This is my view:
"God" (in the context of this discussion: monotheism) is a social concept (cultural software), real or not. Thus, his actual existence is irrelevant to practical belief.
So, if one "believes" in God, it is equivalent to believing in the social concept and that its social effects are desirable.
Conversely, not believing in God is equivalent to believing in another social concept that will always fill the vacuum in the cognitive-values space (the philosophical concept of both the self and its relation to the community).
In the shared philosophical space this replacement occurs once the vacuum, that was before occupied by the shared community concept of God, expands to other individuals in a community.
Unfortunately, on a social level, there is no escaping software.
Rejection of one type of software ensures its replacement by another type of software of differing structure and social effects.
This is why God should be considered by everyone outside of his provable historicity, including by anyone hung up on a sola scriptura derived concept of truth that they might reject for whatever reason. Neither the provability of scriptural history nor scripture contents are solely appropriate methods for considering the concept of God.
The evaluation should be based on what you personally want for society.
To illustrate, the bible could be full of stories of purple-people-eaters and it would not make one ounce of meaningful difference. The only aspect of religion that matters is the social software (theological framework) that it installs, and its effect. Scripture is merely the myth that is the executable file, to beat the metaphor to death.
The over-emphasis on personal scriptural interpretation over a coherent theological framework has confused large numbers of individuals over the past millenia as to the nature of religion, its historical purpose, and the nature of its primary sources (in the modern West: scripture, in the pre-modern West: myth).
To wit, Rabbis do not believe that scripture is literal. It is a book of coded analogy that installs the software. That Christian sects take it literally conveys faulty or otherwise thin theologies that parishioners understand very little about.
Moving on...
Religion, at its core, is about ontology. That is, it is about the definition of person-hood. It follows that, in parallel, atheism is also, at its core, about person-hood.
To begin with the Greeks (though the most fruitful beginning for study is with the Egyptians), an example of a fully expanded ontology would be arguably represented by Platonic Idealism. That is, your person-hood (identity) is anchored to a hierarchically superior ideal of who you are and can become.
You, and by extension greater society, are an imperfect representation of a heavenly ideal that both you and society spend your existences attempting to better represent. You do not have any legitimacy as an individual apart from this definition, and its manifestation in community.
In summary, both your individual and social identities (your relation to the group) are dependent on an objective truth that is not "subject" to individual interpretation. Right and wrong and what constitutes civilizational / community success are all immutable concepts rooted in a divine ideal that you are always attempting to mirror.
This theology can be framed in the secular-ish philosophical language of the Greeks, but its root is in the genesis of human civilization and its theological / mythological underpinnings that are indistinguishable at this stage of civilization.
We only have knowledge of the history for which we have written records, and thus perhaps our most thorough knowledge of an Ancient civilization comes from Egypt.
In Egypt, we see the theology, that is reflected in Platonic Idealism, in the concept of Ma'at. This is the concept, central to Egyptian civilization, that was representative of the Heavenly ideal of Egyptian society as created in the first moments of existence in their creation myth.
The entirety of their religion, with a few qualifications, essentially had to do with restoring Ma'at in the constant struggle against Chaos.
First Chapter recommendation: Order, Chaos, and the World to Come by Norman Cohn http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Chaos-World...os+ma%27at
Have you ever seen a statue in Europe, or a painting, that had a Hero lancing or stepping on a large serpent? They are rather common. This imagery takes its root from the perennial mythology/theology that held the fight of Order against Chaos as its central struggle.
In Egyptian theology, Set (ironically also a representative of a lesser more intermittent Chaos - their theological understanding was complex) accompanied Ra on his nightly boat ride through the underworld, wherein Set was responsible for lancing the ultimate representation of outer-waters Chaos represented by the Dragon / Serpent.
There are artistic representations of everyone from Greek Heroes to Joan of Arc to the Virgin Mary completing the act of either lancing or putting the serpent underfoot. This is the mythological representation of the subjugation of Chaos to Order.
We see the same central theme across ancient mythology/theology, as the above recommended book will explain.
