How do you kill a god?

How do you kill a god? Where will you cut first? Who will strike the first blow?

You could strike right away, but you hesitate. Your god is weakened, hurt and almost drained of all life. He is there, lying at your feet, whether he lies or not, you know he might have as well been doing so; kneeling, head bowed, baring his neck to you. Your job is simple and requires no more talent, no more skill than squashing a bug in the palm of your hand. So, what's holding you back?

Fallen, beaten, bruised, but he is still a god. You cannot forget, you cannot look at him and not look at what he was, what he did. Your stomach is in knots and you do not want to be the first that strikes because you cannot ever truly believe that he is beaten, that he is not capable of, with just a slight movement, wipe the entire lot of you off the face of the earth.

How do you kill a god? How can you, a common, normal human? Do you even dare to dream of such a thing happening? Now you do. Now you can. For he is, indeed, fallen. But this is not about the fall or about the conquering of so great and mighty an opponent. This is about whether you will ever stop believing that he can rise again.

And so, as he lies there, bleeding, dying, you are already dead. You will live lives shadowed with the doubt that plagued you from the very instant you realized you were going to cut a god.

And so we each carry a god with us, around us. Like palpable clouds, we are surrounded by this.

Often, we kill our gods, often others kill them. But killing is for humans. And so a dead god will rise and take back his place. We watch people breeze past us as we walk. In our little groups, comfortable to not be a god when talking of others, we put our heads together and whisper about the god that just walked by. And we talk not of the god, for that god is human, but we talk of the god of that human. The deity that his life, his existence, his words, his work is.

And then others will talk about us and they too, talk of our gods.

Do you now know what this god is? This god breaks every now and then and people see you and think they see the exposed you, the humiliated you. They scoff at you, they pity you, they laugh, they cry: at you, for you. They think of your god and think how they have managed to see through but then they forget about their own gods and how these human gods are mortal and immortal: your god will grow back. And when this happens again and again, people start looking at you and at your god and they start realizing that they can't differentiate any more.  

That's when they realize that you will not stay broken, that they can't ever react when you fall the next time. How does it matter, you only rise higher. That's when people start either loving you or hating you.

When they love you, they realize how much more common you are for you have embraced all that is human in humans: the ability to always hope, to always rise again. And so they understand you stand on the same ground as them and together, somehow, the whole lot is raised.

When they hate you, when they feel you have a better god, a luckier one, they would rather kill your god than make their own like yours: immortal, phoenix.