What is God's purpose for man on Earth?

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It’s really as simple as the Bible makes it out to be. God made the Earth for us to rule over. Being that we haven’t the first clue about how to rule anything, God intended for us to learn from Him.

But while humans are made in His image, we are not omniscient like God, and so we are prone to jealousy and anger. These emotions make us believe we don’t need God, that we are better than God.

None of these things change God’s purpose. When we can turn to the Lord, He can guide and help us. When we can’t, God must operate in the background.

The Bible’s primary value is allegory and myth, to instruct on how best to approach our short time here. There are very few stories of the sort that we tell within it. Rather, the Bible’s narrative mostly consists of what we’d call cautionary tales. Where humans have and can get it wrong, and what God has to do as a result.

There’s no reason to believe, and every reason to believe that even the ancient people that composed and told and enjoyed these stories, that they happened exactly as told. There was no great flood, the Earth wasn’t made in six solar days, a snake didn’t cause God to throw us out of the Garden. To believe these things is to insult the sophistication and intelligence of those ancients.

The Bible was composed at a very special time in history, the after the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The empires of the Bronze Age were built on, well bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper and tin are almost never found in quantity at the same spot, necessitating a would-be empire to get big enough to control both copper and tin supplies.

The economies are termed palace economies by anthropologists. In a palace economy, everything created by a people gets appropriated by the state to be disposed of by an absolute monarch, who was considered the literal representative of the divine on Earth. It could only last as long as the economic underpinnings held strong. The great powers fell like dominoes over a short period of perhaps 50 years.

Bronze couldn’t be made in large enough amounts anymore, so societies had to be built on iron, which is much harder to work, requiring much hotter temperatures, but its ores are far more plentiful. Being that anyone could make iron, this changed the economy to a primitive market-based system. On the ashes of these great civilizations, the seeds of the two great religions of the East and West, Christianity and Buddhism, were born.

The story of Jesus repudiated every ancient value that made society under an absolute monarch intolerable. Buddha taught that the way to liberation was through renunciation of society’s beliefs and values. None of these teachings would have been possible in the vast, sprawling absolute monarchies of the past.

Neither religion altered the world overnight, but rather gradually shifted hearts and minds over the long term, until another great collapse, the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries would usher in the postmodern age in which we are currently living. Technology is rapidly providing the human race with both omniscience and omnipotence and those with it can share in the growing pile of wealth.

The story of Jesus need not be read literally, although it is incredibly life-enriching to do so. Having been composed at the point in time in which it was, when the stories of a civilization and people were no longer forced to be passed word of mouth, the books of the Bible which came at that point in time, the New Testament and the books of the Maccabees, have far more historical bearing than the earlier myths.

Should you choose to believe in the truth of God and the spiritual basis of the world, you can share not just in the pile of economic and technological wealth of this world, but you can also find spiritual riches. God never intended for the world to be poor and for everyone to give away everything to everybody else.

Deep study of the New Testament and the events surrounding Jesus is immensely useful as God provided a blueprint for how humans are intended to solve the issue of the jealousies and angers that drove them away from God in the first place. Selfless giving, prioritizing community over self, never compromising your decency and morals, even if you have to take them to the grave.

These values are universally-acceptable, even those who reject religion can’t help but converge on these values as the best ones to live under. God’s plan continues to be fulfilled, as the better angels of our nature win out over time, and our inner demons, the snake in the garden that provokes us to choose gratification of self over service to our neighbors, are revealed as what they are.