Of course religion is a human creation, man-made and woman-made. Who else is there to have constructed it?
The reason we human beings create religion is that we experience a depth to life, an otherness, a transcendence that we call God and we then begin to seek that which we believe this God can give us. That is where religion is born.
Never, however, does our explanation of God capture the essence of the God-experience. Despite this obvious limitation human beings constantly literalize our explanations, our creeds, our doctrines and even our images of God which inevitably turns them into idols. In the name of these idols we then proselytize, we kill, we persecute and we go to war in the name of our religion. Surely no one wants to blame that human behavior, which is the product of religion, on God.
Religion dies without mystery and wonder. Mystery and wonder exist when we experience that which is beyond our ability to explain. Religion is always a human explanation.
Christopher Hitchens is a great writer, a good political analyst, but an incompetent theologian. The God he rejects is the same God most thinking Christians reject. He asserts that this rejectible God is the only God. I suggest that the God of religion is a human construct and easily rejectible.
Can horses describe what it means to be human? Of course not! Neither can human beings describe what it means to be God. I wonder why it is that the last people to recognize this fact are religious people!
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