The (ir)relevance of God

The idea of Godly power is very appealing. If I had that power, then I would change this or that. The beauty of this exercise is that we learn exactly what we believe

• God is,
• what is right to do,
• and thus how God should and should not interact with the world

We live in a (mortal) body with limited knowledge and power. We tend to define God as free from these limitations: we see God’s nature therefor as something like an immortal and immaterial mind with unlimited power and unlimited knowledge.

The result of our answer what is right to do, is probably a reflex for repair and prevention for suffering, war, destruction, sickness, poverty, etc. We will on the other hand provide life on earth with a decent level of happiness and welfare.

When talking about what God should do, we talk about the relevance of God. In fact, we see God as highly relevant if we consider our answer how God should and should not interact with the world. The only question is, why does God not act according to our thinking?

The only answer is that we use our projections from a mortal body (with limited knowledge and power) about God, and what is right and wrong. Projecting the elimination of our limitations to God, in combination with our idea about what is right and wrong, is as human as ungodly: during this exercise have we not escaped our human nature, nor have we entered God’s nature (and even if we have, we don’t know that we have, leaving our thoughts as arbitrary as our neighbors).

So if we are angry why God does not act according our wishes or with the world as it is, we are angry about our own ideas and projections. Like a child playing with plastic toys being angry that one plastic toy does not like the other.

So we are back at some fundamental questions:

1. Who or what is God?
2. What is right and wrong?
3. How should God and how should God not interact with the world?

By now we know that we actually can verify our own ideas about God with the observable reality. If the world does not work as we think how God should interact with the world, our ideas about God are probably wrong. For instance, if God should prevent poverty from happening, but a quarter of the world suffers from hunger, our idea about God being almighty might be wrong, or our idea about poverty as a bad thing is wrong, or God being good is wrong, etc.

The only possibility we have to make sense of this world and to make sense of God, is to find a story that explains why the world is as it is in combination with who God is and why God interacts with the world as we observe the world works.

The good news is that we have limited options when we get to the evaluation of the existing stories. In What are the religions main differences? the options are evaluated. Remarkable is that every religion speaks of liberation or salvation with regard to the human soul, rather than repair and prevention from suffering in combination with a life of decent quality.