When you worship God, you worship not God but how man wants you to see him

So deeply has the need of a revealed religion been felt,

that many who have not received revelations from God

experienced the need to invent them. Fr Leslie Rumble

Briefly -

Suppose you are concerned that religion is getting people to devote their love and service to a being who is not real or who does not give a damn.

Suppose you are concerned that religion has doctrines and morals that thwart truth and cause harm.

Who is to blame?  It is men who say God commanded these things so it is safe to say they are the real blamers.  If God said it indeed then he is trying to get them blamed more than him.

If you blame people because of what God is said then if there is no God or God did not say it then the blamer is you.  The problem is you.

You simply cannot give even a genuine message from God that blames without being a blamer for you are deciding you speak for him and you cannot prove he said it.

If God exists only in the mind of the believers that will have consequences.  Errors lead to harms and lies and many unnoticed or unintended harms.  Believers will act at times like the object of belief is real.  They say good comes from God.  In fact it comes from them if there is no God.  But there is also the harms of faith in God to worry about.  So the good and the bad is from the believer.  They try to deflect, they try to make God responsible, but that does not erase their own responsibility.  If God does not exist he cannot be responsible in your place even partly.  If God does exist he still cannot be responsible.  See your own immaturity and admit the truth.

Only what is valuable and important gets counterfeited. Religion counterfeits truth. It risks truth as well. We need knowledge and truth and that is what we want faith in God for - God by default would be totally intelligent so he is a shortcut to truth if he speaks to us.

God is the being you can have a relationship with and who is absolute limitless truth and love and there is no real love without truth.

Therefore to see God through the lens of a religion, Muhammad or Jesus is idolatry. Seeing somebody's image of God is not seeing God. To take a person as an authority on God who is absolute truth is contradictory. Whatever comes from a man even if right by its nature could be lies or error and to make the word of man absolute truth is foolish. Absolute truth by definition means it stands for itself and should be taken on its own authority alone.

There is never a revelation from God except from somebody who thinks God is inspiring them what to say. That is dangerous because of the chance of error and the chance that the person is trying to be treated like God the easy way. If you are treated as God’s mouth that is as good as being treated as God and you have no hassle having to keep being angelic all the time or right all the time. A fraud then is more likely to claim to be a prophet than a god. You can just say God occasionally inspires you so that you don't need to be right or sinless all the time. You can even say revelation is a process so that you can err and work with God to weed it out and that the end product, a holy book or whatever, is the authoritative truth from God.

In some cases, the person claims to get revelations from God but does not claim to be inspired in how he reports these revelations to others so errors can creep in. That is the craftiest scheme of all.

The goal is to get seen as a revelator of God and protecting your claims from exposure and ensuring that there is an "explanation" for the exposure. It works very well for lots of religious frauds thrive after being caught out. They get the believers to doubt themselves when they experience doubts about them.

Because godlings and prophets are human and they know it they will do the following. They will say God inspired their teachings thus they turn their word into the word of God. If man cannot be God then speaking for God is just as good. Claiming to be divine becomes a problem if you are caught sinning or unable to do a miracle. The drive behind godlings and prophets is arrogance and craftiness and their ego gets addicted to people believing in them - believing rubbish because another says it is true is a huge compliment to them.

If you would like your word to be treated as the word of God then you can follow a prophet and revere his utterances and that may be enough for you. You make his word your own and he does the work. Easy!

PEOPLE ARE TOO UNRELIABLE TO SPEAK FOR GOD

Lies are very rife. Individuals lie and more importantly keep up structures that lie such as politics and culture and religion. They lie by not challenging lies and letting people wander into the dangerous blind unknown.

A man says God spoke to him. Other men say that he did speak to him.

Is human nature too deceptive to take such ideas seriously?

For you to say all people are irrational or bad or sinful means you are cutting off your own foundation for if those things are true then who can trust what you say? You are left with a foundation but it is a weakened one. Sometimes there is no foundation but that depends on the magnitude of the lies.

Some limit the irrationality to religious believers. They say we get by knowing we cannot fully trust people but given the importance of God claims and the claims of religion we should pay no heed to religious believers. Life can go on without believing anybody's religious claims.

If you are a prophet or Messiah or pope who reports what you say is a revelation from God then what? You are top of the untrustworthy list. If people can get by without paying much attention to religious hearsay they definitely can get by without you. You are in such a tiny minority. There is also the problem that you are asking people to trust your miracle stories even though miracles need a high standard of testing for they are so like magic. Let the evidence make the claim not you!

Protestants say that all we do is tainted with sin which is why God cannot be pleased with our good works so only grace, his free gift of salvation can save us. Catholics say the same thing except their idea of what grace does is different. It is a fact that nobody really loves God with all their heart so that they would suffer forever for him. He does not get the love he deserves for his perfect love. These faiths and Islam warn about how clever Satan is and that Satan manipulates everybody so it gets worse.

