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No. 541
Wouldn't being tasked with making a religion imply that it's inherently false or artificial? Then wouldn't it be a deception?
Ethically on those grounds I don't believe I personally could do it. At some point a deity figure that wasn't already everything would necessitate arbitrariness, regardless.
I couldn't give an argument for an omnipotent or omniscient being, for example, because the only way that makes sense to me is in the bounds of something real; ie energy. I think an omni-anything being wouldn't be able to interact with the universe in any way we define it too without simultaneously making the universe infinite, which it is not.
Take a line for example; infinite in both directions. Now, using only the line as a reference, define a unit. But the problem with this is because of the infinitude involved, any unit defined is inherently arbitrary and self similar to something infinitely smaller or larger. And because we don't observe such arbitrariness and self-similarity we know a division of something infinite can't possibly explain our universe, and, indeed, a division of God's efforts is much the same. For the same reason you can't divide infinity, you can't use a portion of an infinite being to create a finite universe.
At that point, I wouldn't be able to say I have anything to be able to pretend to be worthy of being called "god"; indeed, the choice to me would then be "the universe as god" or some really powerful but not quite gods did things.
The latter I wouldn't be able to prove, not to mention would almost necessitate arbitrary rules, and if such beings were representatives of nature, all I would be able to know and teach about them would be from their respective phenomena, in which case I might as well do some real science and use a find and replace function to make some cheap, terrible poetry ("Ra, growing tired of life, will swell to a terrible red giant in about 6 billion years").
To the former, aside from reeking of new agey hipstery woo, would mean that the study of nature is intrinsically the study to those answers, and it would be indistinguishable from a situation without a god in the classical sense. In that case, I'd simply fall back again to science, perhaps making a religion whose sole dogma is Bacon's method of rational and empirical epistemology.
A religion without a god, though, would be a philosophy or an ideology. In such a case, anything I set without using a reliable epistemology would almost certainly be something that's already happened; say a religious form of stoicism - that would be Buddhism (grossly oversimplifying, of course). Those inherently set arbitrations due to their inability to say anything with certainty without falling back on an epistemology where anecdotal evidence is held to be anything but the fallacy it truly is. If I approached non-religious philosophies the same way, then I'm faced with the problem of trying to reason myself out to a collection of establishments that use essentially a scientific epistemology and are far more adapt at arguing for themselves than I. Not to mention trying to prove that my way of doing things is best for everyone, when I believe that different people require different means of coming to grips with the world (for some people this might be more stoic and for others more hedonistic, for example).
In which case I'd fail at every turn. As best I can know, I know no one actually has the answers to the important questions, and because of that, any ad hoc is absolutely inherently arbitrary.
Hope that answer works? Sorry.
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