If God really existed there would be no religion

This may sound a little Nietzschean, blasphemous or plainly heretical but explain to me why the creation of Gods were not an obvious and natural outcome to deal with our ancestral fears?

We’ve made up thousands of Gods since the beginning of time. Up until the Greeks, there was a God for everything: fire, love, disasters, etc. For instance, Hera was the Goddess of marriage and the queen of Olympus, Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, and the protector of sailors, Apollo was the god of music and healing, etc.

Some of these Gods were very mean and, according to the stories, they loved being Gods. They were in so many ways necessary evils.

From my view point, if God really existed there would be no religion. We came up with religion, and I concede it was an important step in evolution. Making it out of the caves was at best an ordeal.

God, to me, is simply an imaginative metaphor designed to meditate on the paradox of existence. I think that at a deeper level, the idea of God is a tool to help us reflect on why we are here — at all!

To me, religion has very little to do with God or faith. Religion has always remained a powerful tool to control human beings. After all, we had to have control in order to build this extraordinary modern civilization — impossible without slavery and control. I know it’s not pretty to think about but any history book is filled with examples of that. The deeper you research, the more plain it becomes.

The aim of religion has always been to control the masses. Clergy and kings alike were in tandem to rob individuals of their liberties and more important of their money or goods through taxes. A personal sense of self and personal freedom were not rights until much later in the 19th and 20th centuries. When you look at the dates it can be quite scary how long it took…and we can all see prejudice and racism are not over.

Fear, shame and guilt are the primary enforcing weapons of religion. This is not an attack or even a political statement. Punishment and blasphemy were invented to further assist the men (not the women except a few queens and female rulers here and there) in charge, to not only take power but also make sure they kept it.

The carrots of redemption and life after death were dangled in front of the credulous so they would forever keep in line. What religion doesn’t have the promise of an after life much better than this one? It says a lot about how we value life on this planet.

No fault of ours, we’ve been so damn scared for hundreds of thousands of years.

I heard it whispered that fear is the mother of intelligence.

If our fears run so deep (and they do), it must mean our intelligence does to, doesn’t it — to go beyond fear? Isn’t it what courage is all about?

A friend of mine used to say: “fear is the anti-ignorant emotion”. Fear of death is the common sense number one fear, along with the fear of not having enough or the fear of not making it, then we can mention the fear of the future, of the past, fear of inadequacy, responsibility, fear of emptiness and rejection, fear of dinner conversations, of silence, of darkness or intimacy, etc.

Being human is full of uncertainties and we always have needed protection.

Isn’t it logical and wise to safely hypothesize that God only exists in the spiritual quantum of our free spirit and clearly does not exist in the atomic realm (our physical consciousness)?

Show me God! Oh, I know, we say God is everywhere, in a smile or a flower, in the air…in our minds, etc. But these are metaphors and projections, right? God, in so many ways, is a great metaphor to deal with the mystery of life itself.

Why is it so difficult to realize collectively that we have undergone a quantum genetic mutation probably right around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Look at us since then! The elevator, the telegraph, the steam engine, vaccines, dynamite…fast forward to the computer, the car, airplanes, etc. Can you imagine someone from 1781 landing in a New York City on an airplane with an iPhone in hand?

If God existed, then we are the Gods, the new Gods. To me, spiritual consciousness is a deep and freeing awareness of the unfathomable and the ethereal. It’s wonderful to imagine what you cannot see! Children do it so well.

Science is deeply preoccupied with the totality of existence since the big bang or should I say before the idea of time itself. How then, can the totality be a time construct? Beginnings and ends are time-bound. A great sage will tell you that only the heart in total surrender and watchfulness can traffic in the unknowable; you must let go of everything in order to even begin to sense it. Any pretense to know or understand is of the mind and its arguing ego companion.

I also heard it said that only our free spirit can navigate without fear or a compass; it is the very essence of what we are. I love Eastern philosophy as well because it is so full of wisdom.

As an artist and a writer, I seek a deep connection to intuitive awareness. I present creative musings. Science uses intuition to establish new paths of inquiry and advance possible theories. I favor a philosophical exploration through my own intuition rather than fit-all reasoning. I am not a follower nor do I ask anyone to follow me. I see myself as a traveling mystic and emotional spirit filtering universal consciousness in the now. I feel that I am the witness of a great cosmic joke playing with my being on this earth inside the tremendous beauty and mystery of life.

...perhaps life is not so serious, we are.

Philippe Stonebeck