Ever wonder what God does? I mean, if he exists of course. If there is a god watching over us and watching his creation do what it does, what is he doing during all of this? Is he actively participating in our lives or watching like a stalker from the shadows? If a god was personally involved in our lives, wouldn’t we know it? Does anyone know it? Can anyone demonstrate it?
The only evidence we have of a god participating in our lives and being actively concerned with our well-being is through written words in various holy texts. There is The Bible, of course. But there is also the Koran, the Torah and Talmud, the Book of Mormon, the Vedas of Hinduism, and many others from various other religions. My question is, are there any observable instances outside of these texts that can be considered evidence of God’s involvement? Some say yes and others say no. I say that if not everyone can see and experience these signs, they aren’t really there at all. If God really is getting involved in some people’s lives, but not all are privy to observing this, it’s not really happening. What kind of god would operate that way? Certainly not a caring and loving one.
If God wants to be known, loved, worshiped and revered, is he making himself accessible? No? He’s not? Why not? Why stay hidden from those who seek him? Why stay hidden from those who don’t believe? Are they unworthy simply for not believing? Is it because, without God, they are morally bankrupt people who live in the evil, sinful dark? Most of the irreligious are simply living their lives without giving religion a second thought. They don’t seek religion or try to destroy it. They aren’t running from God. How can you run from something you don’t believe in? They simply live their lives according to what they can see and observe and since God doesn’t qualify, he isn’t added to their lists of important things. Here’s a fun fact for you: Those who sincerely pray for God to come into their lives and participate in them are met with the same response as those who couldn’t care less…silence from above.
So why is religion still ongoing? How does God continue to be on the lips of billions of people? Religion continues push on without any involvement from a god whatsoever. How? We have become God. We take what we say God is and what God does and we live it out here. We say that God clothes the poor and feeds the hungry so we have food and clothing drives run by the churches who preach God’s goodness. They gather the items, take donations, set up their tables and open their doors to let the less fortunate in. They provide what they need and then thank God for it all.
When people are sick, prayers are offered up to God in order to heal the ones we care about. Prayers are also uttered for the doctors. We pray for surgeons’ hands to be guided by God or for God to grant people searching for the cure to cancer and other diseases the knowledge to do so and even raise funds to donate to such causes. Again, it’s the people who are doing the work, yet people still give God the credit. All of it.
When it comes to Christianity specifically, who preaches the Gospel? Is it God the father? No? Does Jesus come down off of his throne and teach all of us? No? If the Heavenly leaders don’t preach their own message, how do we even know about it? We’re supposed to do it? Really? Okay. How? It’s in a book? Alright, so God wrote it down and people observed this? No? Then how’d the words get in there? Different men from different periods in time wrote their own words and then it was all combined into one book? But they were just men, right? What do you mean God inspired them? How do we know this? It’s written in there? It actually says it’s God-breathed? Okay, but how do we know God actually inspired these men? I know it says it in there, but those are just men’s words. They could have made it up. Faith? I need faith? So I should just trust that men wrote stuff down, said God told them to do it and then believe it based solely on their words and not from any divine being whatsoever? Hmm…
There are not only huge issues with saying men’s words are really God’s words, but there’s also the issue of people having to do all of the work. Anyone can say they were inspired by God. Cults are inspired by God. Mothers who drown their children in bathtubs have been inspired by God. Serial killers have been inspired by God. That’s not evidence of anything. Without proof that God was involved, all we have are the words of men. Doing ALL of the work of God? That’s a huge red flag that screams out “He’s not really there!”
If humans had to write everything down for God as is said of the Bible, that shows laziness or apathy on the part of God. Why not do it yourself if you want it done right and if you want it to be error-free? Why leave it in fallible human hands? Even if you went that route, why then not share it yourself to every area on Earth? Wouldn’t you want everyone to hear it while they are here? How many people have died since Christianity’s inception without hearing about it because missionaries just never got there in time? If you are a god and want morality to look a certain way, people to love a certain way, churches to operate a certain way, societies to function this way or that…why not step in and make sure it happens? Again, we are left on our own and expected to take care of every last detail.
