>>23985528So you have a conception of God. It is very likely one of a kind, in the same way your siblings have a somewhat different perspective on your parents than you do, despite all growing up together.
Raised in religion, you have a prepackaged understanding of God delivered to you. Sadly, it’s often very different than their own holy book says. My own struggle with God came about in a similar way, I was raised in a church that taught me lies about God.
This caused me to be unable to assess God clearly, because I had attributed qualities to him that he did not have. Learning about atheism reinforced this misunderstanding, because they all have similar misunderstandings.
It wasn’t until much later I was able to “build God from scratch” so to speak, by stripping my preconceived notions and meditating on the nature of a God (I prefer the term creator) compatible with the universe.
A clever man pursuing this shouldn’t take long to arrive at deism as a justifiable placeholder, but the more clever you are, the less suitable that solution becomes as you think about it.
But I’m getting pretty far astray here: the core point may be more relatable with human relationships. Have you ever been brutally betrayed by someone you trusted? That feeling of anxiety mixed with the anger is because a person you thought you knew became a stranger. They did something you couldn’t imagine them doing, you never actually knew who they were, you just had an imaginary image of them in your head, which was shattered by their betrayal.
If we assume the existence of God, he would be a self-consistent being; but all religions describe him in contradictory ways. At most one could be accurate, the rest would be following a false imagination of God.
Does that clear anything up?
