This is regarding the Big Question, is there a God? From my point-of-view.
I like this topic and I've gone to long measures to form a personalized opinion on the subject. Not many will manage to read this, but I promise that you will most likely see a glimpse of reason within it if you do, hopefully I will too, because I haven't written down my thoughts about this in years, and it has evolved quite a lot thanks to self-studying - this will be extremely philosophical, you have been warned.
First off, I'd like to point out that most, if not all, involved in this debate bypass, unknowingly or not, the actual question and gone to specifics regarding either the consequences of the so-called faith in God or the validity of either side, without ever touching the question "Is there a God?"
The debate usually evolves into a critique on the capitalization of faith, being - church and / or organized-religion, and mostly out of context to its role as a sociological power-structure.
Now, let's focus on the main question.
Man has thought about this problem since he first had a thought, and given that we are in no way, and I underline this without using the underline format, intellectually superior to our ancestors dating back thousands of years. All we have now that has given us the illusion of intellect is our knowledge / awareness - completely irrelevant of the human intellectual prowess. Now we have, in general, more "fragments" and "bits" of knowledge compared to our ancestors, but what matters most is how we put those bits together into a mold, the fact still remains that we are still using the same tools of the trade as they had at their disposal 10.000 years ago - the only difference being situational at best.
This brings me to Bertrand Russell's (1872-1970) protegé, who surpassed his philosophical and mathematical genius, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). He wrote an essay simply called "Philosophical Investigations," widely regarded as "unbelievably logical," but still has not sunk into our general knowledge even though it has been published and logically agreed upon, which of course can be said about most academic word of any significance.
The curse of our intellect, and in turn; the bane of philosophy, is language itself (in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, philosophy was mainly about philology, the philosophy of language) . Why you might ask, is language, our source of everything defined, the curse and bane of everything in itself? The simplified reasoning is that language is a tool that we can willingly manipulate to portray ideas and situational conundrums without any necessary connection to the Natural World. We can create problems with our language alone that can never be solved or explained by anything other than the same, more-so or equally, disconnected and manipulated tool, the language. When we use the language to portray the simply "unexplainable" we find ourselves in a similar situation, as Wittgenstein said, as a fly - stuck inside a clear glass bottle. The fly notices the Natural World around it and assumes it can fly about as usual, but just so much that it hits an invisible barrier that cannot be explained by what the fly senses with sight. The language is this glass-bottle, and without connecting it to the Natural World with logistics and reasoning - we will never be able to see the exit above. This encases our perception of Nature inside an invisible barrier of non-defining word-definitions. We are at a time where we ignore knowledge that cannot be spoken in words, and what we can not see or explain - we simply give it a word, which consequently makes us aware of what we do not know, by definition alone, this poisons our thoughts from the inside out rapidly without realizing it.
Nietzsche mentioned how we can destroy the beauty of Nature with definitions. Imagine taking a child to the beach for the very first time, it sees an infinite mass of liquid that rises and falls as far as the eye can see - beating upon the shore with force it does not recognize nor can the child compare it to anything else it has seen. You, the responsible adult, explain to the child that it does not need to worry - you put your hand and swirl it around in the sea and say: "See, it's harmless, this is just the Ocean." In that moment the amazement and astonishment of the child has been subdued and replaced with acceptance and assurance of fact, you defined the unexplainable with a simple word and what was once unfathomable and not possible in the child's perceived world is now simply called "The Ocean" and the infinately complex becomes as simple as a single word.
