There is a clear division between believers in god and atheists with the gap widening further and further apart. Most people in the western world don’t want to believe in god anymore, they interpret religion negatively and with current religions trying to curtail the freedoms of others by dictating their skewed perceptions of what is right and wrong… who can blame them? For truth seekers its hard to believe in religions that have this kind of track record, especially the religions that are notoriously known for their ignorance and intolerance. It seems only natural to reject these kinds of bigoted organizations in this day and age and that leads most to sympathize with the growing number of atheists, yet it can be just as difficult to NOT believe in god, especially if you have ever had a spiritual experience.
For the agnostics and middle of the road commoners who have a strong desire to get the root of WHY we have created these belief sytems and WHY people believe in these religions, you would be surprised about what you would learn. I often say that if believers learned the roots of their faith, they probably wouldn’t believe anymore, but the same is true in reverse for non-believers… no longer would they be so adamant that there is nothing to believe in, once these processes were truly understood and if that seems a little crazy to you, than look at it this way: believers, believe because they have faith, but by learning the in’s and outs of what they believe in, would prove to just confuse what they accept without question. On the other hand, if non-believers knew why and how we got to this point, they would see that these processes are much more scientific then they would have ever imagined.
It takes years of serious study to understand, but to breif it up as simply as i can: the minds of man developed by understanding the processes of the natural world symbolically and to relate these processes to each other we needed to identify the source of our thoughts, the basis of that understanding, which we saw as being seperate from ourselves. By differentiating our being from our thinking we created a common ground from which we were able to communicate to each other, that common ground we saw as god(s). Therefore god(s) is the faculty that allows us to speak to one another and is ultimately responsible for the further development of language and our extraordinary ability to communicate our thoughts to one another. This was later referred to by philosophers as the ‘Logos’ and is likewise responsible for why we deify the spoken and written word. This is more complex than it already sounds! There are two hemispheres and an even more primitive stem that make up the regions of our brain and they all depend upon the other to facilitate our ability to communicate effectively. The formation of words is the job of one side, the symbols to represent these things that are intangible and cannot simply be ‘pointed at’ with a grunt is another and there is yet another part that contains the memories and the knowledge for us to disseminate the information that is eventually related in a simple word! If this is confusing, your not alone, the process still baffles modern science and was abandonded by early scholars altogether, until just recently.
The inner voice that we all have and interpret today as being just our mind and our thoughts, speaks to us with an authority that supercedes man’s understanding. This inner sense that we all possess urges us forward, it wants to relate to one another and share experiences, and it formulates metaphors that we share and pass down as stories and myths. It is the artist, the creative force within and it has great admiration for whoever is able to bring forward this ideal of self that we all internalize. It recognizes the achievements of our ancestors and it emulates this greatness because we all sense that we are capable of achieving these same divine accomplishments. Yet we are all divorced from this ‘higher’ self and the achievements of those who were somehow able to restore this relationship in conflict became supernatural in our reflection and eventually further apart in our minds from being one and the same. For instance: The greek god Aeolus, the god of the winds, was originally just a leader who taught his people how to harness the wind by hoisting sails on their boats. The same is true for almost every other original god in the ancient world, they can be traced to actual individuals who were later regarded as gods because of the advances they made for mankind. Cronus was actually a king in Libya, who was able to sustain water in the middle of the desert… he was revered in Egypt as Ammon, Mesopotamia knew him as Enki and the levant understood him as El, which they eventually elevated to a supreme position and now we know him as YHWH, the Single invisivible god of the Bible.
The reason that this didn’t confuse the ancients is because they viewed gods differently then we do today, they understood that god exists, but in the mental realm and not the physical, which they regarded equally as REAL and relevant. As socities grew and exchanges of cultures enlightened peopel, they began to question who these shared gods were and why they appeared universal. The idea of gods being like humans also changed and the veneration of heroes seemed a more sensible way of remembering the greats. Eventually this humanization of the divine led to philosophy and eventually to an abstract understanding of god that wasn’t available to the average uneduacated layperson.
