So you think you know God?

For most people there is only one answer for this question. A loud and emphatic YES! Usually spoken when clutching the idea of an ancient tome that has revealed all to them, a member of the chosen. They hold dear the idea that truth was delivered to them. Given to them above others. A claim often made before reading their book.

The god-concept has been with us since consciousness first awakened. Some moral-biologists believe that the concept was born of fear, when early man was for whatever reason first forced from the trees. In the day he was preyed upon by wild beasts he could see and flee from. In the dark night creatures who to him were unknown and acted with cruel unpredictability visited both his young and his old. As these poorly creatures huddled together in the unforgiving blackness of the ancient Savannah, they had only their imagination to provide the evidence of what unseen force was removing them forever. The early god was cruel and demanded sacrifice, almost as though he hungered for flesh. Only the rising sun offered salvation. It brought with it a mixture of relief and sorrow, early morning warmth brewed these two contradicting emotions together to form what I think were the first instances of guilt. A guilt that could not be satisfied by rational thought. Another coping mechanism was required. A mechanism that allowed the missing and the lost to feel the same sense of relief and salvation that the sun had brought their luckier brothers and sisters. The sun that brought daylight could not possibly forsake those those who had been taken in the night. This god was a kind and forgiving god.

As those of us who left the plains of Africa to find a new home in the Cradle of Civilisation our circumstances changed. We lost the connection to our original home. Those who stayed still have imaginings of the old gods, demonic masks still circle the night fires warding off the taker and calling upon the giver to return. Our new home in the desert brought changes to our circumstance, night was no longer the threat it once was. The unforgiving remover of souls was left behind when we travelled up the Nile. The terror of night was replaced with the kind coolness that brought reprieve from the now harsh sun, giving us the peace needed to explore both the wonders of the heavens and the wonders of our own bodies. As the night-beast and the fear of night faded in to memory we spent more and more time on these wonders. Simultaneously our interest in the universe around our us and our numbers -the numbers of brothers and sisters who now were no longer stolen in the night- began to expand. From within our new understanding of the mechanics of ourselves, our environments and our economies god rose again to meet our newest threat. The wicked symptom of our midnight explorations, over population.

We trialled -and erred- to find the solution to the pestilences, crimes, cruelty and suffering brought upon tribes whose fertility and knack for surviving superseded their means. We searched all that we knew to find this solution, we did not find it there. We would need to pluck the answer from the unknown. The unknown was once again labelled as god. We tried much of the unknown before the true unknown revealed itself. We tried to give the taker of old that which he no longer took. A son, a brother, a daughter, a sister each of us gave. But the taker no longer hungered for flesh as it once did and was not satisfied. We tried to build temples to raise us closer to the unknown we had seen in the heavens so that we may find the answer sooner. It did not work. The answer came from humbler tribes, paternal tribes whose women were subjects to the wills -and jealousies- of their husbands and fathers. These tribes who had reign over they're nightly explorations of self, who submitted themselves to the constraints of denial so that the property of they're chiefs -themselves- could remain pure and valuable. These tribes grew slower than others, these tribes allowed themselves more time to acquire the means to survive. As time passed these tribes prospered while others less humble suffered. The unknown had revealed itself. We had a new beast of the night to conquer. Constraint, law, rule came to be our salvation as the sun had done aeons before.

As we began to notice that true salvation came from the rule we imposed on ourselves, we looked to the temples built to be closer to god and the wise men within who promised to find in the unknown that which was to deliver us from the cruelty of over-burdened economies and shortage of sustenance. These fools who had worshipped the unknown, gazed into the heavens, named the constellations and searched for the nature of things. These fools who claimed they would find our salvation by taking themselves into the unknown and building themselves higher towards god. These fools who had failed and in so doing proved their own god false. 'Down with the temples!' came the cry. We took them our rules and told them here we, not you who claim to be wise, had found god and salvation. 'God is not there, god is not known and cannot be known' they claimed as they did. 'Look at our city, where we live long and eat well. God has given this to us, we know god. He is the law', our retort. 'God is not he. God is not law. God is not known and cannot be known', they blasphemed! 'Burn them and they're books which are not law! Down with the temples!', we cried. So by law -by God himself- their fate was decided. 'God cannot be seen, heard, felt, known or written', they mantra'd as we tied them stakes. 'Ha! God is writ here. In stone you old fools', we showed them our tablets. 'Blasphemers! Idolaters all!', they raved as they roasted. Us idolaters? Foolish old wise men, gripped by madness to the end.

So it was decided by us, the new wise men, that the law -God- was known and should be known by all. We found foolish wise men wherever we went, in Alexandria we burnt more of them and they're books. Savages, who still feared the night-beast, down south were taught the law we had found. We took it to Europe where we found sodomites, adulterers and whores. To India where we found idolaters who claimed too that God could not be known. Later the new world revealed others who had returned to the trees and gave to the night-beast that which he still hungered for. By star, crescent and cross we gave them our law. Written by God himself, who was both he and law. Without whom we would not know the way.

We have yet to shake from humanity the curse of those who claim to know God and see him written in this book or that. We have no hope until we rid ourselves of the dogma of knowing that which cannot be known that we hold so dear. The laws in these books do not represent innate natural knowledge -or knowledge of ones soul placed there by god as religion would have you believe- these are nurtured social behaviours passed down from generation to generation. They are messages from our ancestors transmitted through ourselves by means of social conditioning of how they once solved their big issues. Of how they pragmatically conditioned themselves for survival. We owe it to them to now do the same. By keeping those things that prolong our existence, discarding those which do not and inventing our own behaviour to suit our circumstances.

God can only continue to exist as the god-concept was first intended to be. A representation of the unknown, something to challenge, something to discover. So you think you know god? To any who claim YES! goes my cry 'Idolaters! Blasphemers all!'. I am biased towards you who claim to know god. The pursuit of truth inevitably leads to bias. If I pursue the truth of the shape and location of Earth and find it to be spheroidal and to be rotating around a star in the Milky Way, then I become biased -possibly even dismissive- against those who believe it to be flat and at the centre of the universe. Your god-concept is false, dangerous and stupid. I will mock it, fight it and hold it in contempt until it is relegated to harmless superstition. It is all of our duty to make religion dismissable.