If someone is never around to be part of something important, never involved, never seen, heard, felt or observed in any way…they either do not exist or they just don’t care. If everyone else involved is doing all of the work, they should be credited for it. If I, as a father, am never home, never playing with my kids, never teaching them and never telling them I love them at all…I might as well not exist at all, because that’s how I would be viewed by my kids. I certainly wouldn’t get credit for raising them right, loving them or teaching them anything at all.
God is not involved in religion. We are. Jesus never steps in to preach the religion named after him. We do it. No one ever sees, hears or reads things from God. They see us. They hear us. They read our words. Signing God’s name at the bottom is being fraudulent and giving credit where credit is not due. So again, I ask: “What does God do?” Can you show me one thing that can be definitively proven to be the work of God? Is there anything that we can say “Yup, God definitely did that”? Not by speculation. Not by wishful thinking or by using logical fallacies like “I can’t think of any reason other than God” or “Can you prove God didn’t do it?” or even “Since science can’t explain it, God is the most likely reason for something to have occurred.”
Judging by the evidence we have before us and the recorded history we can observe, it would seem that there was once a job opening. The job in question? God. There was a help wanted sign for religion and since no god cared enough to do any work, men signed up and were hired on the spot. The only stipulation was that any and all work had to be signed with God’s name on it. The job title was “God” so it didn’t matter who actually did all of the work so long as it got done and God got the credit. Men got so comfortable in the position that they never left. They never retired. They continue doing and saying things “in God’s name” (wink wink) and here we are today. There’s still no evidence that a God is involved in our lives but there is an enormous amount of evidence showing man’s involvement. But we see God’s name signed at the bottom and never bother to question it.
Question everything until the answer is found. If you question the existence of God, don’t settle for words. Ask for evidence. If none is given and none can be found even after millennia of searching for it, move on. Anyone can say anything and claim inspiration from any source. That doesn’t make it true. Search for truth and don’t stop looking until you find it. Truth isn’t found in ancient, unfounded stories. Truth isn’t found in wishful thinking. Truth cannot be found by faith alone. Simply believing in something will not lead you to truth. Evidence will. Anyone can believe in anything, real or not. Belief is not a reliable pathway to truth.
Life After Religion 
Why Christians think the Israelite tribal god Yahweh ought to care about them is beyond me. They don’t even worship him, they worship in his place some man that they claim existed. They may get better results with prayer if they offer as a sacrifice a bull without blemish, or even a dove or a measure of grain burned on a hilltop altar. At least pour a libation. Nothing is just given for free, you give to get things back in most aspects of life.
A stupid thing the Christians did was promise anything if you only pray in the name of Jesus. That was just setting up a problem, people knew well that you don’t always get what you pray for, most often not. Even early apologists had to concede that Christians couldn’t do the things that the gospels promised they could.
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Promising answered prayers was a bad idea from the start. The authors of the Bible should have known that people would try it out for themselves. They should have known that there would be a lot of unsatisfied customers. That’s why there have been apologists since the beginning. The excuses began right after the message of the Gospels were conceived because none of it was true.
If Yahweh does exist, however unlikely that might be, how upset must he be that we took the worship meant for him as the Jewish god and gave it to a man here on Earth. We said, “That’s enough Judaism. Let’s make for us a new religion and completely disregard all the old traditions.” That would be a huge slap in the face to a supposedly jealous god, don’t you think?
Also, I have always been confused as to why we would follow a practicing Jew like Jesus and stop being Jewish. He was a Jew. He worshiped like a Jew. He celebrated the Jewish feasts and festivals like a Jew. He was one of the Jewish people in every way. We then make a religion in his name and trash all things Jewish. How does that make sense?
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The Gospels already show Jesus trashing Judaism. Even those have him doing away with dietary laws, downplaying circumcision, abrogating the punishment for adultery, criticizing the Jewish legal authorities, and many other things. The New Testament gives a confusing mixed message on the whole issue. Probably because of editing and stitching disparate texts together.
