I was in a Christian book store the other day picking up some store keys in my capacity as a leasing agent. I was approached by a person shopping in the store and he asked me if I was a Christian. A normal enough question to ask somebody was in a Christian bookstore I suppose. I told him I was not and he was a bit taken aback as I expected he wanted to have some sort of a conversation about Christ etc.
I explained that well there may be powers abroad in the universe we are not aware of but I did not believe in a man centric universe. We went back and forth for few minutes but when he started asking me if I believed in “evolutionism” and Darwin I saw which way the wind was blowing and politely made a quick exit.
So anyway, in mulling over the possibility of there actually being some sort of a supernatural omnipotent God I have to wonder why a being that powerful would care anything at all about being worshipped by creatures that are effectively slime molds relative to their place on the evolutionary food chain of the universe. It simply makes no sense.
Is there any cogent reason why a omnipotent God entity would care a whit about being worshipped by lifeforms so far beneath them?
God is the definition of narcissistic tbh. And don’t waste your time on arguing with Hardcore Christians; they simply cherry-pick out of the Bible and ignore the contradictions.
The problem I have with the Bible personally is that Christianity denies science as some sort of blasphemous practice and then when proven right it cherry-picks out of the Bible to find a verse that says that is okay. Ridiculousness at its best.
I’ve asked this question of Christians many times (when prompted as you were), often in the form of: if a non-believer lives a life that God would approve of if lived by a Christian, why would a omnipotent, benevolent God care that the non-believer doesn’t worship him?
The answer invariably converges to, “it’s beyond our comprehension”.
Children should respect their parents, we’re all God’s children, yada yada, sheep and shepherds, becoming enlightened means accepting God’s love and he wants what’s best for us, that sorta thing. But yes, it’s a strange quality for God to have.
There are many other odd characteristics about the Abrahamic God. I never understood the vengeance of God. Shouldn’t he be above that sorta thing? Or why would he create the universe in the first place. Must’ve been bored, except I thought God wasn’t supposed to want for anything - he’s complete. The whole cosmological history of Christianity is pretty strange. Lay it out on a timeline and the vast majority of it will be what happens after Jesus comes back, the dead are judged, etc. There will be a tiny blip of a couple thousand years at the start where Earthly existence was a thing that mattered, but the rest of eternity hinges on it.
The only proper response to any assertion of what Christians do, feel, or believe. As a bonus, it works just as well for any other religion as well (after subbing out Christian for the appropriate identifier, obviously).
He cares about Jews because we entered into a permanent contract a long time ago, and that contract came wrapped up with a lot of rules and regulations. As to the rest of you people? We happen to be of the opinion that he couldn’t care less whether or not you worship him.
God doesn’t care. But his representatives do. A lot. They are called priests.
God can take care of the prayers, the priests will bask in the respect-by-proxy, and the priests will take care of the tithes.
Priests probably figured out that worshiping prayer, if done right, amounts to their mark convincing himself that God is a huge deal and that he had better keep God on his side.
Really similar to a question of mine that led to a years long rift w/ my SIL. The Christian God always struck me as insecure. (Not to mention petty, and just an all around dick.)
They had asked us to join them at a Lutheran Easter service. BIL was playing horn, and we had dinner at their place afterwards. At dinner, SIL kept asking us how we liked the service. Actually, it stuck us as weird - actually kinda sick. It was basically all “Alleluia, he has risen. Praise him.” Not a single word has anything to do with the way people had to actually interact with the world they would encounter as soon as they exited the church. The only reference to real life rather than the possible future life, was the minister referring to his wife’s cancer, and making some sick reference that if she died she’d be with her Lord.
So, as you can imagine, we didn’t really offer our real views, instead saying various versions of “It was nice.” And “Dave’s trumpet sounded great!” Maybe the 5th go-around, I decided she honestly wanted to know, so I said, “Why does God need to be worshipped with all that pageantry in that beautiful building? Why wouldn’t he prefer that the believers were out doing good things every Sunday?” I thought those were pretty legitimate questions. She was outraged that I would say such a thing in front of her middle school children, and didn’t talk to us for maybe a decade. Yeah - those were probably the best 10 years with respect to them… :o
I know what the responses are going to be from the non-believers…but what about those of you that believe? What need has your all-powerful god of worship from beings such as ourselves?
There may be more to it than what meets the eye. You cannot worship an omnipotent God without worshiping the ideals he stands for, by worshiping this god you will hopefully try to live up to his ideals and morals. I think by nature we tend to be selfish and self serving. I think the principle lends it self to a more social society.
There are plenty of good, anthropological reasons for humans to create a god in their own image, one that is jealous and craves approval and praise. We are social creatures, and a hierarchy in which the top creature is jealous and craves approval and praise is reasonably natural to us - at least, as our societies have evolved since the Neolithic.
There are even good social-evolutionary reasons why such a thing would be an adaptive advantage.
Approaching the question from the POV of such a thing being literally true, of course, it is hard to come up with a good reason …
Maybe the idea is that Man was created in God’s image, with a consciousness, intellect, free will, soul, etc. Thus, we’re the kind of life forms that God could have a beer with.
Well of course, you were there only on Easter Sunday. All year long at church I would expect lots of sermons regarding how people should actually interact with the world they encounter outside church. But Easter is the great big celebration day – everybody is pumped up about the resurrection and the promise of eternal life, yadda, yadda.
God doesn’t need pageantry and beautiful buildings – it is humans that want pageantry and beautiful buildings.
My belief? God doesn’t *need *anything from us. Religion and faith have provided humanity with several benefits over the course of our development as a sentient species - a code of morals, social cohesion, hope, etc. - although whether we still need it is an interesting question. There’s a chance that we’ve evolved enough as a species to embrace atheism. If that’s the case, I’m sure God is in favor of us no longer bugging him all the time.