Is there anything more absurd in human society than the belief that a god can communicate with a human culture, directly, one-on-one, the communication successful in reaching the entire cultural group? Yes: the idea that a god can use an intermediary, a messenger, an "angel," and get the same results.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
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