IN HIS OWN IMAGE - RELIGION VERSUS REALITY

While woman was baking gingerbread men - in his own image, man was cooking up gods of clay and wood to help him explain things he feared and did not understand.

After watching all his idols chew up many helpless animals and human baby sacrifices, a wiser man somewhere in the middle east decided those idols were not doing a very good job of protecting him, so he decided the real God must be something else - something invisible and incomprehensible.

So wiser, kinder, man created an invisible god in his own image and attributed to this greater God all the qualities of men  -  their emotions, their ideas, their visions, their intentions, their wishes, their values, their talents, their ideas about right and wrong and their plans for everything.  

And man called his creation "God" in many languages.  

And man says, "My version of God is more powerful than your version of God, so meet me on the battle field and I'll kill you to prove that the real God is on my side and not on your side. Therefore, my god must be the real God. So I'll take your land and your orchards and your savings and your house and your wife and your daughters for myself and my friends - in my God's name."

When man saw that even this Great Invisible God still let people get sick and die, man created Eden in the sky and he called it "Heaven" or "Paradise". So even if you died, you would still live. Shining glory and no more war and no need to work, and wine and little girls waiting to have sex with men. What could be better than that?

Thus, until today, men everywhere promote their own ideas of God, and they blame that God - as a "Judas Goat" - for every wrong thing they do. Guilt-free in God's name. Let Him take the blame. He asked for it.

Evidence of this is clear. Why do tyrants and lunatics cut off the heads of their opponents? The head is the housing of the brain, the organ in which we process all thoughts and ideas. Tyrants, bullies and lunatics fear anyone who dares to think for himself. A free thinking person, endowed by the true Creator with the great gift of a healthy, functioning brain, might consider the evidence that the gods created by men are not the cause and sustainer of Creation. A free-thinking individual might look out at the universe, see the galaxies, the enormity and complexity of Creation and think, "Your god is too small. There must be something more." That's why lunatics and bullies and tyrants murder little girls who want to go to school. Free thinking is the enemy of tyranny. "Off with their heads !- in my God's name".

Maybe my understanding of religion is not new or important, but I decided to write this and publish it in the hope that, somewhere, someone reading it might stop and consider these revelations and decide not to become a murderer in God's name.