The Judeo/Christian God

A lot of things about the Christian god don’t make sense. For instance, if God is omniscient, why would he have created angels in large numbers, knowing that a “host” of them would oppose him, led by an archangel named Lucifer. And why, if he knew everything from the beginning, would he create Satan, and than say to him, (and this is a paraphrase) “You were perfect in your ways until iniquity was found in you.”? “Found in you?” It reads as if this god is not omniscient after all. The bible has God discovering things that make him angry. An omniscient being would never be surprised.

The Bible says God rode on a cherub. This presents a couple of questions. If God needed to ride on anything, which suggests moving from one point to another, that also suggests he is not omnipresent. And if he can ride on anything, or walk in a garden, it suggests that he is subject to the law of gravity. If he is subject even to one of his own “laws” he gets a little smaller.(I know this is from the Psalms, and so can be called a metaphor, but it shows that the perception of those supposedly closest to him perceived him as a being who could ride on something, or elsewhere, walk with Adam.)

If God is omnipotent, if he has ALL power, how can Satan and his host oppose him? How can anything? More to the point, why would Satan or any other being even try to oppose God if he knew God to be all powerful? If you knew the power of a freight train, would you stand on the tracks to resist it? The Bible doesn’t show Satan as stupid. Unless he knew of a vulnerability in God, why would Satan even think of opposing him.

The obvious answer to these questions is that God is a creation of the human imagination. At that, the imagination of barely civilized bronze age people, whose fancies could conceive of a being that was both omnipotent and vulnerable; omniscient, yet capable of being surprised; omnipresent, yet moving about. This contradictory creature could only have come from human minds. It didn’t pre-exist human beings.

All gods came from the same place – the human imagination. The only difference in the Judeo/Christian god from Thor or Horus is that there are still people who believe in him. Eventually, when humankind is fully mature (that is, if it hasn’t wiped itself out before it reaches maturity) Yahweh and Allah and Vishnu will be relegated to mythology, something amuse future generations, to whom our generation will seem primitive.