Does God Exist?

[afleitch]

I agree a bit with LBJ.

If there is a 'god', then we have to determine what sort of god it is and why we call it so. A 'god' need not be a deity. A 'god' need not be infinite or infallible. A 'god' can be flawed. If an alien from a distant sun dropped by and created life on earth because it nothing better to do then crashed and died on the way home then for our purposes it would be our 'god'; but we would never know that it was or need to know that it was.

In terms of what is on offer in terms of the gods that are popular today (and I am very much a believer that religion throughout human history is not about 'truth' versus 'untruth' but a popularity contest with ever changing winners) then it's left wanting. Christianity/Judaism/Islam is quite poor at owning the notion of god.

If I had to attach any awe or reverence to anything then it would be the Sun, without which you and I would never have been here. It's not an entity, it's not conscious, it doesn't know what it's doing but it rules our very existance.

[afleitch]

No.

Human beings have a social hierarchy which is interesting; we have fathers and mothers when we are born and when we escape that influence we are faced with leaders in our adult lives due to the influence of authority and powerful attributes; sometimes it is basic like brawn or intellect. Now it’s about connections, exposure, influence and money. The idea of a god is an extension of that as gods have very human attributes; anger, love, power, influence, comfort, leadership, vengeance. Our understanding of what god is changes as our understanding of power changes. Theologically it’s a very easy narrative to follow. It’s also why the Stone Age god; the smiter and killer and tribal ‘godhead’ isn’t particularly appealing to us today (even if some try and gloss over such attributes written down in their holy books), so theology compensates for that. You will often notice how the portrayal of god depends on the person preaching; the god of one pastor is different from the god of the other pastor. It’s a human projection.

The fact that gods have human attributes should be obvious to you. The fact that gods seem to think we are more interesting than anything else on the planet should cause alarm bells to ring. Other animal species do not, to our knowledge have gods. But if they did, then they would reflect their ‘power’ structures or their ‘need.’ It used to be the same for us. We made fertility idols, because reproduction was important to us. We worshipped the sun (and in my view, if we had to exalt anything it should be the sun), we had gods of the sea and of farming. We wanted gods that gave a damn about our immediate concerns. We also wanted gods to satisfy our more sinister sides; we needed war gods, gods who sent plagues.

We also ‘personify’ everything; we say faces in plug sockets, we make dolls, we ‘humanise’ animals. We give the weather a temperament. The weather isn’t ‘clement’ or ‘foul’; it’s just being the weather. It is us that humanise it in order to understand it. So we made the elements that had mastery over us as gods; humanised, human orientated and human thinking gods. As we developed and didn’t need to worry about the ‘elements’; when we were going to eat and whether the winter was going to kill us as we settled down and began to farm we also started to think. Thinking led to productivity. The more we thought about ourselves and our purpose (which was now more than mere survival) and what we were able to make the gods that we created began to change as well.