There's an interesting question that doesn't get asked very often and that I find is extremely important for how rarely it is touched upon. People ask each other 'Do you believe in God?' or make broad sweeping statements about the intentions of God. On the opposite side, there are outright denials of the possibility of God either within a religious context or even in a more practical sense of comforting oneself and finding purpose for life.
It should be noted, I am not an agnostic and would be offended if someone called me agnostic. I am non-religious. This isn't to say I deny the existence of God or the possibility of a God. I choose not to worship such a being if it did exist. There IS a difference between atheist and non-religious. I make no assertion that God doesn't exist. I can't afford to.
The most important question a person can ask themselves before going after ideas like 'Worship' and 'belief' is 'What Is A God?'. There are a ton of obvious answers. God is the Creator. God created everything. God is the protector. God nurtures. God is the guardian of the afterlife. God is the giver of purpose.
From a purely anthropological standpoint, gods often act as a caricature of human traits. The pantheistic gods are great examples of this. Gods like Dionysus (who represents the part of a human being that wants to party like mad) or Zeus (the leader, whose incidentally a giant horn-ball) represent parts of mankind.
In the case of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim God (Yaweh, Jehovah, Allah), He is a logical conclusion of nearly every human impulse. A person (every person) has the desire to create. So God created everything from every blade of grass to every tree. A person has a desire for revenge so when slighted, God lays waste the world. A person has a desire for peace and to live, so there is an afterlife with absolute peace and joy. A person wants to see other people punished when they do wrong, so there's a Hell that every bad thing people do is punished in.
These traits are all traceable to our most basic impulses. Equally, to look at the idea of a God based just on the traits that human beings give it and say 'That doesn't exist' would be to miss a HUGE swath of the possible realities of a creator being.
Niel De'Grass Tyson is often fond of making a comparison. He says that chimpanzees share 99% of their genetic material with us. So what makes us different must be in that single percent. What makes us intelligent and artful and clever must be in those few billion strands of genetic information. A being that is maybe one genetic percent more intelligent than we might be so vastly superior that we'd be all but unable to communicate with them.
Would we call a being like that a 'god'? Possibly.
Now, a large part of gods involves the use of 'magic'. To define a god we must define what they do and how they do it. In people, we require an exploratory period between having an idea and actually making something happen. You say, "I need a ramp to get up to my house" and you look around for a bit, find a few two by fours, and set them on an incline and have yourself a ramp. As we get more technologically advanced, we slowly shorten the length of the exploratory period.
Starting off, we'd have to hone out a stone axe then cut down a tree, cut the branches off, chop at it for a few weeks and pray we managed to get it the right shape for what we need. These days, we've got a circular saw. We've shortened the period of time it takes us to accomplish something in our heads from a few days to an hour.
Magic is the direct realization of the will, outside of cause and effect and without the need for an exploratory period to see how cause and effect might achieve a desired outcome. You want the ramp there, you will it, and it becomes real and perfectly what you need. That's magic. That is also God. God is a being with no exploratory period between Will and realization of whatever it is he wants to do.
Now, lets look at this from another standpoint. If we are to see God as miraculous (which is to say, vast, unfathomable, and capable of immense creation) then we can look to things like the internet and say 'This is a god'. Of course, the Internet isn't a god. Not yet. It might be, for some of us, very nearly god-like but for anyone who knows it's operation it is explicable.
To make something worthy of worship it must be (in the minds of most) inexplicable. If you know how it works, there's no particular point in investing yourself emotionally in it outside of a feeling of proprietorship. You're certainly not going to look at a Jaguar XJ and say 'That's a god'. Yeah, it might be brilliant and fast...but you break it apart and you can explain the function of each part. By their very nature, a god cannot be explained in this fashion.
One might think from what I'm saying that defining a god would be impossible without also denying one's existence. Bare with me a bit longer.
If we are willing to put aside that God must be entirely inexplicable then we can begin to develop the idea that scientific understanding (the shortening of the period between observation and making use or having influence over some part of the world around you) and belief (taking comfort, security, and stability from the existence of something) are not necessarily opposites.
There is a significant movement to maintain ignorance of the world to make it seem more miraculous (and hence to make it seem as though God is manifesting more frequently in the lives of people each day). This is a purely self serving push coming primarily from those who stand to benefit from manipulating people into belief, rather than exploration.
We don't take comfort from an understanding of atomic physics (in general) because our understanding is imperfect. However, if you understand how a lightswitch is wired and when you flip it on there is light which keeps away burglars, you can take comfort in that. If you get electricity from nuclear power, you take a comfort (by extension) in the nuclear power. However, you aren't required to personally understand it to take comfort in it. Understanding IS possible though. If we start from the mindset that God can be understood, we can explore while also taking comfort in the benefits of having gods.