To reiterate the theme: civilization and its individuals hold themselves to be imperfect reflections of, and irreducibly anchored to in terms of their core identity, a heavenly ideal that they ceaselessly work to recreate (and thus work to recreate Heaven on Earth). This involves a constant struggle against the forces of Chaos, which occasionally win. However, a new order, and thus a better reflection of the ideal, always arises to take the place of the broken order.
This Heavenly ideal is created by a demiurge, a creator god that is the ancient understanding of God across most ancient cultures, and is the objective truth to which man is ontologically anchored. The Heavenly ideal is your potential and destiny as a person. It is society's potential, destiny, and eternal representation of true Order. It is Heaven, God's finest creation, and the ontological connection to it is the anchor that exists between Heaven and Earth.
There exists a variety of sources that can lead you through the slide from a fully expanded ontological philosophy / theology to where we are today with a flat ontology. This flat ontology means that we have no anchor for person-hood outside of ourselves and our individual subjective interpretations of reality. If you choose to investigate, note that it only took one seemingly minor theological adjustment to open the logical door that began a two thousand year slide to rootless individual subjectivism. I'll leave it to you to discover the errors through your reading, should you be interested. Further discussion is out of scope, and frankly you deserve to read it from historical experts.
While I don't know of any authors that aren't at least a little biased or sometimes polemical (even historical theologians and philosophers all seem to have their biases), I can recommend Nick Laos http://nicolaslaos.com/ as a good source. He has an article online, that is really more like a short book, that will give you the basics. http://www.4pt.su/en/content/civilizatio...cal-causes Be sure to copy and paste the text into a word file for highlighting and ease of keeping your place. It'll take you some time to get through it.
Also, he has a book called The Metaphysics of World Order that is the more fleshed out version of the article. http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-World-...bc?ie=UTF8
Nick is dense to read, even for someone used to dense reading, if you aren't formally educated in philosophy. However, one does not need to grasp every detail to grasp the full picture. Often, I only understand 50-80% of what he writes but I keep plowing and I recommend that you do the same toward receiving the general message and most pertinent details. Also, he doesn't delve further than the Greeks. The extended Ancient theology needs to be read somewhere else, if interested. Last, Nick is distantly politically associated with persona-non-grata Aleksandr Dugin, so, you know, you'll get super-edge credit for reading him. There might be alternatives to Laos, but he's one of the most scary-intelligent men I've ever read and so I find him to be a worthy recommendation on this general topic of political-theology.
Theology and philosophy is a bitch to sift through pretty much from the advent of Christianity on, simply because of the copious theories and writing that manifested from the early Christians attempting to justify Christianity, meld it with Greek philosophy, fight what they considered to be heresy, adjust theology to geographic intellectual culture (from Greece to Rome for instance), adjust for purposes of governing (Rome), and again adjust for all of the philosophical add-ons and arguable theological errors that were tacked on since the beginning. And it just continues for two thousand years until we arrived at secular individual subjectivism and nihilism. I tend to try to read for the larger picture. Whatever one's approach to the material, this realm of understanding is, indeed, the software of our society if anyone cares to jump in with two feet.
Last, what I found with myself, and this is likely the case with many skeptics, is that a true belief in God is not difficult to arrive at naturally if we arrive at it via the correct avenue for our disposition. That avenue, at least for me, is the one of discovery of a theological deeper meaning and a theological history that is compared with our so-called progress, motivated by an undercurrent of belief in the goodness and potential of man and his civilization. In other words, getting the root of what religion is, what its rites and theological frameworks actually mean, and how this affects and facilitates a eminently functional civilization as well as individual spiritual healing or "progress" when relevant to a specific religion. Out of all of that logic, and comparing the results of the two extremes (ie: theocracy and secularism) I can honestly say that with a full heart, and no caveats nor hesitation, that I believe in God. Most importantly, that last step in belief is one of Faith and not Logic. Plato would agree with the necessity of that last step in arriving at Truth.
"God" (in the context of this discussion: monotheism) is a social concept (cultural software), real or not. Thus, his actual existence is irrelevant to practical belief.
So, if one "believes" in God, it is equivalent to believing in the social concept and that its social effects are desirable.
Conversely, not believing in God is equivalent to believing in another social concept that will always fill the vacuum in the cognitive-values space (the philosophical concept of both the self and its relation to the community).
