https://www.humanreligions.info/god_to_human.html
By Vexen Crabtree 2025
If God is good in nature and its message is true, and the message of god is important for us, then it holds to reason that a good god would want human beings to know that message1. Humans beings are not a good choice as the conveyors of such truth. People lie, embellish, exaggerate, get confused, speak with poorly-chosen words without an ability to convey truths accurately in unambiguous and clear verse, and translating ultimate truth from one language into others will always diminish the meaning. There is a better way: God in its omnipotence can communicate perfectly, clearly, instantly, unambiguously, and instantly and simultaneously to everyone all at once, if it so wished. If God needs someone to know something, they will know it. There is no reason at all to limit divine truth to the capabilities of human communicators, spreading it haphazardly and slowly from person to person, spawning dozens of poorly-told variants.
Human-passed messages destroy credibility. There are uncountable false prophets, crazies with neurological abnormalities and confused egotists who all think that they receive messages from god. They should not be trusted. It makes no sense that into that mess, God injects the occasional messenger who is telling the truth. And if God does do that, it makes no sense to punish or judge those who don't trust the messenger. Charlatans, tricksters and frauds can be thoroughly convincing. We cannot be told to trust anyone who claims to speak for God. The method of communicating via individual humans is a recipe for disaster, confusion and chaos: if you believe that's what God wants, then so be it: let the people have their prophets. But it's not how a good God would spread its revealed truth.
#beliefs #buddhism #causes_of_religion #myths #religion #stories #subjectivism #thinking_errors
We humans have a set of instinctive behaviours when it comes to telling stories; we naturally embellish, exaggerate, cover up doubts about the story and add dramatic and cliff-edge moments. We do this because we are genetically programmed to try to tell good stories, which draw attention to ourselves2. These subconscious side-effects of our social instincts have a downside: we are poor at accurately transmitting stories even when we want to.3. All the major world religions went through periods of oral transmission of their founding stories, and the longer this state persisted the more variant the stories became4. Hundreds of years of oral tradition in Buddhism led to communities in different regions thinking that the Buddha gained enlightenment in the 5th century BCE, the 8th, the 9th or even in the 11th century BCE and each community thinks it has received the correct information through its oral transmission5. A scientific study of Balkan bards who have memorized "traditional epics rivaling the Iliad in length show that they do not in fact retain and repeat the same material verbatim but rather create a new version each time they perform it" based around a limited number of memorized elements6. A sign of untrustworthiness is that as stories spread they often become marvellous, more sure of themselves, more fantastic and, more detailed rather than less7.
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#god_communication #religion #religious_books
Whatever various religions, prophets, seekers, mystics and holy spokespeople say is not exactly what God wants us to know. There is no reason for a good god, which wants the truth to be known, to convey important messages to individual human beings, in specific human languages, and allow us to spread the message using our own imperfect communication methods.
As soon as people start translating it, explaining it to each other and writing it down then the message becomes reliant upon cultural understanding. It will dilute, get misunderstood, and it is sure that different communities will come to interpret the message differently, leading to schism and confusion, and as history has shown, to violence and bloodshed.
“The idea that God sent Jesus Christ to publish, as they say, the glad tidings to all nations, from one end of the earth to the other, is consistent only with the ignorance of those who knew nothing of the extent of the world.”
"The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine (1807)8
If goodness comes from god, then given their historical mistakes, their culture-specific language, moral shortcomings and the social strife that results from their existence, holy books cannot possibly be from God. The whole idea of cultivating the True Religion via the orally-transmitted stories of itinerant and illiterate preachers such as Jesus and Mohammad, in (often obscure) human languages, is nonsensical.
If it is up to humans to trust messages from God, then, those messages should come from God. We are not judged, thankfully, by our ability to tell when another human being is being truthful or not. The world is full of wrong religions, wrong sects, and crazy communities that are led astray by very convincing speakers. Time and time again, us mere humans fail to detect with another human is actually spreading an untrue message. There's no clear criteria, and no method, to determine who is a messenger of god, or not. We cannot be judged when we do not trust a fellow human... and therefore, it makes no sense to dirty divine truths with human mouths, and human hands.
“Those to whom a prophecy should be told, could not tell whether the man prophesied or lied, or whether it had been revealed to him, or whether he conceited it. ... Nobody could again know whether he foreknew it, or guessed at it, or whether it was accidental. A prophet, therefore, is a character useless and unnecessary. ... Upon the whole, mystery, miracle, and prophecy are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion.”
"The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine (1807)9
Truth should not be a matter of following whoever is the most convincing. It should be a matter of being able to discern what is true. And therefore, it must be more about looking at the evidence in the world, and the feelings of the heart: although as we know, the former is what drives atheism, and the latter is also what causes the majority of the world to believe wrong things. It appears therefore, that there are no divine messages.
Prophets are people who come conveying some new message from God. They have a limited range of influence, take a long time to convince people and are a pretty inefficient method of communication. If God wanted groups of people to know things, God would tell those people those things directly or just put the knowledge straight into their brains.
Prophets are therefore people who believe that people should know things that God itself doesn't think it needs to tell them. If God wanted them to know, God would have told them already. If it is right for them to know, then God would make them know instantly. It wouldn't need to beat around the bush, and go get some random person to go around and tell other people for it. God is all-powerful and doesn't need the help of anyone. Prophets are people who believe they know better than God: they believe that although an all-powerful, perfectly good god hasn't imparted a particular idea to someone, that they themselves should do it instead.
#god #god_communication #monotheism #reading_religious_texts #religion #theism
God does not provide any clear or obvious communications to mankind. Some think that It has knowledge about itself passed by word of mouth from human to human, deciding to send some revelations to individual people which have unfortunately been contradictory. Despite the number of clearly false messages, many holy books demand that believing in signs and messengers is the good and holy thing to do and they declare terrible punishments for those who fail to believe correctly. The epistemological problem is that it is impossible for anyone to verify the message: we can't, and shouldn't, trust human beings who say they speak for god: most such people are convincing charlatans. To believe that God spreads truth via humans is to nurture division and confusion.
Religious texts have almost all been delivered to men; throughout the entire Jewish Scriptures and Old Testament, God never talks directly to any woman10. This mirrors precisely the patriarchal structure of traditional societies because human factors are behind the srpead of messages, not divine instruction. None of the content of religious books has revealed super-human knowledge. Scientist Victor Stenger notes that "Biblical and Qur'anic statements about the natural world, look exactly as you would expect them to look if there was no new knowledge being revealed - just what was the human understanding of the day. That is, they look as if there is no God who speaks to humanity through scriptures or other revelations" (2007)11.
Human voices and handwritten human religious books have led to uncountable errors, mistranslations, disagreements, sects, divisions and then disputes, conflicts, violence and war. That is not how a good-natured god would spread its truth: God could easily reveal pure truth to everyone simultaneously, and put an end to all battles between different religions. But It does not feel compelled to do so. The only sensible conclusion is that God doesn't care about what we humans believe.
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