...I get the impression that you're conflating the attributes
generally ascribed to a particular sort of christian conception of
god with the idea of god in general. A great many theological systems
have nothing at all to do with "benevolent but severe masters who
must be obeyed".
...The incarnation of Brahman described in the Bhagavad Gita comes a
little close, maybe, when translated into English and passed through
those filters, but the very christian god of a mystic like Meister
Eckhardt, who admits prima facie the folly of attempting to describe
the attributes of god bears very little resemblance to what you've
described.
...a philosophy like Taoism would even reject the label of "god" as
loaded with assumptions and imputed qualities. And I don't know what
Thomas Acquias would say, having described god as "that than which no
greater (thing)can be imagined". [caveat, I'm not sure about the
(thing) and it may have been Saint Augustine, but one of them said it]
...are you willing, despite your admission that hypothetical constructs in the mind can be a source of valuable perspective on the world of space-time, to dismiss all the thought of all the people on the matter of what may exist outside the rage of our senses? ...if your answer to this is yes, then I'll drop the dialogue like a hot potato, conceding that we have no common ground on this matter.
-psypher
> Ludwig Feuerbach, in his work THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY,
> points out that religion is simply anthropology that is unaware of
> itself as such. The idea of benevolent but severe masters who
> must be obeyed is parentally imprinted in the developing infant
> mind, providing a substrate which is so intertwined with the
> developing self-image and self-identity that its adherents become
> deeply emotionally invested in reifying it to the point of forsaking
> reason, logic, rationality, and the subsequent evidence of their own
> senses, and the attributes of any deity are the crystallized and
> absolutized attributes we admire in human beings (strong becomes
> omnipotent, wise becomes omniscient, special becomes unique,
> good, true and beautiful get capitalized, and so on). If people had
> wings, their god-concept would be of a big bird; we create our gods
> in our own image (not the other way around), and it has ever been
> thus.