Who can personify the ultimate? Be wary of those who claim the authority to describe it as such…
Because god is a delusion used as a means of social control and as an excuse for violence.
I was raised Hindu and omg this is so evident. Dharma and karma are essential in the faith. Dharma outlines your roles and responsibilities in life. Basically, you’re born poor because of your past karma. You deserve to be poor. So don’t overstep your boundaries and stay in your lane. And let the rich and powerful walk all over you because they are more deserving.
If god is Jewish what did he use to circumcise himself?
Because we apply human traits to God, and because being emotionless doesn’t necessarily indicate being higher than someone else.
In most traditions, God is incomprehensible to humans. Polytheistic religions break God down into multiple Gods or Goddesses with different characteristics, which is how they explain all of the events assigned to God. Lightning happens because of Zeus, etc.
For religions that don’t break God down into different aspects, it’s one of those things that kinda justifies itself. Bad things are happening so God is mad, if God is mad he has to have a good reason because he’s omnipotent. That’s where the faith part comes in.
Abrahamic religions especially have a father/child or teacher/student dynamic between God and humans. A major negative of the Fall of Man was that we had separated ourselves from God and could no longer could wander the Garden of Eden.
The implication is that God knows more than us, and to have faith that he acts for the good of humanity even if we don’t understand in our limited knowledge.
We like to think God cares about us.
God has emotions because it is created in man’s image. It’s pure projection sold through propaganda to keep the weak, scared, and stupid under the thumb of the kind of men who wish to rule.
It’s a perfect cover to call people cynics for simply revealing the poor situation we find ourselves in. The denial will never end. This was one of the best sentences I’ve read in a while. Very succinct, thanks.
Less cynically, I believe the argument in scripture is the inverse. Man was created in god’s image therefore we probably inherited a lot of properties of the devine.
So first, asking religious questions on the Fediverse is a fool’s errand, but that aside: Why not? Hell, if anything it’d be the other way around: An all-powerful being without emotion wouldn’t create anything, because they wouldn’t gain anything from doing so. Any creation by an omnipotent being would have to be an emotional affair.
asking religious questions on the Fediverse is a fool’s errand
Why? Because believers don’t like the answers?
Maybe it was boredom. I mean, when effortlessly power everything sometimes you just need a break.
Boredom is an emotion. As is hunger.
Because it’s nonsense created by humans. Humans came up with these stories, of course they anthropomorphized their deity.
As much as I agree with the premise, I think you kid yourself when you don’t look at the power structure. While in the earliest of times you could definitely blame the entire race, I’d rather concentrate on the current situation.
Aren’t we as humans proving every year that goes by, that no matter how much power and knowledge you amass, you can still be an evil, childish, asshole? God is just a little further along that dotted line. He’s got all the power and knowledge. This doesn’t make him mature or good.
Starts with:
“Not to get into a debate.”Continues with:
" If God is so omnipotent"…🤪
Well, that’s what a rhetorical question is. You’re making a statement, not a query, but the best way to couch your statement happens to be with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure this is the best example of one, but at least they made an attempt to label it as such.
There is no god.
not what was asked
But it is a possible solution to the postulated contradiction and thereby a valid answer.
There is no god so it doesn’t have feelings. Our fictional stories about god project human things like feelings onto that fictional character.
All written accounts of God are produced by humans for an audience of other humans.
In the same way that we might describe a storm cloud as “angry” or a sunny day as “cheerful”, one might apply emotional descriptors to an omnipotent divine force in order to personify an impersonal and abstract entity.
Past that, assuming you believe that a divine being is above humanity, why wouldn’t they have emotions? Emotions are a feature of sentience and God is supposed to be a super-sentient creature. If anything, it would experience these emotions more intensely and intricately than its creations. The human rage of a shout or the despair of a cry becomes the earth-splitting eruption of a volcano or the suffocating deluge of a flood.
At the same time, it is the overwhelming longing for companionship that drives a God to form life from the void of space. The intense joy in the creative act leads this fundamental superhuman force to tirelessly build an entire universe. The deep and profound pride and love which brings them among their creations clothed in their own form, willing to endure the humiliation of this avatar form in order to enlighten and elevate their divine progeny to their own level.
Absent these primal emotional urges, why would a God choose to be a God at all, and not simply languish within the darkness for eternity, content to the echoing silence of dead space?
Having power over somebody does not exclude you from having emotions. Superman is nearly invincible and a great guy who always does the right thing; but his feelings can still get hurt if people are mean to him, and he still gets angry when people are cruel to each other, such as a human murdering another human. God would be above a superhero, but the same principle applies.
If you are God, the point of creating humanity is because you’re alone, and want to love and be loved. If you spent a lot of time and effort to raise your kids and they grew up to hate you for no discernible reason and did terrible things just to act the opposite of how you raised them to be, you’d be pissed too. Do I have “power” over my kids? I guess. I’m bigger than them and even if they’re adults, you can always pull out a .22 and shoot them if they don’t obey. But that doesn’t solve anything and it’s not very loving is it? I want to raise my kids to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, but also because it benefits us all to act that way reliably, and makes us all happier.
If everyone obeys God just because they have to fall in line or die/be directly punished every time, that defeats the point of making humanity because they won’t love you. Yet maybe it would be necessary to step in if they’re harmful enough to the rest of humanity, hence the smiting. But most religions have an idea that God is trying to move us past the point where he has to step in, or has already stepped back permanently. Maybe God punishes evil after death to facilitate us getting our act together. Or perhaps he simply rewards the good and doesn’t reward the evil. Maybe he experimented a little in the past as to what actually works. Maybe he knew he was justified to punish evil, but didn’t realize the toll it would take on him by hurting your own children until it happened, and that’s why he doesn’t do it anymore.
Don’t @ me in the comments criticizing some specific version of God you have in your head. There’s a million different religions that say a million different things. This is theoretical, answering OP’s question.
It’s a little like when a mediocre screenwriter tries to write a character who is supposedly a genius.
As St George the Carlin asked, if God is all powerful, why does he need money?
Because the shit that makes you feel all powerful doesn’t come cheap!
Humans really want to have a reason for things. Any reason, even one that’s wrong, is better than no reason. Some things have reasons that are only discoverable after centuries of investigation, but we demands reasons now.
