A more natural and logical conception of God

When people lose faith in themselves, they are left with putting their faith in God. The Abrahamic faiths represent three different routes to the same deity.

If you are Christian and feeling exploited by Jews and invaded by Muslims, you would feel that you are left with Islam if you want to remain a gentile. Islam is "Judaism Lite" and Secular Koranism is "Islam Lite".

Also, if your faith depended on your capacity to believe that an executed revolutionary is the co-equal of the supreme and eternal Abrahamic God, it would weaken first compared to the one who believes that because there was a Creation, there must have been a Creator and that Creator was the Abrahamic God who created a logical universe whose written instructions to mankind are contained in the Koran.

As my Consort Church of Entropy said, a religion is easier to believe if it requires less suspension of disbelief.  She claims her Entropism is easier to believe because she equates God to the Universe. Her reasoning is that because the Universe obviously exists, so does God. However, all she has done is the equivalent of pointing to box of frogs in her room and saying "That box of frogs is God" and then claiming "I have pointed at God." This is of course pure sophistry and sleight of hand.

Having accepted the attributes of the Abrahamic God and His narrative, we would naturally be awed by this divine concept, particularly if it were the mere invention and imagination of a mortal man called Abraham. The story of Pygmalion is that  Aphrodite answered his prayer by bringing to life the sculpture of the beautiful woman Pygmalion himself sculpted and yearned to marry.

If this was indeed how the Abrahamic God was created, then God is indeed greater than His Creation (who conceived of Him and conjured Him into existence by an act of imagination).

We don't literally need to believe in God. All that is necessary is that we consider the possibility that God might exist according to the Abrahamic narrative, and then consider the possibility that He might protect us and our society, nation and civilisation if we obeyed His laws. This is so low-maintenance that an agnostic such as myself naturally slips into this mode of thinking, which is now my default position. The high-maintenance belief of being Christian requiring the affirmation by the Christian concerned that an executed revolutionary is the co-equal of the Abrahamic God can thus be rationally and readily abandoned because of its patent absurdity and idolatry in favour of a more natural, logical and non-idolatrous conception of the Abrahamic God.

Man's Greatest Achievement is the Creation of God

The only thing that distinguishes Man from lower animals is our ability to reason better than they how best to obtain pleasure and avoid pain in the long term. It was after all Man who created God and the institution of marriage. That must be Man's greatest achievement of all time.

God was created through an act of thinking, when Man conceived of a being that is unique, omnipotent and omniscient - a supreme being.

Having created God in his mind, by an act of thinking, Man simply started behaving as if God existed, Pygmalion-like, in just the same way a troubled child is encouraged by a child psychologist to have an imaginary friend.  That was how God came into existence.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_friend

Lust is a deadly sin when we have extra-marital sex, yet is instantly converted into something good and godly if we are married.   It has all the mysteries of transubstantiation yet can be explained quite simply.


If you are a woman, it is much easier to get a man to have sex with you than it is to get him to marry you.


Woman, do not take the easy way out and misuse the sexual instinct to prove - exactly what?  That a man will have sex with you because you are not smelly, old, repulsive or diseased?


Let us therefore use this instrument of good government that is God to obtain pleasure and avoid pain in the long term.   

Most of us are not saints and philosophers and do not care about the long term if the short term beckons with promises of pleasure.  Most of us are therefore like lower animals, and will not change our behaviour except through fear and pain.  Only a general belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God will make these lower human beings do the right thing therefore.  God is after all cheaper than CCTV and less intrusive than thoughtcrime laws.

Let us have the humility once again to pick up this much-used and much-abused Instrument of Good Government and vow to try harder and do better this time.

Liberals have their own priesthood too, do they not?  They have their own - dread word - theocracy, ie their  people who have the power to initiate, pass and enforce laws and also start wars that kill and torture people for unfair, irrational and unkind reasons.

Liberals believe in Free Love which would lead to a matriarchy, ie a society that condones female promiscuity.   Female promiscuity is logically, biologically and inevitably the facilitator of male promiscuity.

Anti-liberals (who believe that God serves the purpose of assisting us in our government, morality and spirituality) believe that a patriarchy which condones male promiscuity is the lesser evil, and those in charge of the ship of state always have a duty to choose the lesser evil in the long term.

The reason they do not is because our political system and political establishment is now infected by matriarchal dementia.

If the matriarchal dementia we are now suffering from is terminal and irreversible then the patient should at least know what he is dying of. 

An Atheist's Theory of Prophets and Religion

JUDAISM TRIBAL AND RACE-BASED
Jews regard themselves as the Chosen People of God and Judaism is basically tribal. Jesus, a Rabbi, saw that it would benefit mankind to spread the benefits of monotheism to gentiles. Understandably, many Jews objected to this, probably because they felt it diluted or cheapened their religion.

