Of course, the human personifications of God derive from our primitive cognitive processes. Why else would they be so universal? That’s Daniel Dennett’s theory of the origin of religion in “Breaking the Spell.”
We needn’t confine our thinking to our most automatic or childlike inclinations, though. Just because we’re more comfortable socializing with other people than we are with doing math or science, doesn’t mean we can’t shoehorn our basic mental faculties into more advanced modes of thought. We can be objective rather than pretending that everything is alive, like the animists.
So the point was that theistic personification is inherent to the religions that rest content with the primitive modes of thought, as opposed to science and philosophy which advance beyond them. And you said multiple times that you’re opposed to “religion.” When I said you’re “supposed” to be rejecting religion, that meant only that that’s what you said you’re doing.
Once you dispense with the personifications that go along with the religious conceptions of God, you’re left with a “God” that’s only a placeholder for a giant unknown. And once you have a mere empty placeholder or a name for the mystery of the First Cause, you can substitute “cosmos,” “universe,” “nature,” “Big Bang” or whatever for “God.” The implications are the same in terms of our smallness next to that mystery. Or if you go the mystical route, you might be left with some special religious experiences.
Either way, saying you’re at odds with “religion” and then parroting passages from the Bible is, of course, inconsistent.
You don’t like religion because you say religion is just a vain human construct that’s supposed to connect us to God like the Tower of Babel. Yet the very same can be said about the Bible, about all so-called divine revelations and scriptures. If you make an exception of those human writings, priests can make more exceptions out of religious institutions and traditions.
When you say that God is the primary entity and everything else is fundamentally nothing, you’re only begging the question at issue. You’re asserting that atheism is false, but that’s what’s in dispute here. Heidegger was more neutral and intriguing when he said that Being is prior to all beings.
