Religion, religious organization and those belonging to those groups have puzzled me my entire adult life.
When I think or write about religion, I wonder what I could think or say that has not been said before, probably by someone much more intelligent than I.
I also wonder, what percentage of religious people have minds that are solidly fixed in their dogma. Those with fixed minds, either rationalize their doubts, punish themselves for having doubts, or simply ignore any rational arguments about their beliefs. Classically, this is common among fundamentalists and others who believe in creationism and not evolution. For them, "Science is lies from the pits of Hell" End of further argument.
I have heard that certain beliefs, practices and laws come from the Laws of God from the beginning time. Then I shudder.
First of all, using a phrase such as "from the beginning of time" is so grandiose as to engender awe.
But what does it mean? The beginning of time? Doesn't that imply there was a moment before that when there was no time?
We understand time as the progression of events, whether macro or micro. To have time, things must change. How can there have been a God before the beginning of time? Did God exist at absolute zero? Do religious folks imagine God as corporeal or amorphous energy? In either case, just as in the Big Bang theory, to start time, God must have gone from static to active.
What is the religious belief behind that transformation. Why would God decide to just do nothing.?
Actually, if God was even thinking about being active, God would be active already and there would be time. So already one dilemma concerning the beginning of time emerges.
My next thought concerns creation. To create the Earth and Mankind, religions bestow the following attributes to God: omnicognizance, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
If God is all knowing, then he must know everything that will happen from the beginning of time to the end of time. There can be no surprises for God because God is everywhere simultaneously, knowing exactly how everything God decided to create would unfold.
If God is omnipotent, then God could imagine Earth and it's occupants and the sun and the hundreds of billions of galaxies. There would be no need to create any of it.
Could God have been bored? Did he need something, like adoration? Well, if God created man, God wrote the script by which all men would behave. God created the Adoration of God. If some men did not believe in God, he would have known who, why and when, eons before. Why would God ever get angry at any of Man's behaviors, if God as Creator, knew exactly what would happen?
Does God need entertainment? . That would be my guess about why God made Man with free will. God would have to blind himself to all knowing and be surprised by Man's behaviors.
Then, surprised, God would be acting with anger and emotion at the very events which God could have predicted or chose not to predict so that God would be entertained.
If God got so angry that he would annihilate some of his Creation, doesn't it raise the issue that God was not entertained? If God was, God would continue to observe.
My conclusion, and I'm not the first, is that man created the concept of God.
Who wrote the Bible? : many men over a very long period of time and in many languages.
Some of those languages are so archaic, no one knows really what some words and phrases were intended to mean. Instead the so called "words of God" are Man's interpretation of the words of God.
Why the insistence that the Bible is true word of God, when man clearly wrote the words. Man is not perfect. If God really wanted Man to have his Bible, then God could have created IT in its entirety, with rules, laws, aphorisms, poetry and inspiration presented in such a format and in such a way that there would be no question as to its origin.
Why didn't God create us instantly? Why six days? It's more interesting prose.
Out of space in this blog. The beginning.
