What are "The Gods"?

This winter, we've had a couple of consecutive weeks of cold weather and snowfall that accumulated (in the northeast Ohio snowbelt) so I actually went cross country skiing (skate skiing) a few days in a row. I often run into people who were in the northeast Ohio road cycling racing community back in the early 2000s. Skate skiing is great cross training for cycling.

I ran into an old acquaintance from my road racing days yesterday. We were driving the same car and had the same skis and were doing the same hobby. We probably don't have much in common outside our hobbies though. Different work. Different ethnic background, etc...

Lately, I've been thinking about what "the gods" actually are and what "worship" actually is and this chance meeting reinforced my idea. Some version of animism or ancient Shinto in Japan is an apt description of what the gods actually are.

I grew up and currently live in an area with landforms created by ancient sedimentary bedrock that was cut up by glaciers thousands of years ago. There's a handful of patterns that arise from that. When the bedrock is soft, there are short steep ravines cut by even just a small stream. When the bedrock is tough, like sandstone, there are taller climbs, some up to 400 feet, from a river to the hilltops. Then there are flat alluvial plains along rivers and streams.

If you ride a bike in this area hundreds of hours a year, it trains you on some fundamental level. It provides certain expectations like the steepest hills are the shortest. The landscape shapes human consciousness in specific ways. That set of habits and perspectives could be abstracted from the specific trained human and treated as an independent entity, aka "a god".

A person who grew up somewhere else, with mountains for example, like upstate New York or Colorado would form some slightly different set of ideas about riding a bike after decades. It would be some other type of consciousness and a different "god".

The road racing people I knew back in the early 2000s were from many different backgrounds and walks of life, but I think a very intense hobby like that makes an indelible imprint. For example, a person who is racing or testing him or herself daily or weekly versus physics is unlikely to think much of poseurs after a certain amount of time and might be more likely to focus on improving technique or physical capabilities versus pursuing their career goals or climbing up the pyramid of corporate world.

In that case "worship" of the cycling god leads to a certain type of life: a very capable person who is probably not super interested in trading all their time for money and might be happiest living like a monk in the shaolin monastery.

Those are the actual gods and actual worship. They are more subtle and powerful than the mainstream religions which are actually quite strange by comparison. They're narrative based and rely on fairly shallow archetypal characters to train people in "belief".