[Philosophy] El Niño

[Tom Paine]

Author: rez
Original Thread: El Niño

What i hope to achieve with this post is a look at God's human side. I for one cannot accept the idea of a perfect being and applying simple common sense to the idea of God reveals certain possibilities involving his psyche.

Most obviously the first criticism i shall recieve is that i cannot know the mind of God. Secondly that i cannot apply human principles to God.

I say to you, how is it that you know the mind of God when you praise him and preach about him?

I say to you how can you apply the human principles of love, anger and disappointment to God?

So allow me if you will to examine God just as any other creature in this world. I will take a look at scripture to analyse God's actions but it is just as simple to say that those scriptures were analogies or educational stories. however there are many who believe the holy scriptures are all the word of God and my arguments mainly apply to them. For the more progressive Christianity is far more admirable in my eyes.

First off let us look at God's situation prior to his involvement with creation.

We have a supposedly all powerful being placed in a world where it has absolutely NO restrictions, boundaries or role models. It has limitless power and no one to instruct it on the responsibilities of such power. Imagine if you will an isolated child unable to consider the wants and needs of others because the child was never taught how to behave or act. This is how any creature develops when given anything it wants and never rebuked for selfish behaviour. In my little world i see no reason for this not to apply to God.

God has never had a role model or a discipline enforced upon him. The way we become mature adults is to realise we have to work to get what we want and consider others. God has to consider no one and he must work for nothing. As such i see no way for his psyche to ever mature beyond an isolated/spoiled child.

Evidence for this is in God's first few recorded acts. Consider the angels. When considering the Angels the first thing that strikes me is - What purpose do the Angels serve?

The only concievable purpose that God created them for was the sole function of praising him. An entire race created in abject servitude to a supposedly benevolent God? There is absolutely no free will concept for the idea of Angels. They were created simply to sing constantly about how wonderful god is. This is the behaviour of an ego centric megalomaniacal despot. The creature appears to have developed exactly along the lines i would have predicted and exhibited not only the inflated ego i would expect but also we can compare the angels to a child playing with dolls. The dolls serve no purpose other than amusing the one using them. The angels do not appear to benefit from their existence other than the fact that they exist. But an existence of eternal slavery, perhaps one could argue punctuated by the joy of god's love. But i do not see the love of a father nurturing them. I see Megalomania on a cosmic scale.

The second point about God's first creation we know of follows along the lines of love. If there is one universal attribute that all creatures share it is the desire to love and be loved. From a base animal instinct to mate, up to the idea of the peacock showing off in a bid for attention, up to the final ideal of humans desperately falling over themselves to catch the eye of their beloved - we all want to be loved.

From the works that God has the Angels perform i would suggest that God has seemingly succumbed to this desire to be loved. Yet because this immature God grew up in his unrestricted environment he has merely acted in the most self gratifying way. To create a race specifically to love him and tell him how great he is. Again this is the sort of behaviour one would predict of an all powerful being created in an entirely unrestricted environment.

However, it appears God was ethier not as good as he thought with his creation powers, or far better than he thought because some Angels, notably Lucifer appear to have stumbled across free will. And who can blame them? Given the choice of eternal servitude or eternal damnation it would take a man of strong character to stand up for his right to freedom. It appears Lucifer would not tolerate the tyranny of god's hegemony and revolted. These are the things that are evident to us.

1. God creates angels to serve/praise him forever

2. Some angels revolt.

from these premises what can YOU deduce? Do you see the Angels revolting as evil? personally i see no evil in a desire for free will. Yet as God inevitably wins the conflict and damns the uprising the obvious course of action would be propaganda. Its exactly what any being would have done, we all convince ourselves the ones we fight are in the wrong, the very immature convince themselves that their enemies are EVIL. And so we get Satan as the leader of the resistance branded an enemy of the state (Universe) and political dissidents are imprisoned in hell to be tortured for eternity.

These are the actions of an oppresive tyrant - the logical follow on from a life of power and freedom to exercise it. i would point out Udai Hussein as a good example of how this behaviour can develop.