In the shared philosophical space this replacement occurs once the vacuum, that was before occupied by the shared community concept of God, expands to other individuals in a community.
Unfortunately, on a social level, there is no escaping software.
Rejection of one type of software ensures its replacement by another type of software of differing structure and social effects.
This is why God should be considered by everyone outside of his provable historicity, including by anyone hung up on a sola scriptura derived concept of truth that they might reject for whatever reason. Neither the provability of scriptural history nor scripture contents are solely appropriate methods for considering the concept of God.
The evaluation should be based on what you personally want for society.
To illustrate, the bible could be full of stories of purple-people-eaters and it would not make one ounce of meaningful difference. The only aspect of religion that matters is the social software (theological framework) that it installs, and its effect. Scripture is merely the myth that is the executable file, to beat the metaphor to death.
The over-emphasis on personal scriptural interpretation over a coherent theological framework has confused large numbers of individuals over the past millenia as to the nature of religion, its historical purpose, and the nature of its primary sources (in the modern West: scripture, in the pre-modern West: myth).
To wit, Rabbis do not believe that scripture is literal. It is a book of coded analogy that installs the software. That Christian sects take it literally conveys faulty or otherwise thin theologies that parishioners understand very little about.
Moving on...
Religion, at its core, is about ontology. That is, it is about the definition of person-hood. It follows that, in parallel, atheism is also, at its core, about person-hood.
To begin with the Greeks (though the most fruitful beginning for study is with the Egyptians), an example of a fully expanded ontology would be arguably represented by Platonic Idealism. That is, your person-hood (identity) is anchored to a hierarchically superior ideal of who you are and can become.
You, and by extension greater society, are an imperfect representation of a heavenly ideal that both you and society spend your existences attempting to better represent. You do not have any legitimacy as an individual apart from this definition, and its manifestation in community.
In summary, both your individual and social identities (your relation to the group) are dependent on an objective truth that is not "subject" to individual interpretation. Right and wrong and what constitutes civilizational / community success are all immutable concepts rooted in a divine ideal that you are always attempting to mirror.
This theology can be framed in the secular-ish philosophical language of the Greeks, but its root is in the genesis of human civilization and its theological / mythological underpinnings that are indistinguishable at this stage of civilization.
We only have knowledge of the history for which we have written records, and thus perhaps our most thorough knowledge of an Ancient civilization comes from Egypt.
In Egypt, we see the theology, that is reflected in Platonic Idealism, in the concept of Ma'at. This is the concept, central to Egyptian civilization, that was representative of the Heavenly ideal of Egyptian society as created in the first moments of existence in their creation myth.
The entirety of their religion, with a few qualifications, essentially had to do with restoring Ma'at in the constant struggle against Chaos.
First Chapter recommendation: Order, Chaos, and the World to Come by Norman Cohn http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Chaos-World...os+ma%27at
Have you ever seen a statue in Europe, or a painting, that had a Hero lancing or stepping on a large serpent? They are rather common. This imagery takes its root from the perennial mythology/theology that held the fight of Order against Chaos as its central struggle.
In Egyptian theology, Set (ironically also a representative of a lesser more intermittent Chaos - their theological understanding was complex) accompanied Ra on his nightly boat ride through the underworld, wherein Set was responsible for lancing the ultimate representation of outer-waters Chaos represented by the Dragon / Serpent.
There are artistic representations of everyone from Greek Heroes to Joan of Arc to the Virgin Mary completing the act of either lancing or putting the serpent underfoot. This is the mythological representation of the subjugation of Chaos to Order.
We see the same central theme across ancient mythology/theology, as the above recommended book will explain.
To reiterate the theme: civilization and its individuals hold themselves to be imperfect reflections of, and irreducibly anchored to in terms of their core identity, a heavenly ideal that they ceaselessly work to recreate (and thus work to recreate Heaven on Earth). This involves a constant struggle against the forces of Chaos, which occasionally win. However, a new order, and thus a better reflection of the ideal, always arises to take the place of the broken order.
