Because god is a delusion used as a means of social control and as an excuse for violence.
I was raised Hindu and omg this is so evident. Dharma and karma are essential in the faith. Dharma outlines your roles and responsibilities in life. Basically, you’re born poor because of your past karma. You deserve to be poor. So don’t overstep your boundaries and stay in your lane. And let the rich and powerful walk all over you because they are more deserving.
Man, amazing how a lot of religions align with letting the rich be douchebags.
Because it’s nonsense created by humans. Humans came up with these stories, of course they anthropomorphized their deity.
As much as I agree with the premise, I think you kid yourself when you don’t look at the power structure. While in the earliest of times you could definitely blame the entire race, I’d rather concentrate on the current situation.
All written accounts of God are produced by humans for an audience of other humans.
In the same way that we might describe a storm cloud as “angry” or a sunny day as “cheerful”, one might apply emotional descriptors to an omnipotent divine force in order to personify an impersonal and abstract entity.
Past that, assuming you believe that a divine being is above humanity, why wouldn’t they have emotions? Emotions are a feature of sentience and God is supposed to be a super-sentient creature. If anything, it would experience these emotions more intensely and intricately than its creations. The human rage of a shout or the despair of a cry becomes the earth-splitting eruption of a volcano or the suffocating deluge of a flood.
At the same time, it is the overwhelming longing for companionship that drives a God to form life from the void of space. The intense joy in the creative act leads this fundamental superhuman force to tirelessly build an entire universe. The deep and profound pride and love which brings them among their creations clothed in their own form, willing to endure the humiliation of this avatar form in order to enlighten and elevate their divine progeny to their own level.
Absent these primal emotional urges, why would a God choose to be a God at all, and not simply languish within the darkness for eternity, content to the echoing silence of dead space?
As St George the Carlin asked, if God is all powerful, why does he need money?
Because the shit that makes you feel all powerful doesn’t come cheap!
“If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock so heavy even he can’t lift it?”
The Class Clown album was the beginning of the end of my Catholicism
If a deity like the Judeo Christian god is real, the reason they have emotion is we have emotion so early people would tie their emotions to them and think they have it as well. Something bad happens and it has to be god being angry and punishing them, because that was the only explanation they had.
I’m not religious. But I’m pretty sure they would say that we are created in his image.
So, if we have emotions. I don’t think it’s beyond reason that god might have them as well.
And holy shit these comments are insufferable. This isnt about your personal vendetta against religion, just answer the god damn question.
Well, the obvious answer is: if God is so much greater than humans, how would we know? If you’re talking about the Hebrew god from the Christian Bible / Jewish Scriptures, you’re seeing the depiction of God as told through the lens of humans, who often try to be telling other humans about god using the limited vocabulary and imagery available.
God is depicted as being powerful enough that a human not being fully aligned with God but being in God’s presence would lead to annihilation, just like a human approaching the sun would be destroyed — not because the sun was angry, just because of its nature compared to ours.
On the flip side of that, for the biblical God, humans are made in God’s image, which means the species as a whole would reflect God’s character (including the bit about wanting to be the ones fully in control).
Or vanity. “I’m gonna need y’all to show up once a week to tell me how awesome I am”
The main idea is that books like Bible and Quran were sent to humanity so they are made for humans of the time.
The “anger” isn’t supposed to be a literal anger, just how humans identify what happened.
For example most verses about wrath follow with curse or punishment etc, so maybe “wrath” is just what humans call it when God curses or punishes people; and it’s not a literal feeling of anger.
There was a similar debate with how some verses say God heard/saw “humans were doing [insert thing]…” etc in the books.
Less relevant info.
Also in the case of Islam for example, different branches and even sects have different popular interpretations.
I know one Sufi theologist saying “All creatures were made to reflect God’s light” so they might call it “What our own emotions were modeled after, and are distorted versions of?”
Then there is Ahl al-Ra’y (Mainly followers of Maturidism today) who see Hadith as “uncredible” so they usually have slightly different views on most stuff. But I am not religious enough to learn theology that far.
Humans anthropomorphize pretty much everything around us with varying levels of accuracy. I’m fairly certain that my dog and cat feel anger and love in a very similar way to the way I do. I’m pretty sure plants really don’t, but they might a little bit more than a storm cloud. However you apply that to your spirituality or your perception of that of others is going to be a highly personal experience for you.
Also why did he choose to be a doctor of all jobs?
I mean, the red robes and glowing orb do have a certain appeal.
IQ =/= EQ
Omnipotence implies the ability to control emotions (along with everything else). Were God only framed as being omniscient, then your answer could explain it. It’s a bit harder to ignore the gap for omnipotence.
OP’s question is a version of the classic Omnipotence Paradox: “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?”, which has had a good couple of thousand years worth of discussion, but no particularly satisfying answers. I doubt lemmy will have a breakthrough, but no harm in trying.
Because we created god in our image
Who told you God is omnipotent and above humans? Who told you he or she has emotions, or smites or becomes upset or wrathful?
Any God worth naming as such is so beyond such concepts as to be entirely inscrutable. It’s people that ascribe such characteristics, usually to influence other people. In any case, it comes from an inclination to anthropomorphize the unknown, to rationalize non-human phenomena through a familiar human lens. The conflict isn’t in God, it’s in God’s self-appointed biographers.
Aren’t we as humans proving every year that goes by, that no matter how much power and knowledge you amass, you can still be an evil, childish, asshole? God is just a little further along that dotted line. He’s got all the power and knowledge. This doesn’t make him mature or good.
