In the past, there are more illiterate people than the studied ones and therefore it would have been tough to intellectually persuade them towards following the rituals. Even today, the highly civilized and educated people claim to be God-fearing rather than being the God-loving or God-friendly kinds. With Yama, the God of death (Hinduism), Lord Shiva, the God of destruction (Hinduism), Narasimha or Parasurama, who are the forms of Lord Vishnu (Hinduism), the Goddess Kali (Hinduism) Mara (Buddhism), etc are shown to be ferocious and frightening

Fear Frightens The Bad:

People commit mistakes when there is no fear of punishment and therefore the children were brought up telling them stories that if they lie or do bad things, the Supreme Beings will punish them. This is proven further by the representation of Gods and Goddesses with divine faces in some temples and their warrior and killing form in others. It is also said that Lord Shiva has a vertical third eye in the spot above the middle of his two eyebrows that would open when he is angry about the wrongdoers and when open, it would burn everything that is there before it, especially the evil.

Fear Helps to Focus:

Happiness is a superficial and light feeling and one would not be able to focus when they are happy. This is why people are refrained from promising when they are in joyous moods. Fear on the other hand is a deep emotion that would trigger the true nature of the subconscious mind thereby ensuring that the person would focus as focusing is one of the best qualities of adrenaline generation. Fear of God would put the person in the righteous path if they are laypersons and Love of God would give them confidence in living a peaceful life. The frightening deities deliver a combination of these emotions. With something already present to fear, one would not have enough bandwidth to fear for other trivial things in life.

Warding Off Evil:

If one tends to visit to many of the villages in South India, the boundaries will have an Ayyanar temple is erected where he is seen with huge weapons with extended tongue on huge horses few scores of feet tall that would easily put a smiling child to tears due to fear, which is considered to be the guardian of the village safeguarding the residents from outsiders and evil forces such as ghosts or demons. By flipping through the annals of history of these villages, one can easily find the headman of the village or a clan who would have been courageously defending the interests of their people and later became the inspiration for the Ayyanar Gods for the future generations.

Restoring Confidence:

The Gods and Goddesses are shown to fight negative attitude, loser mentality, fear, wrath, envy, pride, prejudice, disillusion and various other things that would hinder the person’s progress. Therefore, when something bad happens to the person, the role models of Deities fighting off the evil forces can be taken into the mind and one can ward off their adversaries easily.

Every concept of the religious belief have been created for a reason, but due to the loss in translation across various generations, the real moral is fading away leaving people with the superstitions alone.

Should God always be seen as Male?
 
Is God always a man? Or should the question be “Do humans always see God as a man?” This practice of attributing human characteristics to animals, plants, natural forces, abstract ideas and symbols is called anthropomorphism, also called personification or prosopopeia. In ancient Greek, ανθρωπος, anthrōpos, meant human, and μορφη, morphē, meant shape or form.

How Animals See Divinity?
Would a dog imagine or visualize divinity as a superdog with canine attributes?
After being in close contact with humans for millennia, dogs are rather used to humans and would hardly imagine humans as divine. At least our family dog doesn’t behave as if we were divine, fortunately.
Similarly, would a cow visualize divinity as a supercow, a parrot as a superparrot and a mouse as a supermouse?
Now, you can of course argue that animals don’t think and they are incapable of imagining or visualizing. You can start quoting other “learned” people or even religious scriptures that animals are lower life forms, so they are not quite as smart as yourself and thus they do not think or visualize.
Another argument often thrown to prove the lower hierarchy of animals is that animals don’t create art. Well, how many of us humans create music like Mozart and paint like Rembrandt? One last argument for animals being devoid of higher “human” faculties is that they can’t express themselves using languages. Well, what about the endless battles, fights and bitter divorce cases among biped primates who pride themselves on their civilized language skills? 
But do we really know what kind of inner mental activity the animals have? Animals observe and interpret natural phenomena, can solve complex problems and make distinct rational choices. Animals build nests in their own style and preference. If a bird needs to build a nest from scratch, the bird first needs to visualize a nest, then plan it’s construction, start gathering twigs and branches. As the construction progresses, the bird needs to check the progress of the construction by comparing it with the model of the nest in the head like any other human house construction engineer would check by comparing with drawings or plans.

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

Other Forms of DivinityIn recorded human history before the age of patriarchy, we have had other forms of divinity such as mother Goddesses (the Hurrian Mother Goddess “Kheba” from which Eve supposedly gets her name), fire (Agni in Hinduism), thunder (Zeus in ancient Greece) or other ideas of divinity beyond the human capacity of description (Nirguna Brahman in Hinduism).

Image via Wikipedia

Animals used to be very common as forms of deities incarnate in almost all religions earlier. With the spread of Christianity and Islam, animals have become less visible in cult religion and rituals even among African cultures.
With all our technology and science, we know precious little about the real mental activity between our own ears. Observing that inner universe is, however, an endless source of fascination and inspiration. Maybe we could get glimpses of their inner states if we started respecting animals a bit more.

Is it possible that animals are not burdened with elaborate ideas and mythologies, over which they can fight endlessly by claiming their own interpretation as the only legitimate one fighting for? Maybe dogs, cows and mice don’t even need superdogs, supercows or supermice! Could it be that, in their own way, animals are closer to the divine than biped “higher” primates, humans!