Religion and God

An extremely interesting topic. Religion creates communities and a sense of belonging, which are very important to people and enable better empathy between them: Empathy and perspectives. (note auto translation, might contain some funky language before I fix this)

I would argue myself that religions are, to a great extent, human creations, self-fulfilling prophecies, and circular reasoning. Belief in God or some other greater power can be a great source of comfort and meaning in a person’s life, and for this reason, I do not mock it at all and ultimately consider it a good thing. However, very often the God that believers believe in tends to think very similarly about the world and morality as the believer themselves. This way it is used as a weapon against people outside their own group and inner beliefs even inside the same religion. Let’s focus here on the Christian God and the points that believers in it use.

God and Morality and Its Problems

God is infallible: Mainly the idea that the Christian God is completely good and never does anything wrong. Their conception of morality is based on this and argue that without god there can be no conception of good and evil. Tying morality to God leads to morality changing according to God’s actions and lacking a deeper foundation. Thus, good and evil are not absolute but entirely subjective actions of God. Secondly, God in the Bible breaks his own dictation of morality by killing innocent animals and people several times (Job’s cattle and children/servants, being a good example of pure murder when God makes bets with Satan for his own amusement). One would think that a perfect God could follow his own guidelines.

This leads to a topic that deals with how in the Christians original creation story God created humans to fail. Consider God himself is a perfect being who cannot do wrong. This God then creates man, and man lacks the ability to always act correctly. This is often explained by free will, but is God then without free will and acts like a robot? Why aren’t men given the same wisdom to always do right thing? On the other hand can it even be considered free will if all choices other than those chosen by God lead to destruction. The end result is, in any case, that God either did not want or was not able to create a human like himself, and this has been an active choice in the creation of man and rules how man is destined to fail from the beginning.
So God created an imperfect human and demanded perfection and blind loyalty from him. When man with imperfect knowledge and curious nature naturally fails once, God banishes and “curses” him. The only way to be saved from judgment is then to love and worship God who created man to fail (in this case, the sins of the ancestors fall on new people). If this was a human person people would call this kind of behavior very narcissistic. Furthermore, the heritability of sin to children is a very sick concept where God practically avenges someone else’s mistakes on innocent people and practically removes their free will to make the decision in the first place.

DEFENDING GOD’S MORALITY

The defense of God’s hypocrisy is that God is completely different from the human whom God has created imperfect. Then God’s instructions of good and evil to people seem like the same dynamic as, a parent’s moral instructions and demands to their small child. The parent can do hypocritical seeming things in situations where the child simply does not understand cause-and-effect relationships and the bigger picture. But how could you then still demand that the child base his morality on the instructions given by the parent, which the child is unable to understand or comprehend. How sensible is it to demand completely ethical behavior from a small child when he does not have the tools or the strength to act within them like the parent, let alone the same understanding of the matters?

You can think also the God-human dynamic from the point of view that: what kind of parent or a person you would consider an adult to be, who lets their child beat another child to death with a hammer, and does not intervene because the child has free will and its implementation would be prevented if the parent were to intervene? Now you can apply the same thought to God and man who commits atrocities. In my opinion, the current human rights declarations are much more moral than what the Abraham-originated God has offered.

morality itself

If one wants to consider objective and subjective morality, then the morality offered by God may seem objective because it comes as “given”, but being tied to God himself (perfect God) it is actually God’s subjective morality. The fact is that believers often pick the raisins from the bun: They choose specifically which parts of their God they emphasize with and thus choose what kind of “given morality” they follow entirely based on their own subjective experience. On the other hand, morality outside of God can be dealt with objectively as it can be criticized unlike god. One way is to deal with it by looking at what is good and acceptable for humans as both the species and as the individual. Doing both analyses for the individual and for society, we get an objective picture as a whole. This, in my opinion, is a much stronger basis for morality than just blind faith in God’s actions, which can be in conflict with his speeches and previous actions or with how his actions have been interpreted and recorded.

An easy analysis is into objective morality: Does action X cause harm or suffering to other people and to what extent? To other animals and to what extent? Indirectly to these parties by destroying the environment? if not then the thing is ok. If it causes, to what extent is the matter ok or not. human rights more specifically for example my writing freedom of speech where I deal with how rights cannot violate other rights.

Universe and its Origin

The need for God or a higher power has often been justified by the impossibility of chance / randomness. However, if you think about chance, it is more likely that the world has formed by chance, than that God has first existed by chance and after that has decided to create the world. Complexity increases significantly when God is added to the equation. Illustrative example:
There is a human. ->Complicated.
There is a human who creates a computer, to which he creates code with which he creates a computer simulation where there is a game world and moving characters. ->For the characters, their computer world seems complicated, but in reality, the world where the human has created this computer world is really much more complicated than the computer simulation. Then think of a world where there is only one person who himself digs minerals out of the ground and builds a computer, invents code and models characters alone, or perhaps can do this by the power of thought from nothing. The probabilities that outside our world there is only one God, who has all the knowledge prebuild, are much more unlikely than a chance-created mere world with all its flawes.

Then there are those who claim that God has always existed because he is outside of time. This can be thought through the computer game analogy, you can pause the game and modify the characters and the world as you wish and then turn the game back on. For the characters in the game time has not progressed from the point of view of the game world during the modification. However, in the world of the god/modifier of the game, time has progressed, so he must have started somewhere in his own time. The problem with the argument that “God is completely outside of time” is that if there is no time in God’s world, there are also no actions. Actions are changes in space, and in order to have a change, there must be an old and a new state, if there is no time, there is no old or new. So then God would not be able to do anything but would be forever unchanging and unresponsive, remaining in just one state (a completely useless God for whom prayer would be of no use).

Also, the idea that we live in a “computer game” created by God, where the only way to win is to love him, is an utterly sick concept, again.

GOD AS CREATOR AND REVELATIONS:

As another thing, I have written enough code to think that if a perfect God cannot create better than this: Thousands of genetic errors in the human genome, terrible diseases and a really hostile environment to live in where thousands of animals constantly kill us and each other, then I certainly wouldn’t hire this “perfect” creator again. This world features some true utter garbage.

This leads to the “wonderful world” argument. Humans have a natural tendency to recognize repeating patterns and shapes, as well as faces. The purpose of these has been to help people find food, determine what is safe, and recognize fellow species and dangers. This pattern recognition is seen in believing in horoscopes, as well as in the repetition of a number in one’s life or other superstitious beliefs. Connections are being made also between things where there are none. Especially when you know what you are looking for, then you start to see it everywhere, even where it is not. For example, the evidence for the flying spaghetti monster is completely watertight.

Conclusion

The idea of God as a perfect creator does not withstand closer examination. The concept of God and morality has evolved hand in hand with human moral development, leading to the obvious conclusion that God is a human creation. God was created to explain things that are not understood, or to justify things so that they are not questioned. The natural human tendency to recognize patterns and shapes has led people to see just the things they want to see as evidence of God. In my opinion, faith and religion are not bad things in themselves, as they unite people and create security in a world that is otherwise really terrible and frightening. Faith gives a sense of the possibility of justice even where there is none. I sincerely wish all the best to all those who truly share love and warmth with their fellow human beings. My intention is not to shake anyone’s faith, but rather to guide the perspective to what is really valuable in faith and to forget its use as a weapon against real, loving, and well-meaning people who deserve to live in peace. If you argue for an imperfect God or a weak God who is much more possible, then that’s fine, I just don’t think such are worth my time especially if their morality is weaker than modern western values.