The subject of God, religion and divinity has always fascinated me and propelled my decades long quest for answers. I have found many explanations spanning several layers of analysis and I decided to write a brief summary of my discoveries in order to help me organize my own thoughts and understanding. I have also had personal experiences and intuitions of the nature of God and the divine. I will try to isolate each layer in its own section, though they all touch on philosophy, metaphysics and the human psyche to some extent.
Anthropogenic
Humans have an innate talent for pattern recognition and abstraction. We can recognize desirable, heroic and noble traits in each other and detach them from the individuals that exhibit them. If we look back at the thousands of years of societal evolution that our ancestors have gone through, we can extrapolate how those powers of abstraction were applied over time. Heroic traits of one individual would be remembered, emulated and passed on for generations. With each new generation, the heroic image becomes less connected to a specific individual and more akin to a mythological figure from the distant past. It accumulates new traits, achievements and stories connected to it over time. At some point, the heroic image is indistinguishable from what we would call a primordial or pagan God. While that process follows its own evolution in one tribe, another tribe might have a slightly different image of what is heroic and desirable. The tribes eventually meet and choose to either cooperate and become one bigger tribe, or fight and lose half the population, while the other half gains more resources and perhaps develops a taste for blood (a trait which might stick onto the God-image), while their respective Gods would share the fate of their tribe - a union and merging with another God, death and being forgotten, victory at the cost of the increased value of violence. If that process is repeated many times over a number of generations and enough traits have been accumulated to a single God image, it might not be that far from what monotheistic religions refer to as their supreme principle or God.
Ethical
Values, good and evil
Psychological
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/philosophy/on-facts-values-rationality-and-stories/
Institutional vs Personal
This section can be explained in great depth by William James who wrote the famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience
, all quotes below are from it.
Lecture II: Circumscription of the topic.
Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the *founders* of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, the Muhammad, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
Lectures XIV and XV: The value of Saintliness
In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.
A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to 'organize' themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word 'religion' nowadays, we think inevitably of some 'church' or other; and to some persons the word 'church' suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are 'down' on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.
In this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The regligious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. Fist-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox and so many others had to go.
A genuine first-hand religious experience is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs!
The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the objects of our study. The persecution of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner focus is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.
Metaphysical
During an out-of-body altered state of consciousness experience, I looked into the eyes of God and he said You are not ready
. It is rather unclear who looked at who, because the person in front of me had my body and my face, though they were infinitely better than my current condition in every imaginable way, and I knew his personality, wisdom, charisma and any other quality were also infinitely better. It felt like that person embodied the limit of what I could become in my current lifetime.
** more metaphysics **