• yupamiralda
    88
    So I'm basically an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I can't imagine Christianity could be true, similar religions like Buddhism, or basically any philosophy that involves being more "civilized" than "barbarian", or to say it another way: "human" vs. "animal". I'm an animal, and I will live as one, with animal goals.

    However, it's difficult to communicate what I believe to others. It might be easier to invent a god, because people would probably have an easier time considering a personality than a list of propositions.

    I think of this god as a sort of personification of evolutionary strategies I believe in. It is not a creator god, and it is not the only possible god. It just is the god that seems best to me.

    I could even see rituals and sacrifices, prayers, etc, to psychologically reinforce the personality of the god and also to affirm commitment to the chosen strategy. Believers would not believe in some kind of supernatural intervention but rather an idea that "sometimes following the strategy works in ways we can't foresee or imagine".

    This religion would essentially be imaginative participation in poetic thinking, and might be more appealing than cold rationality.

    I'd also say the only likely immortality is passing on genes.

    This could be read as a parody of all primitive religions but I'm actually serious. I think imagination is something like an intelligence, one that follows unconscious presuppositions. sometimes, things don't "feel right", even if you can't say why.

    Feel free to laugh. But, why not?
  • I like sushi
    4.8k
    I think you’d find Jung’s work interesting (his interpretations of mythos and Archetypes) as well as many aspects of occultism in general. Alan Moore is a nice touch stone for “making your own god,” as well as being brilliantly entertaining ;)
  • BC
    13.6k
    For you as an agnostic leaning toward atheism... I'd suggest that all the gods were, in fact, invented. Not only 'were invented' but 'are invented' every day. People who believe in gods of some sort (and that would be the vast majority) maintain their gods with fresh investments of imagination and theology.

    Gods like Zeus, Odin, Baal, and so on become static when there are no longer believers investing and reinvesting imagination in these gods. And belief, of course, is both an individual and social activity.

    As for inventing a 'new god', this doesn't seem to happen, but one could certainly give it a whirl. The tricky part is convincing enough others that one's new god is interesting enough to believe in to make it sustainable.
  • Devans99
    2.7k
    On the comical side, and you may have heard of it already, but there is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
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