Quote:
Originally Posted by BlueWing
Precisely that appears to be the case. When we are told that God is sublime, we are often led to believe that God is something so otherworldly that we will never be able to understand him. Such obscurantism is common in all religions and philosophies that include the terminology of God. As if the purpose of that notion was to mystify.
Yet, inevitably, we speculate about who or what God may be (because this notion was brought to our attention, we cannot help but wonder about its essence further.)
As a basic fact of logic, if we are trying to prove anything about any particular thing, we need to know what this thing is. Yet in the case of God, we do not know, because God is not clearly defined. Thus asking about the qualities of God is just like asking about how many seats the theater has, when we do not exactly know what the theatre is.
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Ah, but my point is that if God is a projection of all that we don't understand about ourselves, then isn't God serving its purpose by being obscure?
Think of it this way, in order to properly define something, you have to be able to describe it in a way that makes sense from more than one perspective. In our efforts to define ourselves, how could we 1) describe ourselves in a way that makes sense to someone who is not human or 2) even be able to step outside our perspective to verify whether we've done so or not in the first place!
Along comes God.
We create God, as an alternative perspective. Through God we promote our own understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. It's sort of like a sensory deprivation, in which the mind, free of any input from the outside world, starts to break down, but to preserve itself makes part of itself inaccessible. With a part of the mind that we can't access, we are able to preserve the concepts of "me" and "not me."
Essentially what I'm saying is that the concept of God keeps us spiritually sane. Belief in God I suppose could lead to a blind belief in concepts we can't explain, but does an absence of God or an absence of belief in God really make us any better off?