Who is “God” in whom the majority of men believe?

Men created God in their own inverted image, God is a fabrication, a creation by men, a fiction.

Mortal, finite, limited, suffering, haunted by their desire for completeness - human beings invented God - a power endowed with precisely the opposite characteristics. With their faults turned inside out they manufacture characteristics at whose feet they kneel and prostrate themselves.

Believers in God/s prostrate themselves, humble themselves, degrade themselves, weave fables, and believe unquestioningly in the tales they have so painstakingly concocted in order to avoid looking their fate in the face. They work passionately to bring about what they nevertheless hope more than anything else to avoid: death.

A God did not create the world or man or beast. Neither hell, paradise, nor predestination exist.

Theistic religions each hold up some perfect idealised state or other world or heaven to which man will travel to after death.

These are religions based solely upon superstition and speculation.

Religions that teach a belief in a God are an exploitation par excellence of man’s vulnerability to deception. They assert man’s separation from himself and propose the creation of an imaginary world falsely invested with truth. Belief in gods and supernatural deities proceed from a primitive, genealogical, and outdated mode of rationality. Belief in God stems from fear, misgiving, unease, inability to look death in the face, the feeling that something is lacking, and distress at the realisation that human life is finite. Theistic religions are woven with fictions and metaphysical placebos.

Religions that assert a belief in a God or creator of the universe are religions based upon speculation. They are idealistic religions, based upon the idea of some super human or ideal entity that controls the actions and future of mankind.

God, manufactured by man in his own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads towards death. Men, unable to accept their coming death, concoct this fond illusion. God puts to death everything, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind.

Their glorification of their fiction beyond prevents them full enjoyment of reality - here and now.

As people of intelligence, we do not need a posthumous paradise, a salvation or redemption of the (fictional) soul, an all-knowing, all-seeing man-in-the-sky.

Properly and rationally directed, intelligence wards off all magical thinking.

Theistic religions have no love for intelligence, books, knowledge, or science. They only celebrate ignorance, obedience and submission.

Theists judge the here and now by the standards of an invented otherworldly plane; they conceive of the earthly city only in terms of the fictional heavenly one.

As Buddhists we realise that men give themselves laws and have no need to call on a fictional character in a book to provide them. Buddhism is a religion of freedom and reason. God is a fiction, an insult to human intelligence. We must understand the nature of our existence rationally in a realistic way - free of superstitions, free of fictions. Buddhism concerns itself with living life - here and now.

The Buddha admonished that relying on supernatural gods is folly, for only by our own wills can we live. Concepts of other-worldly beings with supernatural powers that reign over man are for those who have no self-reliance, no discipline and no self-morals.

Our effort to be free of suffering, pain, and unhappiness must come from within ourselves. We cannot gain anything from believing in a fictional God. Supernatural beings living in the sky cannot help us to gain wisdom no matter how much we pray or visit churches.

We are the results of what we were and we will be the results of what we are. The Buddha shows us how to cultivate and develop our power from within and shows us how to make the best use of our intelligence without becoming slaves to the fictions of superstitions. Without placing blame on anyone else, Buddhism teaches that man is responsible for his own actions. We must face the facts of life, and shoulder our responsibilities. The Buddha teaches us to think freely, with common sense.

“I never had any teacher or divinity to teach me or tell me how to gain enlightenment.
What I achieved I did by my own effort, energy, knowledge and purity.”
- The Buddha

From the intellectual and philosophical teachings of Buddhsim arise freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry. There is no compulsion or obligation to believe in anything or accept any fixed doctrine. The approach of Buddhism is one of seeing and understanding.

“When I speak to you, do not accept what I say in blind faith out of respect for me.
You must examine all that I say, think hard and long, and put it to the test,
just as a goldsmith examines gold by cutting and heating it to know whether it is genuine gold.
If you have doubts, test it out. If you find it is right, accept and follow it.
If you find that it is flawed then examine why and think it through.
Only when you know how it is flawed can you say so, and only when you know how it is right can you follow it.”
- The Buddha

Indeed, when we cease to be bound by our own concepts and grasping, or our inclinations of mind, our doubts cease as well, because our knowledge is no longer dependent on anything beyond immediate and direct experience. Humans are fully equipped to just see, right now. Truth is there for those who will open their eyes. Theists are blinded by a faith in a power that cannot be. God, in order to be real, must himself also be subject to the same cause and effect as everything else in the universe.

Theists trust only in a blind faith. There is no testing and thinking it through. They have been instructed to believe unquestioningly. This cannot be a wise thing to do. To follow a teaching unquestioningly is to give up your own mind for that of another’s.

Theists claim that God’s way is the only way, and that there are penalties for questioning the words of God. Why would such a God penalise humans for using their own intellect? Isn’t the intellect the greatest gift of humans? It makes no sense at all that humans would be restricted in the use of intellect if such a God was their creator.

Buddhism is a system that empowers the individual to be their own God, to be their own caretaker.

It means we take care of ourselves as opposed to relying on prayer and false hopes asked of a fictional God or complete stranger. We must accept our own responsibilities and be able to accept the outcome of our actions. As a Buddhist, we should not depend on a myth to pay for our actions.

As Buddhists we are challenged to think for ourselves. Buddhists are challenged to use our minds. To question what does NOT seem right, and to NOT accept something as fact simply “because it has always been done that way.”

It is a very upside down, disturbed and perverted situation when man starts worshipping God that he has created himself.

As Buddhists we realise that we live in a real world with real people. There is no supernatural boogeyman steering our decisions and sense of morality. Our own conscience and principles steer our lives.

Buddhism does not mask reality with the promise of an afterlife or forgiveness from supernatural beings.

Coming to understand the the nature of life has to be done by ourselves, no one can do it for us. Maintaining other peoples ideas and beliefs is like the mimicry of a parrot - it may be speaking, but it doesn’t know what it is saying.

The search for truth cannot be undertaken by closed minds. The Buddhist rejects such things as gods and otherworldly divinities, heavens and hells, and realms of supernatural beings because they do not stand up to scrutiny and vigourous testing. Reason brings clarity and Perfect Insight into the nature of reality. To understand a subject we must give it critical scrutiny and then decide whether it is a conceptual dead end or something worth pursuing. Buddhism is not inviolate, unmoving or locked in dogma - it is open and adaptable.

The most noteworthy characteristic of the Buddha was that he was a flesh and blood man, a historical person who never claimed any connection to God or any other fictional supernatural being. He was neither God nor an incarnation of God, nor any mythological figure. Depending on his own unremitting energy, unaided by any teacher he achieved awareness, perfect insight into the nature of his being and the nature of the universe. Through his own personal experience he understood that the concept of a supernatural being who rules over the destinies of beings below was a mere fabrication.