However this is where it gets interesting, God now shows a vast leap in his intellectual capabilities. He decides to create a race which does not fully depend on him. It seems that God has realised in the wake of the Satanic rebellion that forced love is not love at all. He wants to be loved for who he is, not just because he is omnipotent. This is a fair view to take. So he creates a new race that has the choice to do what they like, but God of course reveals himself to Adam so that he may bask in the glow of this new and improved love. God of course instructs Adam as to how he should live because God know best right? The interesting thing is how God wishes them to stay away from the tree of knowledge. Keeping the new race unintelligent will greatly reduce the chances of them rejecting God as they will just accept the glory of what he has done for them and the beauty of Eden.

However, Lucifer makes his second move against God. Lucifer appears to see God's new creation and notice it is another brand of slavery. Lucifer's next move is to attempt to save the human race! What would we be without Lucifer? we would make a miserable existence of pointless praise and stifled creativity in a primitive environment. Sure the environment would be a veritable paradise, but our minds would be barren wastelands of oppressed and fruitless thought.

Lucifer gave us freedom! Whilst we may have lost the garden our minds were now far more important than mere lush surroundings. And again God is trumped by the plucky freedom fighter so again Lucifer gets the title of prince of darkness. He must be avoided at all costs! A terrorist and a threat to our way of life!

Now the following points are assuming that God does not merely give up and leave us to our devices. Which is fairly easy to argue, another day though.

God now makes another intellectual leap forwards. Since humanity now has the power of free thought God has to create an environment in which we will believe in God even though our spanking new minds can work around simple awe.

God creates an environment in which belief in God is needed. God firstly uses fear as his main tactic. However the main work for creating the belief worthy environment is done by humanity. War, theft, death disease and general strife are natural occurunces amongst us and the idea of a father protecting us is rather comforting. God plays off this rather well, whilst taking al the credit for the good that occurs he manages to take the credit for the bad by suggesting that everything bad that happens is down to the people disobeying God. This tnet appears to have spread world wide in the first instances. Most early cultures behaved in the same way - from offering sacrifices to reading omens and even prayer all show humanity appealing to God's ego to lighten the load of life.

This tactic is incredibly prevalent for the next few thousand years and had i the time i would go through these years in detail (I would expect this soonish). However God again appears to realise that his system of fear not only is completely unfulfilling in feeling loved, but its going so far off the path he had originally intended it to.

Now we have his patron people the Jews practicing a religion that has several hundred commandments based entirely around near pointless laws to follow certain interpretations of scripture to the right letter. However this would appear to be an incredibly zealous way to show love for god, unfortunately where it once was we see God taking second place to the law. I do not believe God loves the idea of second place. The new testament gospels are quite clear in indicating that the Jews of the time were so devoted to the law that they had lost sight of the two simple commandments (love god, love your neighbour). Jesus appears to have been instructed to remedy this.

The complexities of the idea of Jesus are an entirely new idea that i will probably end up considering another time. But for now they are so huge they would eclipse the rest of the essay.

Suffice to say Jesus came to restore focus onto God rather than the law and keep God on top. After this God appears to take a much more laissez faire attitude towards his creation. Instead of fear he uses the sacrifice of Jesus as a lure to his utter benevolence towards humanity. Now people will essentially love God because they truly think he is great rather than any of the previous faulty systems of fear or oppression. And on the whole God achieves the love he desired.

However one thing i most certainly will mention is the punishment for those who do not love him. Either you devote yourself to god or you suffer for all eternity. Whether you believe in the hard line idea of hell of the liberal and rather unfounded idea of levels of heaven the same principle applies.

If you do not love god you will be punished for eternity - i see only more megalomania in this. Fair enough the evil men can be punished, but Atheists and agnostics as well? Megalomania.

I don't have time to go into more detail as im about to go out so i will continue these thoughts at a later date. it should be mention that this is just one thought of MANY in my head. Also i could quite easily believe in this God but i cannot love him. Neither am i a Satanist.