Christianity had to be less Jewish because it was made into a universalist religion, if it did not start as one. That was happening a lot back then. Cults like that of Isis and Osiris that were Egyptian in origin and culture were stripped down and exported all around the Roman Empire. The Mithras religion took one of the Persian yazatas and mixed him with Syrian and Roman elements in the form of a Hellenistic mystery cult. Elagabalus wanted to make his monolatrous worship of his Syrian deity the state religion of Rome. Septimius Severus promoted the worship of the Punic goddess Tanit across the Empire. Aurelian did the same with Sol Invictus, as a henotheistic state religion. The Phrygian cult of Attis had the same happen to it. Thracian cults like that of Sabazius and rider god lost their local character and were mixed with all sorts of elements and spread around the Empire. The same happened to Judaism. I have seen references to a tomb found from early Roman empire that has a Jewish menorah and a figure of Attis(a dying and rising god celebrated around the time of Easter). Christianity exhibits most features of religious and philosophical trends at the time. Christians often act like the Jews were the only culture around that mattered, but that was really happening to everyone. The Jews were not the only ones to try and revolt either. The Romans tried to wipe out the Druids, for example.
I don’t think that Judaism is worshiping the Israelite tribal god or the other gods of the Israelites any more than Christianity is. I am convinced that the actual features of his worship involved a lot of things that the Deuteronomist editors of the Tanakh wanted to do away with. They wanted a theocracy run completely by the temple in Jerusalem. Jews today have a very different religion from the original Israelites. So did Jews 2000 years ago, though in some respects they were still closer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qemant_people
I admit that when I was a Christian or trying to be, prayer related issues never bothered me too much. I would not have seen any prayer of mine as changing “God’s plan” just because I wanted something. I am still kind of fatalistic in my thinking.
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That’s one of the many problems with religion; man does all the work but god gets all the credit. A certain person I know was in serious trouble some years ago and I ended up giving her a significant amount of money to help out her family. Afterwards on her FB page she was ‘praise Jesus’ and ‘thank you Jesus’ and saying that when she got back on her feet she would pay Jesus back by donating the money to the church once she was able to do so. She never, ever thanked me. Not once. Not even in private.
In her mind, though, she was right. In her mind I had nothing to do with the whole thing. Jesus had answered her prayers by somehow influencing me to give her the money. I was simply the instrument through which he worked. And yeah, when she got back on her feet and was doing pretty well, she paid back Jesus by giving the money to the church, not me. And while this was irritating, I’d known this was going to happen before I did it.
There is a serious problem, though, with attributing to god the things done by man. It, oh, insulates them, in a way. They don’t have to feel sorry for or help the poor or the ill or those less fortunate because god is responsible for them for being poor. They must have done something to piss off god or they’d be well off. They must have sinned or they wouldn’t be sick. God becomes an excuse, a way to rationalize their personal greed and prejudice.
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It is rather upsetting to anyone who has ever accomplished anything or done good for others to have all of their efforts diminished by giving the credit to God instead of them. Nothing good that you say or do is done by you. None of your good will is done by you. None of the love you give others or the helping hands you lend are done by you. It’s all God, all the time. I cant tell you how much that confused and bothered me as a believer. Nothing I did was because of me. None of my hard work or talent deserved praise, unless it was directed at God. All of the good I did was because of him. However, all of the bad stuff? All of the “sin”? Yeah, that was all my fault and I deserved ALL the credit for being bad. I definitely DID those things. God has nothing to do with sin so it must be us. Good stuff? God. Bad stuff? Us. That’s a disgusting religion that says that to people.
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When someone is ill in hospital, or perhaps having cancer treatments, and then the person gets better, and people are like “Praise god,” that makes me so mad! To be a doctor, a person has to get their Bachelor of Science degree, then train for 4 years to get an MD, then train for up to 7 years in their chosen specialty. I was ill 3 years ago and cared for by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, radiation technologists, nutritionists and physiotherapists. Humans, trained by other humans, that’s what’s helping sick people.
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Agreed. It’s a slap in the face of all the people who work so hard to help others.
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