Don’t give up hope yet, as to my knowledge the Gods of our ancient past came to our rescue twice, once during the Deluge and more recently what became known as the Exodus. Quite possible if things get dicey and the existence of their favorite people is at stake they just may intervene once more. Would be a shame to see their human experiment fail.
There are many things I wish I could say in reply to your post, but it would take volumes. Suffice it to say you don’t know how close to right you are. Or maybe you do.
Well first of all there is one God, the God of the Bible.
The story of the Plymouth Pilgrims is an easily recommended story in the regard of adversity and the founding of America. To understand them, one has to go back and study John Calvin, John Knox, etc., i.e., the Reformation. I heartily recommend studying William of Ockham as well, he dates back to the 1300’s.
Understanding the motivations and society of America in the 1600’s and early 1700’s requires an understanding of the Reformation, i.e., European history in the preceding several hundred years as well as the much closer-to-true understanding of Scripture that the Reformers arrived at, which hearkened back to the Apostolic age. America at the time of it’s founding did not exist in a “secular vaccuum” as we are taught today. Quite the opposite, every part of society and it’s norms was rooted in Christianity, including culture, the law, business, politics and education. The Bible was a part of every child’s education, and in frontier homes, if they owned but one book, it was almost always a Bible.
The Reformers (who preceded the Plymouth Pilgrims) were simply questioning what they saw as practices in the Church that logically were contrary to the Bible and original Christian doctrine. After all, that’s what the Christian faith is based on, they reasoned; if we’ve departed from it and made up something ourselves (which the Bible expressley admonishes the believer not to do), then what are we doing, really ? It was precisely because the common man was not taught Biblical doctrine directly in that pre-printing era, that the Church had strayed in so many ways. The common man simply had to accept whatever the clergy said for their doctrine, as they could not study the Bible in their local language. In what can only be described as an act of Providence, the printing press was invented right around this time. Though the Church leadership feared that giving everyone their own copy of the Bible in their own language would be the end of the Church, instead, the Reformation wound up resulting in the Bible becoming the most printed book of all time, Christianity being strengthened worldwide and, of course, becoming the moral foundation for America.
Part of Christian doctrine is that Christ is reigning now in heaven, and also that Christ is and will be victorious.
It makes sense: if God created the heavens and the earth then he would have complete sovereign power over it. He revealed himself through prophets to the ancient Israelites. All Jews, up to and including the first Christians, always testified to the truth of the Old Testament (root word, testimony). If we say that it is not true, we are implying that everyone before us is either wildly mistaken or a liar, which starts to make very little sense if you read it and have a good text or teacher explaining all the cross references it contains and a lot of the meanings it conveys. Also, given the fact that millions of people accepted all those Old Testament stories as 100% true facts - over thousands of years - and it was commonly known by heart and transmitted down through the generations extremely accurately, the idea of people lying or being misled about it’s veracity is quite far-fetched.
The Bible tells us that all happens according to God’s will; he is the author of history, existing independent of the time we experience. The true believer is not promised that they will not see trials and tribulations along the way, neither are they promised that things will go the way we want them to. But from a human perspective, even though the movement of every atom of the universe is in motion and this motion is according to physics, so we theoretically could predict the future, even something simple like predicting tomorrows rainfall would require far too much information for us to acquire and analyze. Like a passenger on a sinking ship knows the ship will go down, we know that we will die. But our lack of knowledge of the details of the future present us only with the same rational alternative of the passenger: to try our best. We don’t know if tomorrow something will fall on us and kill us, or we will experience some wonderful turn of events that makes us very happy for many years to come.