When Descartes said "I think therefore I am", he was trying to construct a chain of reasoning that created certainty in the existence of God, but he failed.
The concept of God undoubtedly exists. It cannot be denied that the idea of God exists in the same way that the idea of unicorns, fairies and leprechauns exist.
That is enough to be getting on with because God's existence cannot be falsified.
If God exists, we must submit to His laws.
And even if God was an invention of Man, invented to protect the patriarchy, then we must agree with Voltaire that it was necessary to invent God.
"I think therefore I am" is useful in demonstrating feelings of certainty, and we can be certain that the concept of God exists. While we can doubt our own parentage and our sanity, we cannot doubt that we exist if we think about ourselves, because the very act of thinking of ourselves and looking into the mirror, makes us certain that we exist.
Judaism has the idea of emunah and bitachon - knowing that God exists and belief that He will act for the best possible motives while righting any wrongs we might have suffered in this life in our afterlife.
A good example of both concepts is when Job's wife told him to "Curse God and die." By telling Job to curse God, she was acknowledging God's existence, but by predicting the death of her husband after cursing God, she implied her husband would be better off dead or God would punish him for cursing Him, which was the opposite of faith in God's justice.
But how about this?
Even if we cannot be sure if God exists, we know what we ought to do, even if suffer adversity in this life. Whether we suffer or not, we know what we ought to do, and so we should do it if we desire to be recognised and remembered as rational and moral human beings.
Even if nothing happens to us after we are dead and our corpse only rots, our soul - which I define as the memory we leave behind the mind of others after we are dead - will have crystallised in a kind of post mortem half-life.
If we die for our principles, our sacrifice is magnified. Think of Socrates dying for his principles. If he had died of a ripe old age, he would only be remembered for being an annoying man known for asking annoying questions.
If Jesus had not died on the cross, he would not still be worshipped by Christians after 2000 years as the co-equal of the supreme and eternal Abrahamic God who created the Universe.
Sacrifice gives us an afterlife. The sacrifice of putting up with the annoyance, inconvenience and expense of having legitimate children in a fairly uneventful life gives us a biological bequest to the next generation and we in this way live on.
Even if heaven is not reachable for some of us, we should at least strive to dignify our existence as people who speak the truth as we see it, or at least people who lived in an advanced civilisation in which people were known for enjoying the right to do so which was not given up under our watch.
If we wish to be rational and moral human beings, we must have principles and the most powerful principles are religious and moral principles the most ancient of which is Judaism, practised by the world's most ancient and powerful tribe.
Religion, with its moral principles, is the protective wrapper of groups that dignify and distinguish them from one another while ensuring that their members make sacrifices to continue and protect the group.
Do you ever wonder which religion you would choose if you had to choose a religion for moral and political reasons as a gentile?
Here is a suggestion: choose one easy to believe which worships the most powerful God conceivable with the least restrictive and clearest rules containing the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of belief giving you a constitutional right not to pay more than a flat rate income tax of 20%.
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