Does it matter if man created God?

[Soph0571]

Some kind of ritualised behaviour and religious beliefs and practices are probably as old as man and women kind. The earliest signs of religious conviction or feeling is seen in the graves of primitive man who was kicking around in the long and distant past (225000-100000 years back). However – while we may have had some sort of faith construct it took early man until roughly 10,000 BC to get organised about our belief systems and it was another 5,000 years before Hinduism, the world’s oldest living religion, began to develop in the Indus Valley. Evidence does suggest that as Homo sapiens emerged 100,000 – 150,000 years ago and as our brains gradually advanced so seemingly we started to need to believe in something. So the question has to be, did God show himself to man, or did man feel the need to create God?

Human beings are funny old things. We develop our communities, our social groupings and within this societal environment we unite around shared faith (or lack thereof!) structures. The development of a homogenous belief system within a social group has always been a hugely powerful mechanism to help other members of the group identify who is a member of ‘your gang’, especially within an environment where you have to take your belief system on trust (because of inevitable absence of evidence?. Over time as our brains evolved so did our need to try and make sense of who, what, why, where and when. For our early ancestors (and for us) an unpredictable world can be a frightening and disorientating place. Not understanding how or why things worked and not being able to control the outcome of all manner of things (animal migration, weather patterns, harvest success etc.) early man looked left, looked right, scratched his head and found comfort in activities which he hoped might help him exert some control over things he did not understand. Ergo, early man praying to or sacrificing to a deity to try an influence the outcome of events. Seemingly, religious ritual was a twofer for early man, in that it arguably served a purpose in trying to explain the world around them alongside being a mechanism to coalesce social groups.

It was only about 5,000 years ago that the idea of a single creator God developed, prior to this man kind worshipped all manner of polytheistic deities, examples including a strong belief in the supernatural world, animism, river sprites and the Gods of Thunder! Surely God, is a little late to the game? Why do you think it is that idea of a single divine entity came so late to man and women kind? The fact that we worshipped multiple deities in time past suggests that there is a tendency for a construct of multiple divinities to coalesce over time into the sense of a single divinity, after all a single divinity could be seen as more powerful and complex than many divinities and so is therefore a more satisfying experience of worship for the end user. Consequently one could argue that the creation of all monotheistic religions are examples of socially responsive creations, rather than the creator creating them. They reflect the makeup of any given society at any given time, they do things that society wants them to do.

Does it matter if man created God, or God created man? If God has been created by man as a social imperative for mankind to try and understand his purpose, one might suggest that this is a good thing that leads to more settled and happier communities than if the world had always lived with an absence of God. However, this presupposes that God is good (or at least what mankind has done with the construct of God is good). When we look at the term religion are we actually discussing theocracy? In truth theocracies are merely dictatorships with an invisible immortal ruler who cannot be removed and must be obeyed. And therein lies the problem, the God created by man is the ideal tool for anyone wanting to exert political power within a social construct. However, if God created man he compels man to behave in the way dictated by ancient religious text and exerts control through fear. Either way, oh my, what a conundrum!

[RKP5637]

1. It's all about IMO fear, political power, control, authoritarianism and money. It's a useful tool

for suppression and control. ... and big money for some. The Apex of brainwashing the masses.

[gibraltar72]

2. It matters to the extent

that man won't admit that to himself. Religion has always been a way to control people. It used to be a way of controlling society to be somewhat civil. It is now a way to extort. It never ever was what it was claimed to be. People just refuse to think for themselves.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. Amen

(so to speak)

[yallerdawg]

3. A counterpoint from C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

“We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.”

“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature…Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

[Major Nikon]

4. Ah yes, god is unknowable and inconceivable

So let me tell you what I know about the conception of god.

[yallerdawg]

6. Billions of people - or you.

Let me think about it...

[MineralMan]

8. There are also billions of people who believe in no deities at all.

In fact, two-thirds of the planet's population does not believe in the same deity you do.

Let me think about that...

[kwassa]

22. But they believe in a deity. Think about that.

I think you miss the point. IMHO.

[Major Nikon]

11. The irony this argument is also a fallacy is lost on you

The part you did get right is it's funny as hell you'd think this sort of nonsense passes the smell test.

[yallerdawg]

12. Keep trotting that out.

Does it prove that your opinion is more valid than the opinion of billions of others?

Or is it just your way of saying you will broach no argument with YOUR opinion?

[Major Nikon]

13. You are batting 1000 with the fallacies

[marylandblue]

20. Is your argument that billions of people believe just a way to say

you will broach no argument with your own opinion? Does having billions agree with you prove your argument is more valid?

[Mariana]

21. It's really a weird argument to make

because clearly, billions don't agree with him. Far, far more people think he's wrong than think he's right. Even among the Christians, plenty of them are certain he's a heretic and hellbound.

[Voltaire2]

16. We should always evaluate the merits of an argument

by measuring the mass of the advocates for and against the proposition.

This method of truth evaluation does away with all that complicated logic stuff, who needs that anyway? It eliminates problems of evidence and testability by reducing it to just one standard measurement for all cases: your weight. Reason can be abandoned: even the most stunningly stupid and irrational nonsense can be validated by acquiring enough mass.

[Mariana]

18. Billions of people, but not the ancient Greeks

or the modern people who still worship those gods today. You said, "There are no Greek gods."

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1218268526#post89

So, you think some people of faith are following a false religion and are worshiping nonexistent gods.

Billions of people think your religion is false and that your god doesn't exist. Why shouldn't we agree with them?

[WhiteTara]

7. No Mind No Buddha

No Buddha No Mind

[MineralMan]

9. So many deities; So little time...

I think I'll just not believe that any of them are real. That makes the most sense.

[procon]

10. The deception matters.

If man created his own gods, then acknowledging the hoax makes it much harder to exploit others and gain power over them. Once the fraud is conceded, the whole concept of religion and its cast of divine characters collapses under that revelation. What remains is reduced to nothing more than any of the other entertaining fantasies featuring tales of Santa Claus, Leprechauns, or the panoply of Halloween monsters,

On the other hand, the fabled God created man mythology provides the built in pretense of supreme authority to justify and perpetuate the deception of religion while conveniently granting awesome powers to the self proclaimed pitchmen who deceive masses of people for personal advantage.

[Major Nikon]

14. The fraud doesn't really matter so long as someone gets something good out of it, right?

[Voltaire2]

15. There is no purpose to humanity or the universe.

Teleology is a delusion. Religious and political ideologies frequently attempt to impose meaning and purpose where none exists, and the results are generally disastrous.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. The idea of a single deity seems a lot younger than 5,000 years old

Judaism dates from about 1000 BC, and probably wasn't fully monotheistic at the start; the versions of Hinduism then were polytheistic; Zoroastrianism has an uncertain start date, but linguistic clues seem to date it from about 1500 BC at the earliest; and Akhenaten in Egypt was after 1400 BC.

Of course, there could have been monotheistic religions earlier than that which died out without trace.

[Voltaire2]

19. Indeed. And there is no good reason to view

monotheism as somehow superior to other beliefs.

Despite allegations that theistic beliefs are hundreds of thousands of years old, the evidence for organized religious belief systems - “religion” - dates back at most to around 10,000 bce.

Religion is a blip on the human evolutionary timeline.

[kwassa]

23. No, it does not.

[Lordquinton]

24. Yes it does