Do you believe that God created man or man created God?

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   VanessaRanayposted 9 years ago

   Do you believe that God created man or man created God?
   
   I do not know what I believe, but I want to hear peoples beliefs and reasons.

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2. 76

   jlparkposted 9 years ago

   I believe that Man created God. When one is struggling, one will reach out for hope, support, a sense of there being something more, something to make the suffering worthwhile.
   
   Faith seems to do this for people, some people not all. So, I think that man created God to make sense of the world and it's suffering, and perhaps religion to lessen the confusion (in the beginning anyway) by applying rules in relation to those Gods.
   
   I'm not a believer, so I may be the only person who feels that Man created God, but it makes sense to me.

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3. 75

   Oztinatoposted 9 years ago

   If we use the dictionary definition of God and not our own self concocted definitions then we have to agree that of course God preceded man. Thoughtful people then used basic commonsense to observe nature and to commune within to "realise God". Those who study the words of famous spiritual teachers and who sincerely seek answers discover the truth about the soul within, God and our place in the universe. Those who spend too much time accruing wealth and forgetting humane ethics become blinded to these basic truths. Others who keep an open mind eventually see the unfathomable and beautiful universe itself as proof of God.

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   Commonsensethinkposted 9 years ago

   I will put aside for one moment my contention that no gods (plural deliberately chosen) can be scientifically proved to exist, and raise rather the question: if there were a single god, why did the European colonists have to take this god and all their teachings to other parts of the world with them? Why was this single omnipotent god not already there?
   
   Shortly after the British colonised Fiji in the 19th century, one of the colonists' leading religious figures there complained that the local people were still worshipping Dakuwaqa (the Fijian shark god).
   
   When the Spanish Conquistadors moved into Central America, the Aztecs were worshipping their own pantheon (Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli etc), while in their South American conquests the Incas were in turn worshipping their own pantheon (Inti, Illapa and Co.).
   
   In Europe 2,400 years ago the Greeks worshipped Zeus and the Greek pantheon. When the Vikings first moved upon their conquests of other parts of Europe, they took with them the Norse pantheon (Odin, Thor, Freya and Co.).
   
   And then in India for hundreds of years has existed the Indian pantheon (Brahma, Lakshmi, Shiva etc.). I have met Hindus who have told me that the Hindu pantheon predates the Jewish (and hence Christian) God.
   
   So if there were simply one god, why do or did we have all these others? Man obviously either invented all but one of them, or alternatively all of them! (Unless of course you are going to conclude that all of them exist! No chance of that, is there?).
   
   And in every location on the planet, many different gods were invented, but only one location got it right? Doesn't that just stretch the imagination  a little?
   
   I will now come back to my contention that there is no way of scientifically proving the existence of any god, and that all gods were invented by primitive men in the communities in which they lived.
   
   If people want to believe otherwise, then I will happily leave them to carry on with their beliefs in their own way - provided they do no harm to anyone else and do not impose their opinions upon others (fundamentalist Muslims in particular - please note and observe!). That is democracy in action, and we should all accordingly show each other the appropriate respect no matter how differently we view these issues.

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      Taopiposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are monotheistic, the rest polytheistic.   Hinduism predates Judaism by nearly 2100 years and is the oldest extant religion.  I think polytheism is the most imaginative by far.

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   ValKarasposted 9 years ago

   I think that man should evolve his own consciousness and stop relying on collective consciousness for answers. I have spent decades de-hypnotizing myself from suggestive influences of the culture-market which is at its best confusing, if not normative, misleading, and negativistic. It's insulting to our basic human dignity that we always need an authority figure to tell us what to think, feel, and believe, as if we don't have our own brain to figure out what intuitively and logically sounds correct to us.
   When anybody quotes others for saying this or that, I ask them : "What do YOU think?"
   
   So, here is what I think about your question. I think that religion was born out of man's fear of the unknown. It started with something like thunder being a "voice of god", and mushroomed into a whole garden variety of superstitious beliefs and organized religions that mainly played on man's fear and guilt to put them into obedient state of mind  -  with a clear agenda of grabbing the power. Sometimes it's good to see a phenomenon at its extreme where it's mostly recognizable, and during Middle Ages church was displaying its true face by being more powerful than mighty kings of Europe.
   
