IF YOU DISCARD RELIGION/GOD IS IT ALWAYS FOR SOMETHING YOU ARE GOING TO TREAT AS YOUR RELIGION/GOD?  DOES SOMETHING ALWAYS HAVE TO FILL THAT VOID?

We will examine the claim that without religion or God, you leave yourself with a need that is not met and you will try to deal with this with a bad or inadequate substitute.  It presumes that no matter what you do, you have a God or religious faith in some form.  It is patronising for many testify that it is nonsense and even most people in a Church do not value God and faith as much as they might say.  Also it contradicts the religious doctrine that God supports religious freedom and does not want anyone pressured to do his will.  It is full of implied threat.

Religion asks, "Why cannot people do without religion in some form even a weak form?"  When religion worries about giving people a vacuum that evil will fill its real worry that some other form of religion or spirituality will take its place.  That is to say that when Catholics worry about a void in a child's religious upbringing they are in fact worried that the void will get filled with something other than Catholicism. 

If lacking religion leaves a vacuum then what questions does that raise?

Could it be that those with a void and hunger have been conditioned by parents and religion to develop it?  Are they encouraging them to pray to keep this conditioning there?  Prayer is essentially, "God your will is good and your will not mine been done."  In a sense it is something you repeat over and over again until you are brainwashed.

It is impossible to know how many people have a religious void.  Many unreligious people pretend to be religious to get good music or get a career in the ministry or to fit in in the community.  It is not about the faith so much as the trappings.

It is impossible to know if those who claim the void is filled would not be better off in another faith for no one religion can fulfil everybody.

Do some people find that not being religiously fundamentalist and bigoted leaves a vacuum?  Yes.  They are religious and feel unsatisfied so they deal with it by becoming more extreme and certain in their beliefs and end up being trouble.

Some say that the vacuum left by religion will be occupied with money or power or something evil.  But notice this.  Why does the void have to be taken over by something seen by religion as inferior to religion?  It is like religion is somehow evil - perhaps secretly or internally - and if it goes another evil will take over.

People who tell lies such as that terrorism or violence or lies have no religion and all religion is good probably think as religion is going to be around whether it is good or not and will be around forever.  They are being defeatist and they feel that religion is evil and that telling it how nice it is helps keep it from turning nasty or tempers its viciousness.

So that is religion as filling a void covered.  Now let us look at what happens if we simply assert, "God fulfils something in us so if we turn away from him we will use a fake God instead perhaps money, drugs and sex."

Proof is good.  Not having proof for something leaves a void that something else will fill.  You may try to fill it with the feeling that the something is true or pack it with evidence.  You may even fill it with self-delusion so that you think the something is undoubtedly true.  If God is goodness itself as religion says, then God is proof. Notably they never talk about proof like that so they are more about what they want to think, what biases they want to feed than any God.  If you are into worshipping God and you cannot or will not worship a God of proof then you will worship something else. You do not want God to be a God of proof even if he can provide proof or if somebody needs proof.  Yet you are still into proof in the wrong way.  Rather than, "God is the God of proof and I affirm the absolute value of proof" you have, "It is proven that God only wants us to feel that he speaks to us in our hearts to let us know that he is there and that he gives satisfactory if inconclusive evidence."  You look at how faulty the evidence is and unclear and on that basis declare you have proven that if there is a God he does not care about proving anything about himself.

If you want to exclude proof when you say that God is the God of all that is good, then you replace that with shoddy proof for a different God.

 By the way, atheists and believers are in the same boat here.  Neither say there is proof for God.

People say that looking for happiness in success will fail for it is looking in the wrong place.  So there is a vacuum or void that you will try to fill with something that will not work.  But looking for God is about looking for success too.  You want to succeed in finding him.  You want to be the winner that finds God.

If you need a God of infinite power and who made all things and who loves all to fill a void then what if you are simulating this filling?  What do I mean?  You may be imagining that you are responding to him and you may be using doctrines about him as a substitute for him.  All believers do hold deep down that the idea of God matters even if there is no God.  They think the idea is so good and so beneficial that it will bring enough good about on its own without there being an actual God to engage with you.  So they are biased.

The Bible says that God tests even the greatest saints and even tested Jesus.  The reason is that human nature can look like it is in a proper relationship with God and not be.

So instead of doing even heroic good works for God and praying constantly you need to suffer and to accept it just because he permits it to happen.  You need suffering to demonstrate your trust in a real God.  God set it up that way.

Yet even then we know that a person can sacrifice horribly for a psychological construct, something that they have convinced themselves is the case.  A man may die for a woman who hates him and imagines she loves him underneath it all.

Believers all admit that if God is intervening so you can connect with him properly, your own needs, prejudices and desires get in the way.  It is like a jigsaw with four pieces and perhaps three of them come from God and you improvise to make the fourth piece but it is not the right one no matter if it blends in perfectly.  But because you are interfering and blinding yourself to it, you can't trust even what God inspires you to believe.  So what you believe may as well be all invented by you.  It is still too much about what you want to think.  It is still really about you not God.

Your belief about God is your God. To believe in God is to make this belief about God your God. It is the belief telling you what God is like but belief is not God. To see a person through a vision or some kind of virtual reality is not to see the person. It may be countered that to believe there is no God is to make this belief your God. But that assumes that if you have not got the true God then you have another one that may not be even honoured in religious terms or religiously recognisable such as money. If there is a need for a God then that means the vacuum that you should fill with the real God is going to be filled with something else that functions like a god be it sex or drugs or money or even religion!

The void may need the idea of God and not a real God as such. That would not be surprising.  Our need for food is full of deception. What we don't want is real food such as fish and green vegetables and legumes.  We want food for pleasure and tell ourselves it is about food.  But we have found there is no may about it.  It is about the idea.

A void?  What exactly do you need?  Just for there to be a higher power?  For it to love you?  For it to make morality unchangeable instead of just mere fashionable opinion?  Do you just need it?  If you are conditioned as a child you will need something because of that and for no other reason.  To have a need that should not be there is a sign of a disorder or maladjustment.  There could be any combination of these ingredients.  One of them will however dominate.  They are all bad.

The wish for a higher power is based on the improbable notion that it is going to intervene and do magic for you against all the odds.  That is selfish for why are you not building hopes on cancer suddenly going away all over the globe?  You are lying to yourself and you know it.  If you were not you would step out in front of the bus confident that God is going to suddenly save you.  No you pick something less testable or less stupid to play your self-inflicted mind game with.  And that helps cause a contagion where it will come upon others.

If all you want is love from a God even if it does nothing practical for you then that is a sign you don't trust the love of those who are around you.

If you want God in order to solidify some kind of moral code then that is using God like an object not a person.  It overthrows the supposed morality you say you want to protect.  To marry somebody so that their virtue may spread to you is in fact treating them as a means to an end, the definition of evil.

And to let yourself suffer from conditioning is abuse.  You need to break the cycle for you were not conditioned alone.  Others were targeted with you.  Think of them.

The vacuums and voids that supposedly exist when God or religion is eased out or kept out show God or religion is not a good or rational or healthy thing.  We should try to accept the voids we are stuck with - if any.