And while you are at it, how does the creator of all create himself? Or, who created him? And why would an omniscient being identify as a gender-male of the species he has created? Why would gender matter at all to a God?
Wait, scratch that. Forget about the complicated questions for today, and let me get right to my point. Ive been very busy with work lately, and time is short.
I figured I would leave my musings on psychological immaturity as they relate to belief in God here, as opposed to on facebook, the bulletin board at the laundromat I attend, or scribbled on napkins in my local eatery. I started mulling this over after reading this page, and after reading the descriptions of how to do as the title says – stop living as a christian atheist. This article was not unique or particularly debate-worthy, and what I write isnt in response to anything specific in the text.
Belief in God is surely related to our species-wide level of psychological development and maturity. When we confront our consciences, many of us still lack the maturity to handle the fact that we *can* make the right decisions without divine intervention, or even without the existence of a divine creator at all. The page I read which caused me to want to write this outlines all of the various ways you can more fundamentally dedicate yourself to Christianity, and offers up confidence, absolution, and happiness as the rewards if the reader would but learn how to more fully integrate God into his/her life.
So, God amounts to a form of psychological counseling, and psychological conditioning, designed to give a person confidence, a sense of security, happiness, health, yadda yadda. God is a way to a totally false sense of these things, based upon mythological dogma – nothing more – and so I find God to be a dangerous and impractical way to teach self confidence and remove depression. In fact, teaching people to trust an invisible being more than any real person in their world is probably a good way to set them up with trust issues, or a distorted sense of what trust actually is.
Why must we call our introspection and inflection “a dialogue with God”, and why must we “share with god all our most secret thoughts and most personal feelings,” as opposed to honestly and openly acknowledging this very healthy, human process of self-analysis? Not that I need to ask this, but why would we even need to share anything with an omniscient creator? He should have complete and total knowledge of everything, so why would I have to open up to him?
Learning to open one’s heart to God, sharing all one’s most personal and innermost thoughts with God, and trusting in God all amounts to simply trusting in your own conscience, or your ability to reason right from wrong. However, if this was the very worst of what religion had to offer, I would have little to talk about in my writing vs religion. If belief in God was simply a proxy for believing in oneself, religion might actually have something with that, but we cant discount how easy it is for “belief in self” to become “belief in the righteousness and morality of whatever actions I perform in the name of religion.” If religion was nothing but a proxy tool for believing in and trusting oneself, its use would no longer be needed by the time we hit adolescence. Lying to the children to make life seem more pleasant is a tradition Im not a fan of, anyway.
I look forward to the day my adolescent species grows up a little, and frees itself from these dark ages.
yourcreepyuncle 