   HOWEVER, since the discovery of quantum mechanics, the question of universal consciousness got its entirely new interpretation. Not a complete one, because humans are not wired in their brains to fathom the true  nature of something so complex and out of our range of conceptualization. But a humble one, just enough to state that beside the cosmic components of matter, light, speed, and energy, there is also consciousness which orchestrates all that into a reality.
   
   Again, not a reality that we can grasp with our 5 senses and limited instruments, but the one that's "STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION", as they are telling us.
   Today we know that the universe is made up of energy waves, which when collapsed turn into matter  -  and that collapsing has to be done by a consciousness, "god's" and ours. We are co-creators of our material reality.
   
   So, if anyone chooses to stick to the traditional version found in "holy books", be my guest. I hope I have made it clear that I do believe in universal intelligence, and the only reason that I am not calling it "god" is because of that label's customary meaning.
   Consciousness is universal, and we are like radios picking up that program (calling it "soul").  And "how many stations" we can hear depends on the level of our evolved awareness. Amen

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      Aliswellposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Val, Once again my friend---you have touched that part of my reptilian/all that is and ever will be, part of my brain with words that strike a logical and pleasant state of hopefulness!!! Thank you for being part of my life at its' present stage!!

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      ValKarasposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Allen, my old buddy, the pleasure is all mine, as I recognize a soul that's resonating with mine on my modest spiritual path.

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   dashingscorpioposted 9 years ago

   
   
   I believe God created man and man created religion.
   Religion was a form of government for early civilizations.

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      Taopiposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Not an unreasonable perspective at all, although I would pose that it is not simply early civilizations.  We are only removed of the powers of Church and State by a little over 200 years, in the Latin West, anyway.

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7. 0

   LoliHeyposted 9 years ago

   God is the creator of all things.  Without God there would be no man.

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8. 61

   Taopiposted 9 years ago

   The writer, Anne Lamott, may  have said it best: “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”   One can work with a statement like that.  God likes all the same things you do, God agrees with all the things you agree with and so on and so forth. 
   
   Out of every theosophy and philosophy, Deism seems to be the most reasonable when asking the question about God...which, looking up on Google (for the sake of clarity) is defined as: "...a natural religion (sic). Deists believe in the existence of God, on purely rational grounds, without any reliance on revealed religion, religious authority, or holy text.'
   
   I tend to side with both Anne Lamott's sentiment and the Deist perspective.

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9. 83

   gmwilliamsposted 9 years ago

   
   
   There are differing opinions regarding this fascinating subject.  Of course, there are those who strongly aver that God created humankind.  They maintain that there is a supernatural being who created all life.  They staunchly assert that humankind as all lifeforms did not create themselves.  They contend that all lifeforms have an original source, a creator so to speak.  Some would argue that there must be a God or supernatural being because religious systems were created to guide humankind to its ultimate good &/or union with the said creator. 
   
   However, there are those who assert that it is humankind who created God. They cite evidence that humankind created a God, a Supreme Being, or gods because they weren't sophisticated enough to fully comprehend the full machinations of the universe.  What they couldn't understand, they  surmised that there must be a God, Supreme Being, or gods who were behind the machinations of the universe.  They further maintain that humankind seeks God, a Supreme Being, or gods because they want a paternal/maternal figure to take care & look out for them.  They insist that humankind invented a God, a Supreme Being, or gods in order to have a sense of security, safety, & even comfort in what is perceived to be a cruel, harsh, & even unforgiving universe.   
   
   They maintain that humankind invented a God, a Supreme Being, or gods to give them reassurance that there is something beyond this physical, limiting world.  They indicated that by the invention of a God, a Supreme Being, or gods that humankind will have an unlimited world which is deemed far better than the present physical, limited world. In essence, they proclaim that humankind made God as a psychological mechanism to cope in this world & to have hope that there is always better.

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    Angele Parrisposted 8 years ago

    Like some people I had an out of body experience. Some people question whether it was God I saw based on my revelation. In Revelation God is described as having feet like bronze, esprcially, the church of Thyatira. So the question should be did did God create a white God or man create a white God?

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