My Conception of God

Being of scientific bent, I am quite uncomfortable with the word "God" as it is frequently bantered about carelessly by dogmatic religious traditions. Indeed, this discomfort was so great that at one point I had dismissed the concept of god as useless. Today, however, I have found a conception of "God" with which I am comfortable: God is nothing more than the anthropomorphization of one's personal conception of "goodness". Obviously, one's personal conception will be greatly influenced through the repeated lessons of parents and other authority figures.

Indeed, due to dogmatic religious and legal traditions, people may incorrectly reason that their conceptions of god are so similar to that of their neighbors because god is universal.

Looking at the variety of ideas of god (I prefer lower case) and god's will it is obvious to me that what most people refer to "god", they do not realize that this god voice that they hear is internal and not external. This apparent externality may be the result of frontal lobe often giving inhibitions of behaviors that are encouraged/rewarded by the rest of our mental faculties. Much of our mental angst arises from the competition between these brain centers.

While the concept of god is an imperfect one, so is that of self, ego, gravity or other concepts. That does not make god unreal, but simply an imperfect concept like so many other useful, but imperfect concepts. Most of the attacks on god are justifiable attacks on conceptions of god that are the result of an unreflective minds; however, the concept that I put forward is pretty much unassailable.

One may of course argue that the personification of goodness adds nothing to its understanding; however, that is partly due to the preference for saying that our physical brains control our ideas, when in reality our internalized ideas can control our behavior.