God, Time, Idolatry

Intellectual thoughts about God can only be emanations of the thinker of those thoughts, and so to make declarations about God is ultimately for the thinker to make himself in the form of his/her thoughts God, that is he sets the limits of God to be his/her thoughts on the matter. He deifies his own thoughts, however contrary he may imagine his intentions.

One example of this is in Russell's History of Western Philosophy, where he says that while Occam and Aquinas differed in some related notions, both "admit the universale ante rem, but only to explain creation; it had to be in the mind of God before He could create." I presume the universale ante rem to mean the idea of existence. So God conceived of existence before effecting its actual creation.

This is to make of God, the alleged absolute ground of being and from whom all emanates, a temporal being, a creature dwelling within time; and so God as an inhabitant of time is limited by the nature and constraints of that time within which He dwells. So God's behaviour is constrained by the time God created. God has somehow become submerged within creation, and is another object of creation, subservient to its nature.

So this notion of God is of a limited being, divided between thought and action by time. First God has a thought, and then later acts on the thought.
And though I wrote that God created time, within this logical framework it would seem to make more sense to say that this God is a creation of time rather than time a creation of God. And from there, that time and the God within it are, or would have to be, the creations of another higher God.

For a religion - or perhaps rather institution, for I don't see much of the humility of genuine religious feeling in intellectualising about and defining God, in fact the opposite - which devoted so much of its intellectual efforts to rooting out heresies, it's interesting to see how utterly heretical or false, in the first place, are these limited relative notions of God which the heresies contravene; and all which notions are really merely the limitations of the thinker of those thoughts, but projected onto the alleged nature of God.

To add, if people had any notion of the magnitude of what they are talking about when God , or were in some sense brought into the presence of this magnitude, utter terror would consume them, but generally we are spared such consequences. The lines in Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush are resonant here where God tells Moses, “Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place you are standing is holy ground.”