Let God Decide For You

"Don't think for yourself! Let God Do all the thinking for you!"

 If God was a new product being sold to people today, like "Google glasses" or Elexa, the above sentence might very well be a sales slogan to convince people - especially one's who are exhausted from overwork and stress - that their life would be infinitely easier, if they just let "God take the wheel." In fact, that's probably how anyone who ever joined a cult, or gang, or religion, thought about it.   

The objective of religion is to capture and keep at least part of the human mind in a permanent state of adolescence, so that it is forever looking to an "all knowing" parent for answers, as if that eternal parent were both an Oracle and our god; deserving of our love and worship because of its "super intelligence." (One might as well be talking about Artificial Intelligence, Google, or even an alien species.) 

It is our real parents, ironically enough, who often work so hard to both endear and addict us to the idea of a "parent" who is far greater than they are, and one that we should remain permanently dependent upon our entire lives. And not only is doing so the true "meaning" of life, they further assure us, but to fail to accept this and believe it your entire life will only result in your eternal torment. 

Our "supernatural" parents are comprised of a "father" in heaven, who is said to have created the universe, and a "mother of God," who is said to have been the doorway through which he entered onto its stage, an act that perhaps gives some credence to the idea that our own universe was born from another, with a black hole serving as much as a Fallopian tube as a conduit between universes. Perhaps the "big bang," in other words, was shot out of the cannon of a black hole.

Our parents endear and addict us to a "god" often as a way of strengthening their own authority, for it is God who commands us to obey and respect our parents. And this clearly helps parents assert control over the thinking of their child, which helps in the development of that child. But once that child becomes an adult, after a lifetime of being conditioned to be dependent upon a "parent" to make our most "moral" decisions for us, the person does not simply abandon the need for such dependency, but instead finds other things to "depend" upon, like their ideas about race, their political ideology, their nation, or their religion. 

In this way, people around the world are domesticated like farm animals, and attack each other on command like pit bulls, while always feeling that what they are doing, no matter how egregious or ugly it may be to others, is always in the service of trying to please the master. And we are often trying to "please our master," because we have usually taken some kind of "oath" of obedience to always try to do so. In Catholicism for example, this is done through the "sacrament" of Confirmation.

And when we take an "oath" to please and obey (and even defend) our master, whether that master is an earthly monarch or a heavenly god, we are surrendering our willingness to think for ourselves to the very degree we are claiming we must obey orders. Obedience to laws, in other words, is trumped by obedience to the author of those laws, whenever those authors command us to demonstrate our "loyalty" to our oath by correctly choosing between the two. And we all know who gets to decide if the person made the "correct" choice.

 But when most people think the greatest moral and religious virtue of all is "obedience" to a God or a king and unwavering devotion to a "belief" or an idea, they will obey that God or monarch even when he commands them to disobey all of his laws, especially when doing so is said to be a matter of salvation or national security. 

When you can do that, it's pretty easy to get us all to rush out onto some battlefield somewhere, and start hacking each other to pieces, in the name of one nation or religion or another. And anyone or anything we chose to "obey," is our god. And perhaps the greatest "god" of all comes from the infallibility of our "beliefs," for as Robert Combs pointed out, it is our "unquestioned beliefs" that "are the real authorities of a culture." It is for those "beliefs" that we turn the whole world into an altar, and sacrifice ourselves and each other, out of love for our gods.