I didn’t even know myself for a while. There’s an overarching belief that God is omnipotent, that he’ll never lie, that he’s not even capable of lying in the first place. That the being responsible for all the joy in the world would never be manipulated or tricked.
I find that hard to believe nowadays. God is no longer an objective being, a subject where we can draw back conclusive evidence leading to objective conclusions. For our present purposes, God is manipulated for the convenience of the situation–whether socially, politically, or professionally.
It’s led to a sudden tangent in my research efforts. I’ve mainly delved into philosophers of the modern-postmodern period who had different opinions not only on God’s purpose but also on God’s existence. My findings and subsequent beliefs regarding these opinions are to be written below.
In the present day, some adherents believe there is physical, archaeological evidence that a form of God – a Messiah, or God himself manifested in man – existed. Professor Lawrence Mykytiuk disagrees, claiming “there’s nothing conclusive” to any evidence pointing to his existence. Others believe he was just a myth to carry some through turbulent periods.
Throughout many of his works*, philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach argues against the existence of God for the sole idea that many of the claims we make about God and his omnipotent morality are actually about men themselves. Take his words from The Essence of Christianity:
“What in religion is a predicate we must make into a subject, what is a subject, into a predicate…that is, invert the oracles of religion while at the same time seizing them as counter-truths–thus do we arrive at the truth. God suffers–Suffering is the predicate–however for human beings, for others, not for himself. What does this mean in English? Nothing other than: Suffering for others is divine.”
Thus, religion’s proper focus was not on God, the other, or any infinite being. It was what Feuerbach called our species’ character: the characteristically human mode of being and living.
Religion, in all its cosmology-related talk, is fundamentally human. Without humans, there is no religion. Religion has no purpose outside of comforting, consoling, and fulfilling the wishes of humans from all walks of life.
But at the same time, how can the God we know discriminate? How can God only be supported by a certain group of people who share the same morals as him? Aren’t his morals supposed to be universal, to bring the world back to the “goodness” he once shared with us? How are there so many different sects of this God we know?
There are too many nuances and instances of cultural variation to account for the belief in a unified God or the belief in the morals that religion proposes to us. The morals presented by God and the religion itself are not objective–they are solely the morals that we deem them to be, that we want them to be. It doesn’t matter how you interpret the morals–it’s others’ interpretation of them that you’re supposed to follow.
I found out it wasn’t even God who necessarily lied to me–it was everyone who supported him, who proclaimed his word, who preached his morals. Religious proponents’ simplistic moral standards are agreeable and universal enough so diverse communities can agree with their underlying messages. But how people twist these messages and change them to match their backgrounds and upbringings is exploiting the very message that people need from religion.
It is from this conclusion that I find religion irrelevant for the purpose we think it serves in our society.
What we need is not religion. We need faith in our systems, our communities, and our surroundings. We need trust to support and build each other up after tragedy. We need to be able to turn to each other—not to God.
For as long as religion has been a crutch for humanity to lean on, it has also been a burden we must carry with us–one that has brought us some of our most evil and harmful conflicts to date. It has been an issue that has divided even the most reconciled of communities and lingers into politics despite our societal insistence on not doing so.
Friedrich Nietzsche once declared, 'God is dead.' Perhaps it's time we acknowledged that God was never alive—except in the hopes, fears, and aspirations we projected onto this cosmic canvas.
God didn’t create us; we created God. And that may have been the biggest lie of them all.
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John 15: 23-27 God gives us his spirit in us, not as the world gives
Thus our proof forever, who are we to doubt?