There are known health and emotional benefits to having positive (non-abusive) relationships with a god.
(to be continued. Tired kitty is tired. Give me your thoughts on what I've got so far!)
It should be noted, I am not an agnostic and would be offended if someone called me agnostic. I am non-religious. This isn't to say I deny the existence of God or the possibility of a God. I choose not to worship such a being if it did exist. There IS a difference between atheist and non-religious. I make no assertion that God doesn't exist. I can't afford to.
The most important question a person can ask themselves before going after ideas like 'Worship' and 'belief' is 'What Is A God?'. There are a ton of obvious answers. God is the Creator. God created everything. God is the protector. God nurtures. God is the guardian of the afterlife. God is the giver of purpose.
From a purely anthropological standpoint, gods often act as a caricature of human traits. The pantheistic gods are great examples of this. Gods like Dionysus (who represents the part of a human being that wants to party like mad) or Zeus (the leader, whose incidentally a giant horn-ball) represent parts of mankind.
In the case of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim God (Yaweh, Jehovah, Allah), He is a logical conclusion of nearly every human impulse. A person (every person) has the desire to create. So God created everything from every blade of grass to every tree. A person has a desire for revenge so when slighted, God lays waste the world. A person has a desire for peace and to live, so there is an afterlife with absolute peace and joy. A person wants to see other people punished when they do wrong, so there's a Hell that every bad thing people do is punished in.
These traits are all traceable to our most basic impulses. Equally, to look at the idea of a God based just on the traits that human beings give it and say 'That doesn't exist' would be to miss a HUGE swath of the possible realities of a creator being.
Niel De'Grass Tyson is often fond of making a comparison. He says that chimpanzees share 99% of their genetic material with us. So what makes us different must be in that single percent. What makes us intelligent and artful and clever must be in those few billion strands of genetic information. A being that is maybe one genetic percent more intelligent than we might be so vastly superior that we'd be all but unable to communicate with them.
Would we call a being like that a 'god'? Possibly.
Now, a large part of gods involves the use of 'magic'. To define a god we must define what they do and how they do it. In people, we require an exploratory period between having an idea and actually making something happen. You say, "I need a ramp to get up to my house" and you look around for a bit, find a few two by fours, and set them on an incline and have yourself a ramp. As we get more technologically advanced, we slowly shorten the length of the exploratory period.
Starting off, we'd have to hone out a stone axe then cut down a tree, cut the branches off, chop at it for a few weeks and pray we managed to get it the right shape for what we need. These days, we've got a circular saw. We've shortened the period of time it takes us to accomplish something in our heads from a few days to an hour.
Magic is the direct realization of the will, outside of cause and effect and without the need for an exploratory period to see how cause and effect might achieve a desired outcome. You want the ramp there, you will it, and it becomes real and perfectly what you need. That's magic. That is also God. God is a being with no exploratory period between Will and realization of whatever it is he wants to do.
Now, lets look at this from another standpoint. If we are to see God as miraculous (which is to say, vast, unfathomable, and capable of immense creation) then we can look to things like the internet and say 'This is a god'. Of course, the Internet isn't a god. Not yet. It might be, for some of us, very nearly god-like but for anyone who knows it's operation it is explicable.
To make something worthy of worship it must be (in the minds of most) inexplicable. If you know how it works, there's no particular point in investing yourself emotionally in it outside of a feeling of proprietorship. You're certainly not going to look at a Jaguar XJ and say 'That's a god'. Yeah, it might be brilliant and fast...but you break it apart and you can explain the function of each part. By their very nature, a god cannot be explained in this fashion.
One might think from what I'm saying that defining a god would be impossible without also denying one's existence. Bare with me a bit longer.
If we are willing to put aside that God must be entirely inexplicable then we can begin to develop the idea that scientific understanding (the shortening of the period between observation and making use or having influence over some part of the world around you) and belief (taking comfort, security, and stability from the existence of something) are not necessarily opposites.
There is a significant movement to maintain ignorance of the world to make it seem more miraculous (and hence to make it seem as though God is manifesting more frequently in the lives of people each day). This is a purely self serving push coming primarily from those who stand to benefit from manipulating people into belief, rather than exploration.
We don't take comfort from an understanding of atomic physics (in general) because our understanding is imperfect. However, if you understand how a lightswitch is wired and when you flip it on there is light which keeps away burglars, you can take comfort in that. If you get electricity from nuclear power, you take a comfort (by extension) in the nuclear power. However, you aren't required to personally understand it to take comfort in it. Understanding IS possible though. If we start from the mindset that God can be understood, we can explore while also taking comfort in the benefits of having gods.
There are known health and emotional benefits to having positive (non-abusive) relationships with a god.
(to be continued. Tired kitty is tired. Give me your thoughts on what I've got so far!)
