Golmer's Blog

Heidi, the problem with the position of theists such as yourself and non-believers that to engage with is the vast gulf between the two paradigms in which we live.

In our estimation (and any Atheists out there who don’t agree feel free to bash me at will), belief in your God of Abraham (or any other gods for that matter) is completely irrational, and is based on a combination of human nature and tens of thousands of years of cultural reenforcement. Your god is seen as just one more in a long line of gods created by man - and created to explain away those things that humanity as a whole could not understand - i.e. ignorance of the natural phenomena in which we live. 

Man’s self-awareness and intelligence (ironically) is the source of the problem with respect to our creation of gods to explain phenomena. Humans knew (or thought we knew) that we are the smartest creatures on the planet (a planet on which isolated enclaves of humanity developed believing that their little portion of the world WAS their entire universe, and therefore believed they were the most intelligent things in that universe by example).

It was logical to early peoples and civilizations, therefore, that if we were the smartest things that there were in our domain, and we could control certain things in our domain (other lesser creatures, fire, damming water, growing crops, hunting, etc.) that it would logically follow that those things we could NOT understand must be caused by an even greater civilization or human-like force that we could not see but nonetheless treated us humans much as we treat creatures lesser than ourselves.

Logically, therefore, that force or forces (lets call them gods) could be petty, malevolent, benevolent, childish, churlish, playful, harsh, kind, friendly, etc., just as people are. They could demand fealty, loyalty, sacrifice, exclusivity, etc. The early gods were “elemental” because man was exposed to the elements primarily - they were affected by sun, earth, moon, wind, earthquakes, storms, water, fire, etc. It is no stretch of the imagination to realize that if the weather was nice and crops were plentiful and you had just sacrificed a goat or something to one of those gods, that they were pleased and gave you boon. It is also no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to realize that they believed if there was a huge storm or a drought that destroyed the crops or made the hunt bad, that they had somehow displeased their benefactors and were (as we would punish our lesser creatures and human peons) punishing them for misbehaving. 

This developed over thousands of years and was incorporated into the human psyche for thousands of years. And, just as human culture developed and stopped being as affected by elemental forces (we built better shelters, gained better control of fire, built boats to tame the oceans, learned about tides, years, moon cycles, seasons, etc.), the elemental gods eventually evolved and/or went by the wayside just as human culture (and intelligence) advanced. Elemental gods gave way to more human-like gods that could certainly control the elements, but behaved and were given the attributes OF people, even though they be petty and squabbling just like us. 

Thus was born gods such as you see in the pantheons - designed basically on the aristocracy of whatever civilization thought them up (to varying degrees) - including a leader and lesser elite gods that controlled various aspects of human life from on-high like love, the hunt, fire, the sun, jealousy, etc. They behaved like an aristocracy too - competing with each other, pitting their demigod, human, animal, fantastic imaginative creatures, etc. against each other, demanding sacrifices and meting out punishments and rewards to their subjects as they saw fit.

In essence, gods mirrored people because people created gods to mirror their growing cultures and civilizations. This played out over different cultures and in different ways (Indians had their own, as did the Norse, American Indians, Africans, etc.), but is relatively consistent because of the way people think.

This is no different than the concept that eventually became the God of Abraham. The culture that created the God of Abraham and the model of Jesus the Messiah (and the 250 or so messianic figures that preceded him in history) for it (and even the terminology used to describe the adherents thereof) directly models that culture. God is a father figure (culled most likely from the pantheon by doing away with the squabbling family and going straight to the father figure Zeus). This god still demands exclusivity, still is petty and demanding, benevolent when served correctly, etc., but is nonetheless a construct of the peoples that created him - sheep-herder-hunter-gatherers. The book that describes the religion is a reflection of the creators of the work - bronze-age relatively ignorant sheep herders. The ignorance of the natural world isn’t their fault - they simply didn’t have the will or the knowledge or the capacity to think about that which they were writing - they simply continued the tradition of ascribing human-like qualities to natural phenomena and equating all of that to Gods. 

The members aren’t supposed to really think - they are supposed to adore, to flock, to gather and belong, to swear fealty to their father figure and his shepherd. They are to be treated as subjects of this man-made construct - a construct that grew out of countless millennia of ascribing the unknown and the unknowable to an anthropomorphic being instead of just ascribing it (correctly) to as-yet untested natural phenomena. The god created by these sheep herders is truly a father figure, but if you read closely enough he is also a supreme commander of an army of angels - a militaristic structure modeled on the Roman culture also of the time - and he is a jealous, petty, loving, etc. god whom demands nothing less than total dedication and loyalty as any commander-father figure would.

Thus we come to the difference in paradigms, and why you will never, it seems, get to where we are unless you are willing to actually question yours. We have questioned ours and yours, and we find yours to be completely illogical, irrational, and unreasonable.

Our paradigm is simple. We see YOUR god as just one more aspect of a long multi-millenial line of god-evolution that came before it. We see absolutely zero more credibility or reason to believe YOUR god exists than to believe any of the other gods that mankind came up with before him exist either. We see zero reason why YOUR god isn’t the last vestiges of humanity’s inculcated and indoctrinated ignorance into a system designed to repress or negate the need for any deep thought about such issues. 

We see YOUR god and all of the others as merely artifacts of our ignorance to natural phenomena. We don’t question why hurricanes form, or why prayer doesn’t work, or why sacrifice doesn’t (and never did) work. We don’t question why earthquakes happen and attribute them to some godly benefactor being pissed at us, because we know about plate tectonics. We KNOW fire rains from the sky because really big rocks pass through our atmosphere and smack into the planet. We KNOW tsunamis happen when plates shift or when rock cleaves off into the ocean from a cliff. We KNOW that humans are descended through millions of years of evolutionary processes, and that when we die, just like every other creature on the planet, we die. We KNOW the earth isn’t the center of the universe, and, instead is merely one chunk of rock orbiting one average sun that is just one of hundreds of trillions of others. We KNOW our observable universe came from an expanding singularity that formed about 15 billion years ago.

And we KNOW that we don’t know why, but we are perfectly willing to try to find out. What we are NOT willing to do, is continue thousands of generations of willful ignorance in attributing those unknown (as of yet) natural phenomena to the actions of humanity personified onto the unknown.

Your god shrinks every single time something unknown becomes known, just as every other god has shrunken and become discarded as humanity’s knowledge has grown. Your god will eventually be discarded just as all others have. It is the next logical leap of humanity - to let go - and see that what we are is what we are and what we have is all we have.