God and Religion

I am an atheist or at least I believe myself to be. But for certain I ascribe to no religion. And I put no stock in a deity to have anything to do with me. I was baptized a Roman catholic, was an altar boy, thought about becoming a priest and then reached the age of puberty and as George Carlin was known to say, “I was a Catholic until I reached the age of reason.” So that's who I am. Still this short essay is about God, the supreme deity that people of all faiths believe and I suppose I can even as an atheist make a defense for God. John Lennon said, “God is concept by which we measure our pain.” Perhaps. I believe that God is a manifestation of the imagination. But is that wrong? Must we cut away our imagination? Remove God and you stunt a portion of human imagination throughout the world because many people certainly the great majority are believers. You remove God and a whole realm of ideas, beliefs, aspirations and inspirations disappear.

Yes there is the question of morality that is derived within the structures set up within the various forms of God worship. But that is a question to be taken up at another time. What this belief is has to do with self-consciousness, an arisen consciousness an awareness of the self in relation to the other as well as the positing of the human in the universe and the belief that something perfect can exist borne out of imagination, a collective imagination if you will. The rules within religion, starting with the dictates of morality have somehow perverted this perfect entity of our imagination. The perversion is when religious dictums turn God into a voice, a creator, a giver of laws, an eternal justice definer, a damner. After all these matters are from the “imagination” of those who choose to take the power from the imagination of those who are not so devious and only wish to believe in the perfection beyond reality. These are the people who create a religion who demand that we follow their rules, their beliefs and serve in fact their needs while claiming they receive their beliefs from a higher power, God.

Should perfection be worshipped? Perhaps this is where we can find the crux of the problem of religion. One religion can never say the name of God. It is written g-d. Another religion claims three persons (three entities) exist in one God. Another requires a medium not to be worshipped but this medium's visage can never be shown, creating a need for one's imagination like the God he demonstrates he knows though this medium existed as a person. And then there are the laws written down by scribes and interpreted by anyone who aspires to do so, cutting off the head so to speak of each individual's imagination.

Religions are political forces designed to cause fractures in society for the benefit of some as if to prove that humans on their own with no designs of wanting to rule others and wanting to live and survive as nature intended are incapable of anything but destruction, error, falseness and deceit and only by worshiping a certain formula for accessing this imaginitve perfect being can their perceived enemies be defeated while the sins of the worshipper acting to defeat can be forgiven. What the appeal is can only be guessed at. Perhaps it is when engaging in destructive acts against others. Because guilt can be an unbearable force and it can not be expiated by any means other than lying to oneself or the lie in and of itself.