Thank you, Enigma, we are on the same page.
I have a grim outlook on the matter. I do not think that belief in a God is healthy and I am inclined to say that, actually, it is a symptom of decline. Behind every religion I see a secret distrust and suspicion against life. If not first they dispise the brutal facticity of the world, then surely they claim that because of that, this life is useless unless it is for the development of and toward an alternative to the world they find themselves in here and now. But since this “other world” does not exist, this resolve is a waste of time and potential, is disturbing to the rapport we have with this life, yet it provides the tonic necessary to endure such an anxiety. An anxiety that only exists if this world is misunderstood in the first place; the religious create the monster and then a way to deal with it. The irony here is spectacular. What most religious people think they are fixing is in fact an “undoing” and a sabotage of a grand and magnificent potential.
I follow the Sartrean existential psychoanalysis. “God” is a projection of the human psyche, a symbolization of an ideal which is unrealizable in human existence. What “God” represents to man is a kind of hearth, a father figure, an embodiment of human ideals which cannot be an actuality. First and foremost, God will represent those characteristics which human subjectivity lacks. Things like “perfection,” “necessity,” “objectivity.” Also, “God” would represent a foundation for morality in a world where “good” and “bad” are extremely contextual and contingent. These, to name a few, are the elements involved in the psychological conception of “God.”
This conception is also specific and tailored to the nature of human existence. To have such a conception, a being must be conscious. We need only to examine the nature of consciousness to see how everything falls nicely into place. Once we realize the negative being, that is, the nothingness or “no-thing-ness” of consciousness, we will find how these themes are appropriate in the conception of God by such a being who is conscious, temporary, essentially meaningless, and with no purpose other than this existence. For every quality that we do not have, we attribute to a fail safe “God.” It is a way of saving face and dealing with a world that has been slandered and reproached with great vehemence by our “religious” friends from day one.
And Nietzsche tells us to pass them by with sleeping words? Bullshit. Grab a baseball bat and start whacking some heads. What damage can be done if the head is empty anyway? I call it “moving on.”
No, it isn’t. Jesus was a political aggitator executed by the Romans. He was a revolutionary that served no other function than to help in the liberation of slaves from the Roman empire. He was part of a small Jewish sect that evolved out of Greco-Roman paganism. He was the corner stone of democracy and feminine virtues, compassion, pity, and compromise, of which, indeed, are useful mores, but by no means the dynamic underlying life; the will to power. He made contributions that are minor and blown way out of proportion. That is the only historical and sociological significance that that man ever had. Period.
And this is only if one need to go this far in such a consideration. I had hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary to point out these historical contingencies, but some don’t seem to graduate past even this point of simple and common logic.
