What is God's purpose for his life?

I would hazard a guess. If asked that question God could say, “You tell me.”

If God cannot die, does he have life in the usual sense? Taking this as an academic question, I’d answer that I don’t think so. Therefore any question about the purpose of it has no meaning.

@Jeruba So he doesn’t and just is?

His purpose to keep entertained. Like having a vivarium. Nobody cares to think that he has junk in his trunk, so what else is there to play with??

Well, @RedDeerGuy1, in my opinion he just isn’t; but for the sake of argument, then, yes—he doesn’t, and just is. I honestly don’t think it makes any difference either way.

Hedonism.
Why else would you create a sentient species for the sole purpose of worshipping you?

God’s purpose is to do the absolute best thing all the time. This leads to the Euthyphro dilemma, which is an argument against the existence of God. Does God do things because they are the right thing to do, or are they right simply because he does them? In the first case God is an automaton following a set of rules, not worthy of worship. In the second case, without a pre-existing standard of right and wrong, what is right is purely arbitrary, and there is no reason to obey God.

If God worships a super-God, then does the super-God worship a super-super-God? We end up with an infinite sequence of gods. Why should we obey any of them if there is always a yet higher authority? If you want to hold on to your religion, you will have to stop asking questions, and just believe.

Interesting question, many people have their own beliefs, like Mark Twain and @kritiper, as well as other writers.

My belief is that God is a Creator who is fascinated by many of his creations and evolution. He must be disappointed and jubilant at times. If the Bible is real, which I believe, there is no higher authority.

@LostInParadise I’m sure the Euthypro Dilemma is probably more than you can get into here. But it makes no sense if God is whom most Jews and Christians believe God to be.

God does not follow a ‘pre-existing’ set of rules. Nothing existed before God, the prime mover. There never was a time or place before God because God created time and space. A pre-existing set of rules would apply only to a finite being existing within time and space, and would necessitate the need for something before. which designated the standards.

Nor are what’s right and wrong purely arbitrary.
What is right and wrong are a direct reflection and God’s nature, also reflected and manifest in the way the universe is made. God is the creator of the universe, the space/time continuum, all the rules and laws therein (including the laws of mathematics) and it reflects God’s nature.

Your problem is hidden assumptions: you assume that God is a grumpy old guy who lives in the sky and smites people. God is the God of rightness. You are asking “What is the purpose of rightness?” There is no straight answer to a question like that.

From “The Deivine Comedy of Dante Alighieri..Paridiso”
and with the Verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
Re: Canto XIX
Line : 43–48
” God being infinite,His word,or Idea,must surpass infinitely the comprehension of the finite beings He created.”
Re: line 64–66
“Divine Justice still remains beyond our human ability to fathom it,and the justness of God’s decisions,a point of faith.”

Just my thoughts and conclusion that I reason from this means the following:

God’s understanding and purpose is beyond human comprehension and perhaps God awaits for our human abilities to evolve to greater understanding even if it takes thousands of centuries to get to that point.
In the meantime God undertakes the responsibility to look after humankind enough for them to evolve and thus all that God asks is that we as humans have Faith in that.

He exists to be random and unpredictable, and watch people lose their minds over “WHY???”

@Dutchess_III
Then that begs the question “Why not”?
Asking why, almost reasons that something else is controlling our lives, instead of
knowing that it is just ourselves who is deciding and directing our fates.

And perhaps God is observing and learning as well?

A collective consciousness or bank if you will, of human experiences, thoughts and so on.

Well, if you have an unkind, uncaring God I guess “Why not?” would be the perfect, flippant answer as to why 60 children drowned in a flood.

@Dutchess_III
My opinion of why bad things happen?
It wasn’t God who caused those things to happen rather it was human error in not taking
precautions in life to safeguard their children.
Blaming others be it God or whomever relieves some pain and justification to the event.
We as humans are responsible for events in our lives as decisions impact everyone.

Well, I figure if he’s willing to accept all the glory and praise for saving 2 children from the flood, he needs to man up and be willing to accept the blame for the 60 others who died, too.

I am not responsible for tornadoes or floods or earthquakes. No one is.

We have trouble enough understanding our purpose. God’s purpose would be completely beyond our comprehension. It is difficult to imagine how a being that doesn’t age and that lives in all moments of time simultaneously could even have a purpose.

Here is a detailed answer by a respected Rabbi , for those that need a detailed reason laid out before them to begin to understand.
https://www.thenewsstar.com/story/life/faith/2016/02/12/quick-blame-god-bad-things-happen/80284700/

I’ve been all over under and around all of the arguments. They always come down to “God works in mysterious ways.” I don’t buy that.

If there was a purpose, then there would have to be something beyond “God,” who might have created him somehow.

@Yellowdog , How do you know that goodness follows from the nature of God? What is the standard of goodness? There is either a standard or there is not. If there is no pre-existing standard of goodness, as you suggest, then in what sense can we say that God’s nature is such that he always does the best possible thing? Saying that what God does is always for the best, is meaningless. You might as well say that what God does is the most fribitz. But what does fribitz mean? Exactly, and what does being good mean?

