someone, at an .asp site wrote:
I understand why you want to worship God, but why does he want you to worship him? Why would God create billions of people, simply for the purpose of self-glorification?
i’ll address my take on this.
i believe god created us in his image, likeness, and/or form.
i think we were created to be like him not so much in “body shape”, as i don’t believe the one true god has a body (and, hence, no shape), but rather we were created to be like him in another way. an english idiom that sums it up well is “a chip off the old block”.
i believe that any of the “stuff” in me that makes me “me” is based upon something that god finds in “him”self.
if i have love, it is because god loves.
if i have pain, it is because god experiences pain.
if i can be lonely, sad, happy, joyful, angry, it is because god can be all these things, and he created me to be like him.
my “person” — is where these things live. the love i have, the joy i feel, the most ME of me is not in my heart, my synapses nor traveling around in my blood, but is “contained” in some wholly other essence of “me”. the thing that makes me what i really am. the part of me that is my soul — my spirit.
so, i find in myself the desire for people to see, recognize and acknowledge when i do truly good work.
being a disciple of jesus, i understand that such things are not the goal of life, but rather seeing this thing in myself, i must also believe it exists in other people, and so i set out to do what i can for them: pointing out when they do good work. after all, they have done a good job, and deserve the praise.
(interestingly, my friends, be they also followers of jesus’ teachings do this as well — and so my built-in desire for such things is met, all without me having to “fish” for them: we end up taking care of each other)
additionally, i find in myself a natural reaction to want to be with people who want to be with me.
do not we all?
so combining these ideas, that what we find in ourselves was placed there by the one true god, who created us to be like him…
is it not reasonable to extrapolate that god also desires to be around people who want to be around him?
is it not also reasonable to think he must desire the praise for a job well-done?
so, then, with that in mind, let’s think about creation: god created the heavens and the earth, and planted man on the earth, to take care of it, and to enjoy the fruits of taking care of it, and he loved what he had made, declaring it very good.
he created man, according to the creation story, to be “in god’s likeness”, but innocent: blissful ignorance, perhaps?
however, mankind managed to become familiar with the concept of morality (“Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil”), something god did not want for us.
we are now able to have a sense of “right and wrong”, and most all of us know the difference between them — children develop very early in life a sense of when they are wronged: try taking their pacifiers from them! — but we, unlike the one true god, keep doing the wrong things, rather than always doing the right ones.
we tend to choose evil instead of good.
so the “desire for being around those who want to be around us” is all twisted by this innate “wrongness” we choose.
when we “want people to praise us” it is likely, as was pointed out, “self-glorification” (not always!), and when we find ourselves wanting to be around those who want to be around us, it is just as likely out of a sense of selfishness as some innocent sense of mutual attraction.
but, in light of the “wrongness” we choose, and the innocence we were meant to have, and the goodness of the one true god who created us to have these desires we speak of: i believe phrasing the “why did god create us” as “for the simple purpose of self-glorification” really trivializes the matter, and, it seems to me, is indicative of projecting the wrongness we choose onto our creator.