Originally Posted by GeistFaust;781881[B
]I think the central and primary issue with the conceptualization of God is that man can not help projecting his own anthropological being onto this abstract being.[/B] This tendency to anthropologize God basically has its roots in the Semitic religions, especially Judaism, which basically sees God as manifesting itself simply in the Jewish people and culture. God was a personal individual and an anthropological character in the Jewish mind, and it enveloped its commands and orders in the form of the law and torah.
This law and torah was built on shanty grounds, and it promoted an ideology laddled with hypocrisy and contradictions. The greatest stupidity about Judaism dealt with its emphasis on that only certain people were chosen by God to receive special messages and revelations. The high priests were the chosen ones to receive the message of God, but the commoner just was not good enough to communicate with the divine and abstract.
This turns God into a hierarchial being, which seems to give preferences to some people over others. I do believe in a natural hierarchy, but it is not determined by God, but rather by nature. This natural hierarchy is determined by things such as survival of the fittest and natural selection. Some people definitely have a certain capacity or talent which makes them more valuable in a certain aspect than another.
That said to make a claim that someone can not all of the sudden contact with God on a spur of the moment whim, without having to be a high priest conducting himself in holy of holies is blasphemous. I think the image of God projected by Judaism is completely misunderstood as well, and it fails to realize that God is merely a subjective feeling about self as it is projected on the environment by the individual self.
This feeling about self in the environment centers and orients itself by the individual feeling itself in the self of environment, and thus God is nothing more than an anthropological concept for man. It can not be anymore than this, and the function of believing in a divine or abstract being is determined by a pleasure motive in man. A pleasure motive in man, which exists in mankind to mitigate and suppress the pain and suffering of life.
The empirical and phenomenal world is the "limit" of all that is metaphysical and ontological. Anything that lies beyond these worlds must accord themselves with the operations, dynamic laws, and functions of the empirical world. It is the empirical world upon which we can sense any understanding of an abstract being.
That is the source of this abstraction of a divine self lies simply within the empirical world, and is determined by the mechanism of the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is this abstract feeling designed and programmed in the mind of men to make them anticipate and desire good and pleasurable things will occur.
This means that if they submit or surrender themselves to some abstract and imaginary world that some good and pleasurable feeling will be created. That in re-creating themselves in this abstract and imaginary world, through perceived good actions and morals, will win them the reward of having pleasure in heaven.
It goes back to an infantile and juvenile desire and feeling which resides in humans from the time they are born, and its a safety net the fall back onto when they feel threatened or in trouble.
Basically the belief in God is nothing but an anthropological projection of a defense mechanism, which is constructed in accordance with the pleasure principle as it acts on our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings pertained to the things we sense and perceive in the empirical world.