by Currie Jean

Created on: June 09, 2008

One of the problems presented in answering the question, "Do you place more trust in people or god?" is that even those who claim to trust god more are really only trusting people.

Those who claim to "trust god" are trusting any of the following things: themselves (in trusting their dreams, fantasies, and judgements), their clergy (in trusting what is said at church services), a group of men who have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years (in trusting what's written in their holy book), and their community (in trusting what is said around them, day in and day out, about their god).

Only in trusting the things mentioned above does someone gain the belief that there is a real, actual god, and that this god has particular properties and makes particular dictations about how people ought to live. In this sense, no one trusts a god - they just trust people, sometimes the wrong people, at that.

All this trusting leads to convictions, ideas, and images that create the illusion, in some people's minds, that the god they've been told about by people and books exists in reality. In this sense, an imaginary god can technically be trusted, as long as the trusting person believes this god to be real.

Of course, whether or not he's worth trusting is another matter. Since he isn't real, belief in him opens a person up to severe gullibility, and thus manipulation by his peers (that is, clergy), who can then take his money, his time, and his praise, often using it to line the pockets of their robes.

Assuming the Abrahamic god to be real, he still isn't trustworthy. He condoned rape, slavery, gratuitous violence, viscousness, genocide, and infanticide in the Bible. In the Bible, he was as cruel and ethnocentric as his followers were at the time they wrote the Bible. These men, and their god, have moral skills inferior to nearly all of the people living in the modern-day societies of Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, among other places. If someone from these countries acted as barbarically as is condoned by the god of the Bible, they would be thrown in jail, or even put to death by the state. In democratic countries, the state is usually subject to this rule, as well.

Further, god came down to earth later on, disguised has his own "son" (as they say, "Jesus is god"), simply to confuse his followers into dividing against one another. Since god is all-powerful and all-knowing, he truly can do whatever he wants to do. Nothing is stopping him, as his knowledge and power

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