This Heavenly ideal is created by a demiurge, a creator god that is the ancient understanding of God across most ancient cultures, and is the objective truth to which man is ontologically anchored. The Heavenly ideal is your potential and destiny as a person. It is society's potential, destiny, and eternal representation of true Order. It is Heaven, God's finest creation, and the ontological connection to it is the anchor that exists between Heaven and Earth.
There exists a variety of sources that can lead you through the slide from a fully expanded ontological philosophy / theology to where we are today with a flat ontology. This flat ontology means that we have no anchor for person-hood outside of ourselves and our individual subjective interpretations of reality. If you choose to investigate, note that it only took one seemingly minor theological adjustment to open the logical door that began a two thousand year slide to rootless individual subjectivism. I'll leave it to you to discover the errors through your reading, should you be interested. Further discussion is out of scope, and frankly you deserve to read it from historical experts.
While I don't know of any authors that aren't at least a little biased or sometimes polemical (even historical theologians and philosophers all seem to have their biases), I can recommend Nick Laos http://nicolaslaos.com/ as a good source. He has an article online, that is really more like a short book, that will give you the basics. http://www.4pt.su/en/content/civilizatio...cal-causes Be sure to copy and paste the text into a word file for highlighting and ease of keeping your place. It'll take you some time to get through it.
Also, he has a book called The Metaphysics of World Order that is the more fleshed out version of the article. http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-World-...bc?ie=UTF8
Nick is dense to read, even for someone used to dense reading, if you aren't formally educated in philosophy. However, one does not need to grasp every detail to grasp the full picture. Often, I only understand 50-80% of what he writes but I keep plowing and I recommend that you do the same toward receiving the general message and most pertinent details. Also, he doesn't delve further than the Greeks. The extended Ancient theology needs to be read somewhere else, if interested. Last, Nick is distantly politically associated with persona-non-grata Aleksandr Dugin, so, you know, you'll get super-edge credit for reading him. There might be alternatives to Laos, but he's one of the most scary-intelligent men I've ever read and so I find him to be a worthy recommendation on this general topic of political-theology.
Theology and philosophy is a bitch to sift through pretty much from the advent of Christianity on, simply because of the copious theories and writing that manifested from the early Christians attempting to justify Christianity, meld it with Greek philosophy, fight what they considered to be heresy, adjust theology to geographic intellectual culture (from Greece to Rome for instance), adjust for purposes of governing (Rome), and again adjust for all of the philosophical add-ons and arguable theological errors that were tacked on since the beginning. And it just continues for two thousand years until we arrived at secular individual subjectivism and nihilism. I tend to try to read for the larger picture. Whatever one's approach to the material, this realm of understanding is, indeed, the software of our society if anyone cares to jump in with two feet.
Last, what I found with myself, and this is likely the case with many skeptics, is that a true belief in God is not difficult to arrive at naturally if we arrive at it via the correct avenue for our disposition. That avenue, at least for me, is the one of discovery of a theological deeper meaning and a theological history that is compared with our so-called progress, motivated by an undercurrent of belief in the goodness and potential of man and his civilization. In other words, getting the root of what religion is, what its rites and theological frameworks actually mean, and how this affects and facilitates a eminently functional civilization as well as individual spiritual healing or "progress" when relevant to a specific religion. Out of all of that logic, and comparing the results of the two extremes (ie: theocracy and secularism) I can honestly say that with a full heart, and no caveats nor hesitation, that I believe in God. Most importantly, that last step in belief is one of Faith and not Logic. Plato would agree with the necessity of that last step in arriving at Truth.
![[Image: bodies-revealed-02-1040lg010710.jpg]](http://www.aolcdn.com/photogalleryassets/latnews/906818/bodies-revealed-02-1040lg010710.jpg)
![[Image: religiosity%20vs%20iq.jpg]](http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1178650819549_2039144714_8492/religiosity%20vs%20iq.jpg)
![[Image: 0316-pew-religion_1.jpg?alias=standard_600x400]](http://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2015/03/0316-pew-religion_1.jpg?alias=standard_600x400)
![[Image: Napoleon-religious-quotes.jpg]](http://www.quote-coyote.com/album/small/Napoleon-religious-quotes.jpg)
![[Image: mvq9Ax8.png]](http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/files/2013/08/mvq9Ax8.png)