Today a friend wrote and said unto me:
While reading this (from your "A history not of God, but of the idea of God" post)......"create a sense of him for myself." For several months now I have much enjoyed the freedom from any such sense whatsoever. If it's "obvious" to some that God exists, it's just as obvious to me that there's no such X.
...I remembered you used to believe in "the goddess," a concept you had arrived at yourself. So at least up until or at that time, I can only imagine you must've had some sense that there was some kind of "higher being." What happened since then?
And what I wrote back and said unto her I would like to share with all readers of this blog:
I realized that I was wrong. Before that, I was still laboring under the apprehension that there might be "God," and I preferred to think of her rather than of him (or it). The goddess was also my way of thumbing my nose at the he-god people. But over the course of time I realized that there seemed to be no little justification for going the full monty and thumbing my nose at the whole god concept. Not that thumbing my nose was the object, but I do admit seeming to need to go through such a phase. I think I resented how most of world civilization seems to have conspired to foist god-belief onto everyone, from the cradle.
The real advantage of throwing over the god concept is that I no longer have to bear the burden of its baggage. Everything is much simpler, sort of à la Occam's (or Ockham's) razor. It seems more and more obvious to me that most theological constructions (which can become church dogmas) are attempts to apologize for (in this context, that means create rationalizations for believing) things that seem pretty far-fetched (if not downright stupid or even immoral, such as animal sacrifice, not to even mention various shameful practices regarding slaves and women, the latter being considered a sort of slave themselves, or at least a class of property belonging to men).