If you are coming from the angle that all people lie, this adds to the mistrust especially in God matters.

The religionists wreck their own foundation. Religion is not about God or faith at all but about culture. God and faith are just props for the culture. There is no foundation left. Religion cannot be inherently morality promoting or morality preserving.

Imagine you are Jesus who said that nobody is good but God. Imagine you are his mouthpiece St Paul who said that all are divorced from God by sin. You are asking others to be so keen to accuse that they would take your unreliable word for it to blacken people as sinners who have no God in them until they repent or whatever. That is just hate. It also shows your pride. Religious leaders are masters at using humility to hide their pride. Catholicism reaches a new low by inventing the idea that babies have no God in them until baptism puts him in.

Religion is not about character building but about religious character building. You are not to be a good person for the poor but a good person for the poor for it pleases Jesus. This outlook says that the suffering of others does not matter. It treats helping suffering as an afterthought after serving Jesus or a tool to serve him with. What about your own? It says the same thing. Only growing a good character through it matters. That is hard and cruel enough but to say that only a good character in the eyes of Jesus matters is worse. You may interject, "Does suffering matter a lot or not at all? Is it only becoming more compassionate, fair, kind and loving that matters?" You are turning your suffering into a means to an end. There is a pride in saying you should be compassionate and fair and loving just because you can as if what they are for does not matter. Suffering is by definition a degradation and that is what matters. It matters that suffering demeans you and by definition nothing else can matter. It is cruel to use suffering either your own or somebody else's as a virtue seed pot.

If there is any time it is right to say that man should not be listened to just because man in general is unreliable, it is with God. You should not take man’s word for it that God speaks even if God does speak.

Ad hominem arguments are mistakes for they attack the person saying something instead of challenging what they have said. If x says God exists don't say, "X is stupid so I will not listen." That does not make x wrong. Keep your focus on the argument made by x. It is possible for a system of thought to be ad hominem on itself. When and only when religion claims that God uses it to show his love and good works which means ad hominem applies to religionists and religion. Religion by calling man unreliable in God matters is inviting it.

To say all people are not very dependable is saying you are not that reliable either. So logic says you should not be taken at your word without checking. But evidence gets you out of the quandary. You cannot use God to get people's attention. Realistically a man saying God said x or y is going to get more of a hearing than one who does not.

THE DANGER OF DIVINE REVELATION CLAIMS

A sense of morality does not necessarily intend what is best for others - a moral person may put obedience before the happiness of others. That would happen more often than not even if it should not. But there is another reason why moral teaching is risky.

If good people can be got to do terrible things by an authority figure when they feel they should obey then clearly there is a risk that all morality systems carry. They demand obedience and that comes across as being more important than what is commanded. To obey a God telling you to love your neighbour in fact stresses obedience to God more than love. Obedience and love - either of them can make you miserable and joyless. But obedience is more likely to do that than love. If God commands you to love there is a risk of putting you off love. Loving for no reason and certainly not because you were commanded is everything while loving for God orders it is nothing in comparison.

Doing the good can be more dangerous than doing the bad. That is true if you do good just because it is good and good is more dangerous if you are ordered or pressured to do it.

God presumably only directly commands one in a billion! The trouble is the rest us of have to go to his prophets and holy book or religion to get the information second-hand or infinite-hand. So God sends you to man - how strange and how risky. The risk increases if the authority is seen as a man of God or an authorised spokesperson for God and that is down to the fact that belief in God goes with the doctrine that God lets evil and suffering and death happen for good reasons- he uses them. Whoever says that it is okay for God to send terrible sickness to kill babies but not to tell you to make the sickness in a lab is just a fantasist not a believer. She or he is a hypocrite. In their hypocrisy, they insult those who suffer for they use their suffering to build hypocritical delusions on it.

The good may feel that they are so good that some bad now is fine. We see that once God and religion get involved in moral deliberations that this is happening in some form.

If right is right and wrong is wrong then let that be enough! Why do you need to reinforce and increase the problem caused by commands by making out God commands?

Even if God is right for us and moral then it is clearly a very dangerous thing to go to man for his word. No loving God would want that.

Finally

An idol is whatever you think of as being of supreme importance when it does not deserve it. The idea of God will be the biggest idol of all for God is not about what you think of him or think he is. If you have the truth about God and his true religion and your motive is, “If I didn't have this I'd make do with inventing it” that is still idolatry for the truth means nothing to you. You will never get away with trying to make truth what you want truth to be.

Disobeying a man-made religious rule to say not draw Muhammad or to baptise your child does not make you the instigator. They are the instigator and you are the hero. When your rule is against somebody's rule for you what else can you do but break it?