Why should an omnipotent God care if you worship them or not?

According to Christianity, God (a) created those lifeforms, (b) maintains a relationship with them, and (c) actually was Incarnated as one of them. Which is indeed a pretty strong claim—but not because of God’s omnipotence. An infinite God wouldn’t be limited in whom he could care about.

As for worshiping God, the impression I get from the Bible is that God is always stressing, not “You must worship me” but “You must not worship anything/anyone else instead of me.”

Maybe He has a bet going with another omnipotent god. Most worshippers in a billion years wins the pot.

The only explanation I can think of is that God is trying to keep people out of trouble. You know, like giving them busy work. It’s hard to rape, murder, and steal when you’re singing hymns at church. And perhaps a regular ritual of worship confers spiritual benefits that you can get through other means, just not as easily.

So it’s not so much that God needs people to worship him. It’s just that he wants people to be good, and he has found that worship promotes goodness.

I will never really understand why believers are so happy to oblige God in this ego-stroking, though. I mean, I can understand wanting to have a relationship with God and engaging in prayer and Bible reading and church attendance to achieve this. I can understand listening to religious music, too. I like some of it too. But I don’t understand how people don’t feel weird when the pastor says “Let’s show Jesus how much we love him!” Even as a little girl I felt weird about this. You mean to tell me that I’ve got to jump around with my hands up in the air, tears strolling down my face, to really show Jesus that I love him? And why does he need me to love him anyway? Isn’t it enough that I try to be Christ-like? Is Jesus the chief of the feeling police or something?

The focus on love above everything was a big turn-off for me on the whole Jesus business.

Just because a god is omnipotent doesn’t mean he isn’t a dick.

Worship an omnipotent God? Yeah, right. What’s He gonna do, make me?

I kind of figure God is like some of the programmers I know he started of building a world/universe to see if he could setting rules as they seemed important to him and thunderbird simulation run fora while. After a bit he wondered what his world looked like from the inside so he jumped into the game to wander around and then decided to change a couple of rules. Then he got bored and wandered off to do something different.

So when he’s paying attention he like to have followers because its fun and a way to interact with his simulation but when he wanders off he doesn’t really care except once he comes back and sees his number off followers have dropped he gets pissed.

You should be grateful that God just wants praise. In the old days he wanted meat (and don’t even try to burn up grain and veggies for him.)

As for the creating us in his own image business, clearly not true in terms of appearance, and not even true in other respects given that we are not omniscient. But the real question I have is this: if he created the universe for us, why such a big one? The ancients view of the universe ending at the end of the solar system with the stars pasted on the walls makes a lot more sense for a created universe than the one we have. I think fundamentalists accept how big the universe is (if not how old it is) but it really is a better argument against their god than evolution.

Who doesn’t like a little flattery now and then? No one has worshipped ME yet, but I think I would like it!

Why assume that he created it for us?

But even if you have to assume the whole universe was created entirely for humanity’s benefit, I can think of several possible (purely speculative) reasons for making it so large:

(1) To give us room to expand into over the next several millennia/eons
(2) To inspire us to write some good large-scale science fiction
(3) To make us feel small
(4) Because if you want to create a world that has the properties ours has (capable of sustaining human life), you have to embed it in a very large universe in order to make the science work out.

Because God is bipolar.

It’s an escalating race, between two shrill extremes of vanity: The idea that the creator of the universe is vain enough to demand worship, and the vain idea that you are important enough that God would notice you.

It brings to mind the Simpsons eposide, where Homer is on the roof shoutong at God “Why does everything happen to me” and the booming voice comes back from the firmament "Your call is important to us . . . "

Perfect question. It just goes to show how anthropocentric belief in god is. In other words, god orbits man rather than man on a planet possibly in some kind of orbit around god. Each person effected by this bit of hand-me-down insanity has the capacity to start believing that every thought they have is monitored, every coincidence in their life must be instead a message or a “divine intervention” implying they are meant for a special purpose. This goes off the rails when even a little schizo-effective disorder gets mixed in. The outcome is often delusion, demonization and eventually a catharsis that ends up in murder.

And the science doesn’t work out, so we have to postulate essentially supernatural (well, you can’t prove it exists, so…) stuff like dark matter/energy. So while science can nail down the reality of the small stuff in our neighborhood, there’s still no getting around God in The Big Picture. The science falls apart on the galactic level and above, without magic.

Which brings me to the OP. God wants the worship so we don’t completely forget Him as we tumble through generations of self discovery and exploration of our ever-widening world. Eventually we will discover all there is to be discovered, and it won’t add up. Only a supernatural force can make it all work, and we will at last know the face of God by the silhouettes in our knowledge. Were we to forget God along that journey, we would truly despair and not comprehend the truth: we can know our creator through all of that which He did not ceate. So, it takes a little cajoling and some horror to keep us on that path, so what? Totally worth it.

Kind of like when you’re sitting and waiting for Dwarf Fortress to randomize an entire world and then you scroll through the seed looking for the one grid with the perfect combination of parameters for your doomed civilization!

So scientists should just throw up their hands and say “Gawddidit!”?

Speculative hypotheses of the origin and activity of large scale cosmic phenomena based on existing (and evolving) math and physics paradigms requires a “supernatural force” to work?

Either you don’t really understand quite how science works or your definitions are fighting with each other. The whole point is to derive a useful explanation that fits in with, or elaborates on the models we have of the physical universe. Just because the scope of a phenomena is currently unknown does not mean it requires “supernatural” explanations.

I’m a Christian and frankly I think if you asked him he’d say “You guys could seriously do with a lot less kneeling and bowing and a Whole Lot more of the Love Thy Neighbor”

Well of course not. Too soon. We’re not out of hypotheses and research yet. Eventually. :wink:

Hey look, I’m not a believer either, but I do like to spin a yarn now and again. And sometimes I like to spin one for the underdog. Sometimes I buy it and sometimes not, but my goal is to get folks to at least question what they are certain of–change their ways or maybe be even more confident. Although, admittedly, it seems more often the result is people question what the hell is wrong with me. Ah well. Back to stringing beads.

I don’t think mainline Protestants (of which I am one, so I can, maybe, speak for them) believe that God needs us to engage corporate worship. We engage in corporate worship to join in community (which I think is a big part of it) and give thanks to our Creator. It generally tends to remind of us things that may have fallen by the wayside during the grind of the week (love our neighbor, care for the needy, etc), and be sent out in mission.

Allright, here’s a horseload of worship and praise to you, Sir! Feeling any better?