did man create a god or a monster?

Roger, you are fortunate that you came to hold your understanding regarding religion without having to have travelled the long road of misguided beliefs. 

For myself, I do not apologize for how I viewed God during much of my life.  I was raised on Fairy Tales.  Both Fairy Tales of secular nature and Fairy Tales straight out of the Bible. 

I was never afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, understanding that he was just made up, but I feared the Wrath of God Almighty because people I trusted and looked up to believed it. 

In church I saw my various grade school teachers, singing and praising the Lord.  I heard kindly men on the radio when I visited my grandma.  While my dad spoke openly of his disbelief, my mother dressed us and sent us to Sunday School.  She seldom went to church, but never spoke against religion until well into her 70's. 

Balance against that the fact that we received virtually no science lessons in school.  I had what was classified as science in grade school, but I did not have one single science class during my high school years.  I never cut up a frog, or studied the mating habits of angle worms.  I can't even tell you how I managed to get into college without something that passed for science.  But I did. 

But even though I began having difficulties explaining the world through my Faith in God, it still took years of bending this way and that until I finally awoke.  Religious Faith is very cunning.  It plays upon our lack of knowledge.  It creates fear over the unknown.  It is the "what if's" that keep us tied to the fear that there just might be a Hell waiting for Sinners and nonbelievers. 

Religion does all it can do to squelch objectivity. 

Think of being raised believing that your mother is the greatest cook in the world.  Your dad tells you.  Your entire family tells you.  And there is all that good food as proof that it is true.  Why in Earth would you begin to pick apart Mother's cooking, examining it under the cold light of science?  Just accept it and go along eating happily.  So folks continue to munch down on religion, and close their minds to troubling tidbits. 

Besides, there is such comfort wrapping ourselves in our Make Believe blanket and letting the world go to Hell...just like our Bible tells us it will do. 

Man has created a Monster in his own image and now we are like fish in a net.  Can we find the way out before our Make Believe God takes us down? 

 

Curious Carl