Here’s the thing. Leave your beliefs at the door: this topic is not to prove Mr Almighty exists or otherwise. Instead, I’m going to try an approach that is crucial to the thesis I’m developing. You guys will be my informal peer review of sorts. I cross my heart and swear I’m not going to steal any ideas (anyone more acquainted with my thesis project can readily guarantee that I couldn’t even if I wanted to).
For the time being, we all assume in spite of our most fervent beliefs that God’s existence cannot be proven or disproven. If you have trouble playing that argument, go straight ahead and assume he doesn’t exist.
My question is: does God have agency? That is to say, can we isolate a bunch of events that cannot be credited to any human alone, nor to any single human group, but which must be credited to God? —to be sure, not the supernatural entity we’re not sure that exists, but a self-consistent social phenomenon strong enough to have a rather clear personality and his own self-interested agenda.
Can we attribute actions to God regardless of his existing?
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Me again, trying to edit some sense into the topic with an example or two. Picture this: a bunch of considerably mad, poor Arabs blinded by faith steal a bunch of airplanes and throw them at the symbols of Western civilisation on a mission from God. Western civilisation reacts by invading Arab countries and beating them into democracy, and the speech that advocated such a posture claims this to be a mission from God and that speech resonates because the people who hear it in the States believe they are indeed on a mission from God. Now, check out that God: what the hell is his agenda? (Try not to split him into two gods, try not to demonise one of the sides).
Nazis say God is obfuscating the love for the nation and so they set out against God. Communists say religion is the opium of the masses and thus declare war against God. Who is this great strategist, who is this tangible enemy we take social action against. Playing the card “he’s just a construct of our minds” is to avoid the question, because I’m not interested on whether or not he exists objectively: I want to figure out how he surfaces from the belief of billions of individuals, and how consistent he is, and what’s his agenda.