Pagan God?

You’ve laid out the two poles nicely, and the interesting thing is how little they have to do with each other.

The first one — God as imagined parent, inner advocate, cosmic helper in daily affairs — is the version Feuerbach and Freud dismantled: humanity projecting its needs onto the sky, the exalted father who watches, rewards, intervenes. Calling it “delusion” or “immaturity” is fair if it stays at the level of a being who arranges parking spots for me. Though even there, “immaturity” might be slightly too dismissive psychologically. Winnicott would say transitional objects aren’t pathology — they’re how a psyche scaffolds itself. The imagined friend can be a developmental stage rather than a defect, something many people outgrow and some never need to, and some transform into something else entirely.

The second definition — God as the cause of the phenomena of life — is doing something completely different. It’s no longer a someone at all. That’s Spinoza’s deus sive natura, Tillich’s “ground of being,” or in your more familiar territory, the nondual move: not a being among beings but that out of which appearing happens. Rohr’s “Christ as another name for everything” is in this neighborhood too.

But here’s the tension worth sitting with: the second definition is invulnerable to the projection critique precisely because it has shed everything personal — and in shedding it, you can ask what the word “God” still adds. If God simply is the cause of phenomena, why not just say “nature,” “reality,” “what is”? The honest answer from the contemplative side is usually that the word isn’t doing explanatory work at all — it’s doing devotional or orientational work. It marks a relationship of awe, surrender, intimacy toward what-is, rather than a hypothesis about it. The pagan god explains thunder; the ground of being explains nothing — it’s what’s left when explanation falls silent.

So maybe the real divide isn’t mature vs. immature, but God as explanation (which science steadily evicts, and which does shade into magical thinking) vs. God as the name for what you can’t stand outside of — which can’t be evicted because it was never a claim in the first place.

Where does seeing-no-self land on this for you — does the word “God” still earn its keep, or does it carry too much parent-in-the-sky residue?

The contrast you’re drawing is sharp and worth pressing on.

The “pagan” God critique

There’s a long tradition of this critique — Feuerbach said religion is anthropology in disguise, God a projected human wish. Freud: the father-figure made cosmic, a comfort against helplessness. The “inner voice assumed to have power” framing is particularly pointed — it describes something that functions less like encounter with the real and more like an internalized authority figure wearing divine costume. Interventionist, personal, meddling in parking spots and career decisions.

Whether that’s immaturity or just a natural starting place is a fair question. Maybe it’s the ego’s first attempt to relate to something larger than itself — still in its own image, still transactional.

Your definition: “the cause of the phenomena of life”

This is doing something different. It strips personality, preference, intervention. It’s closer to:

• Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover — causality itself, not an agent
• Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura — God is nature’s self-organizing necessity
• Tillich’s “ground of being” — not a being among beings, but Being itself

What’s interesting about your phrasing specifically is phenomena of life — not just “first cause of the universe” but whatever is responsible for the arising of experience, aliveness, this.

That points somewhere nondual traditions take seriously: not a God who acts on life from outside, but whatever life is from the inside of it.

The tension might be: can the second survive without the first’s warmth? Can an impersonal cause be related to, prayed to, loved?

Or is that need itself the thing to examine?

Could you for a moment stop rushing over words…

What does it take to really understand what is being said?

“Truth is simple, but the seeker is complex.”

Idols are mental images/constructs:

• imaginations,
• assumptions,
• beliefs,
• concepts,
• muscle-memory… often very subtle!

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The “but then face to face” is happening now, not in time!

Like the menu in a restaurant cannot be a substitute for the real nurturing meal, we are unknowingly unaware of the gift of Life:

“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but see not, who have ears but hear not.”

Alone we cannot see our own biases!

“Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, which has eyes to see but does not see, and ears to hear but does not hear; for they are a rebellious house.”

Tangent: We really can read the Bible as if it is written only for us – you and me!

Radical Openness is perhaps the only tool to wake up from the hypnotism of person-hood, otherwise we likely slumber forever in our me-bubble.

Back to Idols…

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”

The Bible becomes alive when we read it with radical openness:

• What do I really know?
• What is aware of thoughts/feelings/perceptions coming and going?
• What is the difference between conceptualizing and direct experience?
• What is the nature of reality?