The God lie
For many who follow a religion, God is but a being to enlist to fulfil delusional selfish aspirations.
For a being who is supposedly the creator and maintainer of the universe, people seem to think that they are going to be personally listening to their selfish requests for material advancement. It seems that people have put in little thought to what sort of expansive consciousness would be able to run a universe and at what level their focus would be. Is it them who is merging galaxies together, or are they delegating that out to lesser consciousnesses? In that hierarchy of consciousnesses, where does our individual human personality consciousness sit?
Most traditional religions have posited themselves as a channel to God, or whomever they assign as the ruler of their pantheon, mainly to maintain their position in controlling their societies, or whatever they can wrest from their secular democratic challengers. Then there are the fundamentalist or evangelical arms that posit that we can just talk to God as if they are hanging around waiting for our call. Both these models misrepresent God and the nature of the universe, as if people on earth are at the centre of it.
For many religions, there are a class of beings known as angels or devas. These do not have physical bodies, yet do have a form and their own consciousness. That means that they could exist anywhere in the universe, even on worlds uninhabitable by us. Accepting them as existing means that there could be a myriad beings of varying levels of consciousness and extent of will, and thus varying spheres of influence. Some of those could be the ones listening to us in our prayers.
Many invoke God to help their country conquer others, and even bless genocide. All think God is on their side, seemingly oblivious to that the very nature of God requires that they be supporting all beings in the universe. In this way, everyone is blessed because they are allowed an existence with an ability to self-actualise. The only criteria by which they see God as supporting them over others are that the scriptures they choose to believe state that, and whatever twisted logic they use to link those ancient opinions to their current circumstances.
The idea of one God that they can chat to is appealing because that concept allows people to overate their own importance, thereby allowing them to think they are entitled to a lot more than an equal share of the universe that we share. The thinking required to maintain this delusion works against taking actions that will break the spell they have willingly spun around themselves, with the help of those who want to take advantage of them.
We exist in a hierarchy of consciousnesses, and in finding where we belong in that, we find our path to freedom from our delusions. But that involves choosing to see who we really are, and letting go of what is not us. We do have a purpose, but it is not written in stone, because the whole universe is evolving in real time, and we are part of that fabric. With each thought and action we tug the fabric and create ripples in it, which radiate out, but come back to affect us some time later, showing us what is real and what is folly.
We need to be open to what the consequences of our actions are, as that is our teacher in life. While we can seek the wisdom of others, it is in finding our own wisdom within that we really understand the nature of ourselves and the universe. We have quite a wide latitude to make misjudgments, but if we don't try to understand the consequences, we may continue to create problems for ourselves.
We are always a part of a greater consciousness, which is allowing us to experiment with the life we have, but it sets the operational limits on our existence, just so we cannot do so much that we will disrupt its own existence. The planet is one of those consciousnesses that allows us to play in its fabric, but it is about to undergo an expansion of its consciousness, and that will result in a change in its operational limits, and thus what we as humans can be allowed to do. If we cannot adapt to those changes, we cannot stay in its sphere.
To us, God is a concept that we would have to evolve exponentially over a very long time to have any real idea of what their real nature is. Scriptures have told us stories about creation to placate our curiosity enough to keep us from straying too far from what the power structures built in their wake want us to adhere to before threatening us with consequences. But we have to stray, because those stories and all that they rely upon are limiting our vision of what we are able to do. We have a lot more opportunities to create than what those fabrications allow us. It is our duty to take them.