By the time of Christ, the worship of gods was mostly out of favor and the only religions that truly survived were the ones that still held the mystery. These schools were known as the mystery religions and from these semi-philosophical and semi-theological beliefs rose a need to do away with the impersonal and immortal gods of old, altogether, in favor of the dying gods, that are ressurected and come back to life the same way that the earth’s vegetation renews itself year after year. The most popular of these life-death and rebirth deities was Jesus, who was easier to relate to and believe in then the elder omnipotent gods primairily because of his humanity and fallibility.
Now although from our perspective, Christianity plunged the world from the modern societies we achieved in Rome into the illiterate dark ages that proceeded it. The question you must ask is: was the dark ages necessary? I think you will discover that they were, we would not be the same compassionate individuals we have become without that humbling experience.
During that time men who saw the inconsistencies in their faith sought to understand god again in the mystical sense, those who were not as enlightened sought to make god and christ concrete and physical, which they’re not and this led to the denial of truth and the perpetuation of a literal interpretation of spirituality. That too though was neccessary for us to discover science and to reject anything based on speculation. If we hadn’t taken these concepts the way that we did, there would have been no advancement in study, if the church hadn’t convened all those councils to discuss and define the tri-nature of Christ, we wouldn’t have bore the abstract thinkers that eventually ushered in this age of reason. Who knows, if christianity never existed and Rome never fell, we might still be living our lives in service to the imperial cults, venerating emperors as divine because they were decreed so by the senate!
Beliefs are complex and seemingly archaic, but upon reflection, they brought us a long way. They may seem ridiculous to us now, but they still hold a tremendous amount of knowledge that we are not yet able to fully understand. The Hindus for example, claim their religion is millions of years old. This seems too fantastic and impossible to us, but they also correctly determined the precise age of the Earth and universe at least 2 millenia before our astronomers were able to. It is unlikely that we would have been able to master the art of agriculture, if we didn’t represent these processes the way that we did, through the myths of demeter, tammuz and Adonis. The greeks knew the liver was a regenerating organ, again something only recently discovered. The wealth of knowledge derived from these religions is endless and I could write a book solely about how incredibly insightful these myths and beliefs are.
So the truth is, that god is that collective higher reasoning within all of us that urges us forward by giving us ways of seeing things in a simpler and easier to understand way, when these things are in actuality, extremely complex and abstract. We still don’t have all the answers, which is why we still have these religions and until we do have all the answers, we will continue to direct our questions to the one being that always appears to have the answers… that higher inner collective voice that we have come to identify as god.
Related articles
- Who Is God and How Do We Know? (naturalspirituality.wordpress.com)
God Triggered Cognition 
Why do you insist that this inner voice is god? Why is it that it can’t be me talking to myself?
It is you as much as you are me and we are all one, but notice the inner voice is almost always larger than just you, sharing memories that aren’t always yours alone. The collective part of our brain is the oldest part, reptilian, back brain, it shares memories of our entire evolution. There is much more to the human soul than just the individual, we have experienced the creation in e very aspect and this is just another vantage point.
What do you imagine it would seem like if we could sense the various parts of our brains communicating with each other? If we could sense the river of information coming from our eyes, or if we had some sense of the processes which are memory recall? These mechanical things, what would it seem like if we could sense them happening?
what you are describing is to percieve things on a cellular level, each cell being individual does have individual sense, however it spoecializes and delegates once it evolves into a collective and is percieved macrosopically as an organ rather than a cell.
That doesn’t answer the question really. I did not describe it as a cellular thing, but a functional thing, such as the flow of information from our eyes or between brain hemispheres, or perhaps the pulse that makes our heart beat. We can sense time, but not always accurately. We often get a feeling that someone is watching us but are unsure why, we have communications from various parts of our brains all the time but do not pay particular attention to them. What would it seem like if we did? Would it be like having a conversation with dozens of people at once? Or is that simply not possible?
You hit it on the head when you described it in temporal terms, if our perceptions were tuned to a higher or lower frequency, we might percieve those things and do already in special circumstances. Some might describe schizophrenia in terms of disassociated cognitive functions. Schizophrenics have been documented as far back as ancient Sumer, however, much of the sciences devoted to psychology have learned little since.