Suppressed Perspectives
Most people would agree with me that their God is not a human being. Likewise, he is not a superhuman. As such, God should barely have human qualities. Since God represents all creation, he should have a form that manifests uniformly across species and natural phenomena. He would apply uniformly to a whale, an elephant, a cat, a flea, a bacterium, a stone, a baobab, a tuna, an eagle, a grain of sand, an oxygen atom, water, and so on.
The Bible gives God humanlike qualities because the story is told from a human perspective. The God in the Bible has human qualities and, therefore, is more of a superhuman. For example, he talks in human language. He told Moses to remove his shoes because the ground he stood on was holy. He writes with a human hand as he did on the wall, addressing King Belshazzar with the inscription “mene mene tekel parsin,” or at least he sends someone to write. Don’t forget he has a book in which he writes and will use to call out your names – pretty much like a teacher calling out misbehaving students. He demands attention when he asks humans to worship no other god but him. He gets angry as a human would like he did when he burned down Sodom and Gomorrah. He chooses like he did when he chose Jacob and not Esau. He even chooses a country, like he says about Israel. All these and many others are human qualities.
In short, writers of the Bible imagined a humanlike god. Assuming they were inspired, such inspiration came from their inner selves and not from a supreme being. Today’s writers, artists, and content creators can relate to the idea that they get their content out of some form of special inspiration. If the authors of the Bible were inspired, it was just like the way other writers experience today. This kind of inspiration is indeed a powerful force. However, inspiration is often about imagination, and it does not automatically mean the content is accurate. Even writing dirty rap songs requires inspiration. Without inspiration, artists would struggle, whether writing songs, poems, or stories. In other words, inspiration is not unique to the authors of the Bible.
If a god existed, it is unlikely that it would resemble a human. Its laws would apply uniformly across all creation. Humans are reasonably insignificant in the universe, and it is unlikely that God would be so much like them. They may be significant on Earth, but not on other planets or galaxies. There are billions of planets, stars, stellar systems, galaxies, and so on, and earthly humans are not close to being at the center of everything.
A universal god would not be limited to humanity, let alone to a specific religion. A god would be more of a force like gravity. Gravity has no human qualities. It does not talk, listen, write, get angry, love, choose, or demand attention. It just applies across all creation uniformly. You obey gravity whether you are a human being or not, living or not, big or small – it is in control. I do not say that gravity is a god, so don’t misquote me. All I am saying is that biblical authors imagined a superhuman. In so doing they convinced the then population that they knew of a god. The people believed them, and since then, generations have passed down the misleading beliefs.
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