If a god was proven real would you worship it? A god would have to do some modern miracles to convince me that it wasn't some advanced alien. It would have to heal all amputees, heal all the sick people on the planet, end world hunger forever, and tell the whole planet it was real all at once. Even after doing all of that in front of me, I still wouldn't worship it. It would have to answer for allowing human belief in false gods and false religions. It would have to answer for all of the religious wars in the past and present.
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In its efforts to me to prove that is real, it would have to just that, answer all the questions you present and more.
But say a god managed to do all that, (hey it is a god after all, if it is so powerful it can just enter my mind and make me believe in it.)
I am not really sure, beyond mind control, that a god could convince me it is real, I would assume that I hallucinated all the miracles like limb regrowth, is the far more likely scenario that I must consider than what I think I saw/experienced was actually real.
If say, I still had free will and a God convinced me it was real in an extremely convincing fashion, (somehow,) if that god had a heaven, and I had even a small chance of getting in, logic/reasoning would dictate to worship that god to me, even if it was an evil cruel and unjust god. I would dedicate my entire life to increasing my chances of getting in this heaven, only a fool would turn down a shot at an eternity in heaven if it was proven real to them in a way that could not possibly be denied.
That is a whole lot of very, VERY! circumstantial "if's" though.
@LogicForTW
I could not bring myself to worship a cruel, evil, and unjust god. I would have to ask it was so cruel, evil and unjust.
It does bring up an interesting dilemma. Stepping away from the "god" stuff to a more simplified construct to discuss this dilemma of "if" scenarios and worshipping.
Say I was an evil warlord, incredibly rich and powerful, and you lived out an awful, meager existence on the land I claimed via force, a life that could be mostly defined as misery day in and day out. My power is absolute, there is no escaping, and no challenging of my power. If I offered you rooms in my palace, food, shelter, modern medicine and amenities, the best money can buy, and all I demand is that you worship me and follow a few general rules in my palace. Would you take that deal? Even though you would be worshipping an evil warlord?
Worship an evil warlord, or continue living a life of misery. Which would you pick? Stand on principle and suffer, or abandon principles and live a life of leisure and luxury in exchange for spending a few hours a week worshipping the evil warlord and weird rules of the palace that is something like the 10 commandments? I suspect just 3-4 days in a row of an empty stomach will have just about anyone making that deal.
To me, if we accept the "if" that god is real and proven beyond all doubt. That is the stakes, but only greater, we are talking eternity and paradise here, immortality, instead of: a nice room in a warlord's palace to live out your days in.
Of course the argument of which god applies here, which religious denominations god are we talking about? If their is no heaven or hell, if the god does not interfere with your life while alive, If the god is so nonsensical in his wants and desires and rules that you can not possibly make sense of it, all bets are off.
I need a seriously, very powerful carrot/stick to worship a god, even if one was proven to exist beyond all possible doubt. That carrot/stick would be so powerful that just because the god is evil/unjust/cruel would not stop me from worshipping it.
"If"
Nope..... Not going near that....
I'm thinking that the imagination brought to this forum to volley god around is always entertaining.
If there was a god it would already be complete unto itself wanting for nothing, especially humanity. The fact that humanity exists as we know it is not proof of a god but more towards proof that one does not exist.
When the genius of humanity gets its collective brilliance around that humbling truth we can all coexist on a level where notions of superiority and immortality will no longer modify the human behavioral psyche inwardly, to its own detriment, but outwardly steered by its natural curiosity for advancement.
Pitar said:
This well stated thought to me, is one of the most powerful reasons why I do not believe in any possibility of a "god." Basically a: if god was all powerful and timeless, why would it have human traits, why would it care about us at all, why this weird complex "game" for lack of better words? If a human became all powerful and was timeless, it would act and do nothing like humans would. Why would an all powerful timeless being suddenly take on mortal and weak, (in comparison,) human traits and desires?
@Xenoview: "If a god was proven real would you worship it?"
In a vanishingly unlikely scenario in which theists were able to prove the existence of their god, their assumption would be that since god exists we need to worship it. As you have quite rightly stated in your topic, these are two separate questions.
If we ever reach that stage, we'd then need to ask two more questions. 1. Does this god deserve to be worshipped? 2. If so, how should we worship it?
My response to 1 is absolutely not. The god of the bible is a war-mongering, genocidal, cruel, capricious sack of shit who makes Hitler look like Ghandi by comparison. Judging from the Bible and the Catholic church, the answer to 2 includes killing and burning animals, stoning people to death, wearing funny hats, chanting gibberish, drinking bad wine from dirty goblets, and buggering choir boys. I think I'll pass.
I largely agree with LogicforTW on what I'd do if the impossibility if god and heaven and hell were suddenly certain. If non-existence was on offer I might decide to tell god to fuck off and I'd be content with nonexistence. But I damn sure wouldn't want to boil forever, so if I was convinced hell existed I'd be forced to worship the stupid bastard. But he might as well call me Satan, because god would be in for a mutiny at my very first opportunity. And his jack ass son Jesus would be in real danger if he ever wondered too far from his father's side...
A lot has been proven since gods were first imagined. The creation of elements in stars, DNA and evolution, an expanding universe, diseases caused by bacteria and viruses, earthquakes relationship to tectonic plates, billions of distant galaxies, relativity, the Higgs Boson.
I could go on and on!
In all this growing mountain of facts , no evidence of any god. I will not expect any soon.