Chapter VI: On These Strange Images We Have of the Divine

Let’s be honest: humans can sanctify just about anything. If your irritable, unbearable neighbor became a god (or had always been one), people would worship him without hesitation, declare him infinitely superior, even call him perfect. Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has imagined and crafted images of God—or gods—in its own likeness: flawed, temperamental, lustful, sometimes unjustly lenient. What man was, he has remained. Even today, despite the evolution of dogmas, modern visions of the divine differ little from those of ancient cults. Most religions still promote strange, often contradictory figures—easily described as tyrannical or absurd. And even if they now awkwardly and falsely speak of divine ethics or respect, it’s only because religions claim so, not because this is a prerequisite for humans to worship.

When It Comes to Religion, Humans Care Little for Ethics

Not only do they not care, but they even dare to affirm—and deeply believe—that they prioritize ethics. And that is the gaping abyss between their lofty claims (which are based solely on repeated slogans with no proof in reality) and the actual importance they place on morality, goodness, and justice. Many current religions prove this time and again: gods who would be imprisoned if they were human are still adored today.

It’s as if justice, wisdom, and kindness lost their real meaning to adopt whatever qualities a god happens to possess. What would be wise for a human in a given context is not necessarily wise for a deity; for the deity, wisdom is simply doing whatever it chooses, regardless of what that is. And humans go even further: the choices made by these gods become models of wisdom to imitate. People believe they are pursuing true wisdom—not merely engaging in blind mimicry. This absurdity is so deep-rooted that no one would have believed it if it hadn’t been the norm on Earth since the beginning of time.

Echoes of Ancient Cults

Take the gods of Norse, Greek, or Egyptian civilizations: they demanded blood sacrifices, glorified massacres, accepted rape. These deities didn’t even pretend to be just; they were openly despotic. Today, most religions—despite being wrapped in language about divine justice or goodness—continue to reflect similar images. They barely disguise their blind submission to a supreme authority, regardless of whether it is morally acceptable.

Modern divinity imposes demands that often seem absurd: unconditional belief, fixed prayer times, abstaining from certain foods, forgiving the unforgivable, or waging war in the name of faith. These practices are sometimes disguised as virtues or beneficial acts, but they collapse under rigorous ethical scrutiny. Failing to examine them critically is ethically irresponsible, deeply hypocritical, and blameworthy.

Even if we suppose these demands are ethical in some deeper sense, one must actually reach that depth. One must understand the reasons. And those reasons must be valid, legitimate—not just (as often seen in scholarly writings) meaningless justifications, like: “Ah, he killed that man because he made a strange noise; nothing could be more just.” The ability of scholars and theologians to argue for massive contradictions through rhetorical sleight of hand, sincerely no less, deserves a book of its own. They resemble a madman insisting that a pile of garbage is a bouquet of flowers—because one can clearly distinguish the colors of roses and lilies in it—all while waving their degrees to demand trust from non-specialists. And it’s the same across all religions, without a single exception this time.

A striking example is that of a god who preaches universal forgiveness while imposing absurd conditions to obtain his own forgiveness. If such a god truly wanted a world without resentment, wouldn’t he have simply spared all of creation? But no—people dive headlong into such faith. A god who talks about absolute forgiveness? That’s the holy trifecta. No need to strain too hard imagining the garbage heap is a lush meadow. It makes everything easier—for human hypocrisy.

Ethical Judgment of the Divine

Let’s imagine a perfect and just God. If he imposes rules on his creatures, shouldn’t he also abide by them? Yet religious descriptions often portray him as contradictory: forbidding injustice among humans while practicing it himself through his judgments or demands. A crucial key to evaluating Creation is to consider God as an ethical actor, subject to the same critical lens as his creatures. If God exists, how would he judge the incoherent images believers have constructed of him?

Religions tend to project their own ethical shortcomings onto the divine. They reshape God into a biased judge, demanding his followers deny moral evidence in favor of blind obedience. And this is often presented as the pinnacle of faith. The most praised are those who see only the flowers. “Garbage? Blasphemous devil! Hell-spawn! Heretic!”—that’s what they’d think of anyone who points out the filth. And they imagine their god applauding them from above, calling them: righteous among the righteous.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Don’t they see that if their deities actually existed, they’d despise such blatant hypocrisy?

The Two Great Nonsense Pillars of Religion

Two fundamental errors underpin most religious systems:

Blind Submission as the Supreme Virtue:

Believers think their role is to believe and obey—even when the doctrines they follow seem unjust or absurd. They imagine a God who values blindness, passivity, and the denial of ethical clarity. But what kind of justice would reward those who refused to think or question?

A perfect God wouldn’t seek “criminally naïve fools” who are ready to forgive or accept everything without discernment. Quite the opposite—he would expect minds capable of recognizing true good and true evil on their own, not based on a command or dogma.

The Ban on Objective Seeking:

Religions often encourage followers to examine other beliefs in search of truth—but deny their own followers that same freedom. If God requires people from other faiths to seek him out, why wouldn’t he demand the same quest from his own believers? A perfect God could never condone such inconsistency. All truth should be objectively accessible—no path should be arbitrarily privileged by accidents of birth or family tradition.

The Importance of an Ethical and Objective Quest

To deserve divine reward, one must have sought the truth honestly and objectively. A just God could never accept blind faith or allegiance based on cultural or familial bias. 99.99% of believers follow their religion simply because they were born into it. If their ancestors had been wrong, they would still blindly follow the same errors. Is that a genuine quest? Absolutely not.

Faith, to be valid, must be the result of thoughtful reflection, guided by a sincere search for what is just and good. If God issues judgment, he must provide a path that is accessible, clear, and built on solid ethical foundations.

God and Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is condemned by nearly every religion—and yet, it permeates religious practice, as we’ve repeatedly shown. Believers often accept doctrines they know to be unjust or absurd simply because they think that’s what God wants. But a perfect God would never demand such submission. On the contrary, he would require moral integrity, even in the face of supposed divine commands. And doesn’t thinking otherwise seem like an insult to him?

Toward an Ethical Purification

Creation, in this light, only makes sense as a process of ethical purification. A perfect God could demand nothing less than justice—even if it meant justice against himself, should he stray. If a religion asks its followers to abandon their own sense of justice to please God, it becomes a glaring ethical error.

A perfect God could not be pleased by faith rooted in fear or blindness. He would seek beings capable of critiquing him, of opposing him if necessary, to uphold universal ethical principles. And paradoxically, that might be the truest sign of faith.

Conclusion: Rethink Your Image of God

Our idea of God must be refined—not according to power or majesty, but according to ethics. Whether perfect or not, a God cannot impose absurd demands without losing all moral legitimacy. And if a just God exists, he wouldn’t expect blind submission from his creatures, but an honest pursuit of truth and justice.

Believers who wish to be truly just must seek not only within their religion, but beyond it. To refine the image of God, to understand what he must be ethically, rather than merely clinging to inherited dogmas, is a necessity. For a God who judges souls based solely on religious affiliation would be unworthy of respect.