Why is there a God?
Why did humanity even create god? This is not a rational post, this is purely speculative. I just thought I’d get that out of the way before you waste your time if you were looking for something solid. I will cite and reference some things, but they are not good references. Again, if you’re looking for something useful in anything other than philosophy, don’t waste your time here.
Early in humanity, we asked questions, probably because wanted to know how to avoid things we didn’t like. When you know that fire hurts, you can avoid getting hurt… at least by fire. So what happened when we didn’t know the answer to things? Apparently we just started making shit up. The earlier religions were based around multiple gods, a god for wind, fire, storms… a god for pretty much everything, eventually even a god for the gods.
So what is the point of this speculation? I think that gods filled the void of the unknown in order to focus on more important things… I mean that knowing how lightning works isn’t that useful to people that need to hunt mammoths for food, however knowing that lightning comes from clouds could be a useful way to avoid getting killed by lightning.
Nowadays god is useless. We don’t need a god to explain the need for morality because we can conceptualize, understand and enforce it ourselves. We don’t need a god to explain nature because we have science. So what do we need a god for? Death. That scary word that almost everyone is afraid of. We have a short existence and most of us don’t want it to end. But believing that we exist for eternity does little to benefit anyone.
Fear of eternal punishment doesn’t stop people from doing bad things and hope for eternal rewards doesn’t make people do good things. So why do we still bring up god as an answer?
April 26th, 201010:37 am at
You’re asking some really good questions.
I’ve actually written an entire book on this topic–Hell? No! Why You Can Be Certain There’s No Such Place As Hell, (for anyone interested, you can get a free ecopy of Did Jesus Believe in Hell?, one of the most compelling chapters in my book at http://www.thereisnohell.com), but if I may, I’d like to add one more point from it to compliment yours–that the fear of Hell is not only ineffective to stop wrong doing, but actually retards morality!
What happens to those who never get past the point that the reason to refrain from doing evil is because “Someone is watching” is that the second they “forget” God is watching or have a lapse in belief that he’s going to punish them, or if they believe since He has saved them so it doesn’t matter what they do, they never grow up, morally speaking! Never do they get the concept that doing good and not doing bad is actually in THEIR best interest IN THIS LIFE! Moral maturity is a realization that, be agreeing to some reasonable limits on what we can do, such as, “I’m not taking the property of others,” then you don’t have to worry, “Others might try to take my property!” But the person who only sees right and wrong in terms of what bad things might happen if s/he gets caught, is very likely to do those bad things the second they think they can get away with it! Never do they INTERNALIZE morality, since their elementary version of it relies solely on an EXTERNAL THREAT.