"MY DAD IS GOD SO YOU BETTER LISTEN TO ME!"
To make his message more persuasive, Jesus claimed divinity. For this blasphemy he was crucified. But it was not that unusual to claim divinity. After all, Roman and Chinese emperors were worshipped as deities and so were Egyptian Pharoahs. A modified form of this was the divine right of kings, practised in more recent history by European monarchs.

THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY TRINITY SOLVED
[It has been said that if you can explain it you are a heretic.]

Christians have never convincingly explained the mystery of Holy Trinity. The only way it could be convincingly explained is through a non-religious context of psychology, mythology and propaganda. It is the device through which Christ's message is made more appealing and more powerful. It also serves as his vehicle to divinity. (You see, it is not enough to portray Christ as a man who just died for his principles. People need more than this to want to accept his message. A man who died for all our sins is infinitely more appealing than one who has died for just his own principles.)

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is this: it "explains" and "proves" that Christ is divine. To enquire further is to commit heresy. In the olden days, you could be burnt at the stake for this.

A LIGHTER BUT MORE POWERFUL FORM OF MONOTHEISM - ISLAM
Muhammad's lighter and more powerful version of monotheism consisted of claiming divinity only for the Koran which Muhammad "revealed" or "recited" in his liftime when his followers needed the guidance of God in difficult and confusing times.

MUHAMMAD THE TECHNOCRAT?
The fact that it was taken down from one source and later standardised would at least make lawyers of those who could read and had to interpret the Koran. In the meantime it encouraged literacy, for that was necessary to receive the full benefit of the Koran - to read it for oneself. Islam does not require you to believe in the impossible and improbable, ie that Jesus is Son of God.

LOWER ENTRY REQUIREMENTS OF ISLAM
Through the Koran, fairly common-sensical teachings had the stamp of divinity. Conversion to Islam was easier, because it has lower "entry requirements" than Judaism and is not caught up in incoherent and mysterious trinitarianism - a theoretical device which "explains" the divnity of Christ. Disputes on interpretation could be resolved by referring to a form of words in a particular chapter and verse that is at least undisputed.

Not perfect, but better than before. Not perfect, but still progress!

FAITH AND REASON
While Jesus emphasised Faith (as he must necessarily have done to move it away from the then wholly ethnic basis of Judaism), Muhammad emphasised Reason, and the Tools of Reason: reading, writing, reference, authority and jurisprudence.

PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF MONOTHEIST RELIGIONS
Muhammad could not have developed Islam without first examining the life of Jesus and the form Christianity was taking in Muhammaden times.

Schism was and is the most noticeable characteristic of Christianity. Muhammad must have seen the effect of the disputes amongst Christians over the Holy Trinity - an incoherent theory that would have us accept that One is Three and Three is One (or "one for all, and all for one", like the Three Musketeers!). He cut the Gordian knot by denying its validity in the Koran, saying that Christ was just another mortal prophet with no divine attributes, just like Abraham, Moses, and himself of course!

AN OMNIPOTENT AND MORAL GOD
Christ certainly would not have been able to spread the benefits of a monotheist God, if Abraham had not conceived of it first. If not for Abraham, Moses would have had no single god to which to ascribe moral attributes with his Ten Commandments.

A SCIENCE OF RELIGION?
It can be seen therefore that there is a progressive nature to the monotheist religions. Islam was built on the foundations of Christianity and Christianity built on that of Judaism.

Subsequent prophets sought to improve and add to the teachings of previous ones, and this theory can only be grasped in a non-religious context. The same analogy applies to Hinduism and Buddhism.

THE PROBABLE ATHEISM OF ALL THE PROPHETS
Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that none of the prophets in fact believed in God. They merely had the wisdom to use this innate desire of all those who wished to believe in a loving and omnipotent God to make the world a better place. Ascribing to it moral attributes to the most powerful entity Man could imagine and describe - All-Powerful and All-Wise, Benovelent and Merciful - could perhaps indirectly encourage some of us to understand and indeed take on the attributes of God, ie to become stronger, wiser, kinder and be more forgiving.

To love God is to know God, to know God is to become one with Him.

The supreme irony of this is of course that most of what humanity worships was and is in fact man-made!

PYGMALION
The story of Pygmalion illustrates this beautifully. Pgymalion was a sculptor of extraordinary talent. He sculpted a woman so beautiful he fell in love with her/it. He loved it/her so much that it/she became real, for when he behaved as if she was real, she was real. That is precisely what Man has done with God throughout the ages.

The power of imagination, eh?