I am not the one who said that God always does ‘the best possible thing.’

Nor would many humans say that what God does is, by human standards, the best possible thing. For instance, I cannot account for the many absolutely horrible parasites and diseases that exist in the world that cause so much suffering on people. But I DO see intelligence in the design of the universe the DNA codes, and the events of history.

I don’t know why so many innocent people suffer from natural disasters. But God has put me exactly in the right time and place and nudged me to do certain things that were exactly what was needed at the time that has affirmed God’s existence.

Once, when someone I was trying to help through an illness was suffering immensely and I couldn’t pray for her because I believed it would not work, I needed proof of God’s existence, God nudged me to buy two record albums at a random yard sale I passed on my way to work. Then, I sensed that God was nudging me to give them to a drama teacher in an afterschool activities program where I worked. I felt silly and apologetic but did this.

The drama teacher had also been praying for a sign from God, and those two record albums had belonged to him eight years prior and had disappeared from a school office where he had stored them temporarily, One of them had his wife’s first and maiden name on it.

Why God can arrange that but does not alleviate the suffering of the person I was caring for, I have no idea. God’s standard is not mine. But the woman who was ill that I couldn’t pray for—she had faith and I didn’t. And she is in a better place now. She would say, God chose to heal her in heaven. Those would have been her words after a life of suffering.

When I was a little kid, I wanted a pony and a Superman suit. I prayed like hell, night after night, but nothing happened. I prayed like hell some more and even told “God,” in an effort to make it easy for him, where he could tie up the pony and hang the suit, but nothing happened.

Even Santa Claus has a better track record than that.

I was told as a small child that the church was God’s house.

I assumed that God was never at home when we came to visit.

If God does not always do the right thing, then why believe in him? Disbelief is so much easier. The Universe just is, without any excess mental baggage, like the need for an all powerful all knowing being. The theory of evolution explains how life can originate and diversify. Saying that God is needed as the creator leaves open the more difficult question of where God came from.

Disbelief actually answers all the questions I ever had about god. It came as a huge relieve for me, too.

* relief. *

IMO and I’m not trying to be harsh but people have a fairy-tale picture/idea of “God” that is completely inadequate. It needs to extend beyond what humans have defined or invented to fill the “where do we come from” conundrum. I see dismissing religion as logical and natural but total disbelief in “creation” as a kind of cop out leaving the larger question unanswered.

But scientists are working on answering the larger question. One of these days they’ll figure it out, just like they figure evolution out, and star travel and all kinds of things that were unimaginable at one time.

All I’m asking is to expand on your definition of “GOD.”
There is no guarantee we’ll find any answers. There is no guarantee we’ll see star travel either.

Well…I did. Actually, I contracted it I suppose.

God’s not a person with a life to have a meaning, nor thoughts to think about that notion.

Weill if he can’t have thoughts, does he even care about us? Does he care about anything?

If he did exist, he wouldn’t care about us. If our world all goes to shit then it just all a part of the show for him.
That’s entertainment!

I guess that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it! He created us to worship him, and if you don’t, look at what he’s gonna do to you! Wheeee!!!

Those are just some tips of the iceberg of mistakenly relating to gods as actual people.

“God” “cares” about everything, absolutely and in infinite detail, but only in a metaphorical sense (i.e. in the way everything exists and is intrinsically significant and is what it is – the same way the butterfly effect cares), not in the sense of there is literally one personified human-like ego consciousness that observes you (and judges you) etc. Unless maybe that’s your own conscious non-ego attention…

Dante Alighieri is/was a mess.

I still find in quite odd that Christians can talk about the Greek gods and easily refer to them as myths. They can agree that Zeus coming down from a mountain and impregnating a mortal human is utterly ridiculous…..and yet take their ancient middle eastern god stories, that are very, very similar to the Greeks, and insist that those stories are fact, not a myth (although they all probably had the same beginning.)

One of my jail students asked me to check out Dante’s Inferno from our library for him, so I did. Lord those guys must have been bored!

A Greek tale of a woman who is impregnated by Apollo in a temple from a snake, is not quite the same, It is impossible to have sex with a snake, but the Greeks might not have known that.

To be impregnated without an impregnator and remain a virgin physically requires something more than a Greek God, which were actually more like Super Heroes in today’s comics and probably filled the same niche. The Judeo-Christian version was foretold centuries before.

That is exactly what I’m talking about @Yellowdog. You dismiss the Greek gods as silly “superheros,” yet on the other hand, in a scholarly, serious way you say, ”To be impregnated without an impregnator and remain a virgin physically requires something more than a Greek God…” Yeah. It requires the Invisible God of Abraham. Does that really make sense?

You condescendingly say a woman can’t get impregnated by a snake….yet you believe a snake can lead humans straight into mortal sin.

Also, Apollo had some kids, but Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, was involved in most of these strange ancient births of mortals or humanoid gods.. I didn’t see anything, anywhere about snakes so I assume all those gods just did it the regular way. Or maybe they did it the same way as Abraham’s god did.

Eh, I’m not going to argue about something that happened thousands of years ago, @Dutchess_III