruff, and scientific theory leads us to believe that divinity did not play a hand in creating human beings, but a force called 'natural selection' did. Now, given this abundance of information, human beings have learned that since Science can explain things was once considered 'beyond reason', people on the whole have responded to this in two ways:

First, they abandon spirituality as a whole and forsake the intangible for the materialsitic, more on this later.

Second, they ignore science and blindly follow their creeds despite tested evidence and logical theories that refute their doctrine. This seems like the more dangerous option for society at large, because the point of this practice is "Don't ask questions and do what you're told." which not only undermines the freedom that the human brain deserves but seems to lessen the complexity of the world around us by making it the whim and fancy of a higher power than an awe-inspiring universe full of connections and diversity.

Most of society opts for the first choice than the second, which is probably healthier from many standpoints but has key flaws; abandoning spirituality altogether for science does not strengthen the human mind or make it more open or even more logical, it does quite the opposite. Though this physical world can be defined by formulas and numbers, mapped by facts and data, this world cannot be experienced through such things. You can list the countless ways to cause a person's death, but you cannot say what happens to them after they die. You can analyze the compostion of a human being, every chemical down to their atoms, but not the reason for their existence. The reason for humanity's existence. The reason for the existence of the world, even the universe at large.

Pantheonism and the Temple of Thought:
So we basically live in a world where gods of religion doesn't need to serve the same purposes it once did. We live in a world where science can give us definition but not meaning, and where people think that meaning is not important. But we know that meaning is important. We know that the gods of man watch us as we stumble through life, but they watch us from a different perspective than most people are comfortable with believing.
Inside us. Inside all of us there is talent, wisdom, hope, dreams, ideas, all lying dormant and ready for awakening. This is my call for you to awaken them. Give form to these thoughts, dreams, morals, and ideals. Name them. Talk with them. Call them gods or consciences or muses, denizens, guardian angels, familiars, spirits, call them what you like and learn from them what you can. Then discuss them, with all the others who have created such entities. Share what wisdom you have gleaned from whatever faith you belong to, whatever creatures you are taught by. Form your own Pantheon, and add your creations to ours to form one harmonious Pantheon of all creeds, of all gods; to learn from each other and learn from yourselves.