JehovahsWitness wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 5:33 pmWell Knight, before I comment on your second scenerio please note the following. ..
FIRSTLY PLEASE NOTE I make no claims here, I am simply expressing what I believe based on the bible. Please take all sentences to be preceeded by the premise "I believe ..."
Are you alright with this?
Of course. I'm interested to know where worship comes from.
This might actually be the reason I assess that if God exists, it may not be worthy of worship and others assess oppositely: I had terrible parents. So I was forced to discard any idea I ever had (or not develop it) that one's creator is automatically worthy of worship.
I would be interested to see both how religious people assess where this loyalty rightly goes if we disentangle our creation from the best interest in our wellbeing, and how the distribution goes on atheist versus religious when overlaid with good parenting versus abuse.
Neither of these curiosities, no matter how the distribution goes, means that for certain, your God if it exists, is, or is not, worthy of worship. But having a good sense of where ideas come from can help in understanding those ideas.
Tcg wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 12:15 pmNah. All concepts of god/gods/God are equal unless one relies on Special Pleading to claim that they aren't.
Unless you assume a god
can't exist, concepts of gods that are illogical - contradictory - are inferior to those that are not contradictory. I would also say that concepts of gods that hurt humanity (require sacrifices for instance) are inferior to those that help or are neutral. And the latter is independent of whether these concepts point to a being that actually exists in our universe or not.
Where you have a point is where this thread is, about more powerful beings. What if worship - blind faith - is such a poisonous thing that no possible being would rightly deserve it?
I tend to think it might be so. Even if we're cosmic children, our understanding so feeble that here is this great being and we would be better off going on its understanding, that's fine, but
it would require a guarantee we could understand, that this being was being honest with us and had our best interests in mind, and we cannot have that guarantee because if this being is so much smarter, it always can be tricking us.
No matter how feeble our understanding is, we are bound by evolution to be getting things right slightly more than 50% of the time, especially where survival is concerned. Nature would not shell out for our brains if a coin flip would do better. We can understand that, and that makes betting on our own understanding a good bet. Is betting on a god's dictates a good bet? Well we would have to have >50% certainty that it is not simply tricking us.
). Some gods have the power to grant immortality in a special, good place (ie heaven) or punish in a bad place (ie hell), etc (though this isn't a complete list as what gods are and can do can (and does often) vary from culture to culture, location to location, time to time and even person to person). 