Alright, then that's out of the way. Given that we are actually debating a problem created by ourselves with no connection to the Natural World (the only connection is, like I said, with the same tool that created the problem) we must first initiate the Natural connection. Why is there a God and how can we connect him / her / it to our surroundings? This brings me to yet another philosopher who is often forgotten but undeniably one of the most important philosophers of all time, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), of which Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) noted: "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Spinoza was Jewish and had radical ideas which eventually caused him to be excommunicated and persecuted (his books had to be protected from all churches after his death) this idea is 360 years old, approximately 300 years before Wittgenstein mentioned the necessity of the Natural Connection. I'll sum it up and try to connect the two:
The idea is that everything in the universe; Nature, is simply one substance (not matter, rather the "essence" of everything); Reality. Reality has a set of rules that governs it entirely and of which we are part. God and Nature are two names for the same Reality, a single substance of which all entities of it are modifications of itself, all things within Nature (or God if you like) are determined to exist and cause effects, the extremely complex chain of cause and effect is only partly understood by us humans. We, as a species - with language as our curse and tool, also presume that we have free will because we are aware of our desires but unable to understand why we have them and why we need to act on them. Nature has infinite variations of itself and the physical and mental separation is non-existent, the two are just sides of a coin with infinite sides. God exists as Nature, Nature does not rule the universe by providence - the Universe is part of Nature and thus there is no personality to idolize.
This gives us a logical reason, in its illogical way, to seek explanation of what we do not understand by using the aforementioned curse of the language - just put together a disconnected, unnatural definition based on what little that we know of ourselves and Nature - and we have the definition of God as he is idolized today. And like children who did not understand any of this were contacted by those who did know the fictional word of God and used / uses the exact same tactic as the adult uses to explain the ocean to the child, don't worry, it's just God work.
Now, think about it - Spinoza had managed to connect the dots in such a fashion 360 years ago that he correctly implied the existence of the infinite sameness of everything down to the molecule. Wittgenstein managed, 60 years ago, to define 90% (remember, 73,4% of all statistics are made up on the spot, mind you) of all philosophers into the school of Optimism due to their unaware disconnect to the Natural World whereas they dealt with situational problems that had no Natural basis other than what I personally call Philography (Philosophical Pornography, the art of stimulating your mind without ends being met).
So, to me - there is only God in definition, as he is Nature, our perception of this so-called God is only based on our inability to understand and comprehend the complexity of everything. This complexity and our curious nature can distract the individual to such a degree that he will not fit well within the social-structure we have built around us. The worst part is of course that there is considerable evidence to support the idea that the capitalization of the God-Excuse is just to sedate the individual curiosity, just as Karl Marx (1818-1883) said that Religion was the Opiate of the masses. If we seize to ponder the nature of our surroundings we find ourselves in need of a purpose or at least an explanation of what it might be, and an overly simplified answer to what our purpose is, is capitalized by either monetary-slavery, you need a job - you need money, or religion, you get all of this from the government / those in power. The power to govern can not exist if the individual can not be capitalized, if the God-Excuse removes a large chunk of our individuality / curiosity, then he is free to be enslaved. If he, the individual, does not see the purpose in taking active part of the social-structure originally created by the "slavemasters", there is no power of control. With no power to control, the system collapses.
With this in mind we realize why those in control often regard and abuse religion and/or our volunteered-slavery (think about it). It's not that they are offering you the feel-good-faith or the willingness to do good, nor is it the assurance of whatever bad happens in your life then there's an afterlife; it's your individuality they're after. You trust the government today in a way people trusted God in the past, we go to work - we interact, we do business - with the assurance that there's someone out there thinking of you and in your interest. In that state of mind you do not freely form a personality, you conform your behavior to what is needed by those who do not think about your personal needs at all, they only think about what to do to remain in control. This applies both to religious and / or governing bodies.
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I think I should let this go now as I could probably ramble on forever about this particular part of the Big Question. The other historical, political, sociological and psychological factors that we need to cover on the rise of organized religion is so vast that not a soul would like to even begin reading my post if I did it here as well. There is, of course, my view on how the exact same brainwashing and rise to totalitarianism is evolving as we speak - of which I do not want to cover as of yet. The tactics being used by governments today, even when excluding the religious influences, to control and harvest the masses in even larger scale than before give credence to a conclusion that politicians today are the exact same fragment of our social-structure as priests and Kings-from-God were in the past using the same tools to control. That alone gives us a reason to believe that it's not the belief in itself that we should be debating about, much rather why there are people who use whatever means necessary to be in "control", be it with monetary or religious influence or blend thereof.
Regards,
Óðinn Löve
