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"God" is the name religions - especially those of the Judeo-Christian mould or those influenced by them - give to the supreme deity of the
monotheitsic worldview. A distinction can be made however between the God of Religion, the God of Philosophy, and the God of Mysticism |
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Most religions explain the meaning of existence and the origin of the universe in terms of a supernatural being which they call called
"God". "God" is usually thought of as a sort of person up in "heaven", who creates the entire universe and all beings in it out of nothing, and then reveals Himself to humankind through a sort
of cosmic rule-book, a Bible or whatever. Whoever follows the dictates of this rule-book is rewarded with heaven or Eternal Life, but whoever doesn't goes to hell or eternal damnation.
Of course, since there are many religions, each with its own sacred scripture, it follows that each believer will assert that only their religion is true, and all of the others are either inferior truths or completely false. From this attitude there come about all sorts of holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and proslytising, that go hand in hand with religion.
Nowadays the big enemy of religion is the secular society and the findings of science. The discoveries of science concerning the universe are so vast and amazing that they threaten the little box that believers of fundamentalistic religions keep their minds in. These believers then feel compelled to create a science of their own; i.e. they construct their own paradigm. This is what's called Creation Science which is actually a pseudo-science in that it rejects the methodology of falsification (the key element of scientific method) in favour of Biblical literalism. (Materialist reductionists are also "fundamentalists" as regards their Reductionism, but they're not anti-falsification).
God - a good philosophical definition
