am reading Jung right now who writes that throughout human history people in various cultures have been intuitively aware of a spiritual dimension in themselves... hence the similarities of rituals and symbols and symbolic hero figures in various religions...

so the question of (or problems criticized regarding) christianity aside, humans seem to have a tendency to worship something. the earth, their own human ability, a tree in their backyard that they call sacred, stars, messages in their dreams... bizarre in prosaic terms but not an invalid feeling... "everyone" at some point makes a "leap of faith" about their existence and the nature of the universe, believe something will bring them goodness and joy, believe somethings are immoral. in other words, "religious feelings" (not necessarily affiliated with any organized religion) seem to be part of human nature.

Mark Twain writes:
"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...” -- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

this seems to be the jist of twain's quote, as i understand it:
christianity is irrational because God, who is professedly omnibenevolent, created evil and lets us suffer. it is hypocritical of him to do this, and still expect us to worship him.

we all know from experience that we suffer, that there is (some amount of) good and evil in the world. that's a fact from which we can start. a world of pure goodness is not something we are familiar with, in other words only a fantasy to our knowledge at this point. idle to wonder why God didn't create a perfect world (eden / heaven) when we have no idea what a perfect world constitutes.

so we suffer and we have moments of surpreme joy. what do we make of it?
- we can believe that the suffering is meaningless and vain. in which case what do you live for? if you live for the moments of joy then you do believe in joy or pursuing joy (which is good... or "God")... if you live in pain and continue in a downward spiral of pain then... good luck to you, there's no exit, unless you kill yourself and die
- or, we can believe that there is goodness and happiness (God or heavenly state) we can strive towards, and the bad stuff will bring about some goodness (whether by a pattern of cause and effect or fate if you will, or just by making other things seem better by comparison)

twain's saying that "god made us" doesn't make sense, so i'm basically flipping the equation around and saying "we made god" because we seem to need to.

of course that doesn't answer the question of why is it in our nature to need to "have a God" (or have a spiritual side). no more than it answers the question of "if God made us, why did he make us?"

well what came first, the chicken or the egg? i dunno, but it still seems to me like there IS a chicken and an egg.