How to believe in God (Stephen Clark | The Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

... I am exasperated by people who treat God as if He were Superyeti, a creature that might or might not exist, might or might not be worshipful ... There is clearly no way of proving that there is no such entity, or that there never will be, but its existence need have no more religious significance than any of the superior beings encountered in Star Trek. If it claimed "divine status," most mainstream monotheists would reckon it deranged ...

... secular moderns usually construct stories about humankind's gradual release from superstition and oppression, by science and liberal democracy. Oddly, this grand myth is a version of the founding idea of the mainstream Abrahamic religions! Abraham left behind the cult and culture of his ancestors, summoned – as he supposed – by a voice that demanded something more of him and his people than "religion" ...

... to "believe in God" for the Abrahamic tradition is to believe in the possibility of Justice, of Freedom from oppression: "what does the Lord require of you", said the prophet Micah, "but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" Believing in God is believing that the orphan and the widow will be, must be vindicated. The first Abrahamic monotheists, like the first Christians, were in a real sense atheists: that is, they denied that the spirits evoked in most religious ceremonial deserved our worship, denied that kings and emperors were divine, and chose to remodel their personal and communal lives in the light of the demand for Justice. It was also important to acknowledge their own sins, their own walking aside from the Way. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves": all of us have behaved very badly sometimes ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/28/religion-philosophy-god-belief