No Stupid Questions

Whipping out my clover and putting on my best Irish Accent to explain the Holy Trinity

Why are we satisfied with the idea that God made man intelligent in his image, while being all-knowing, but not this? Isn’t this the same thing? God could have made man with emotions in his image, while being in no way limited to those emotions himself. Why would we limit ourselves to an uncaring God above all that when he could also be all-caring, all-feeling

(Insert misogynistic crack about an all-emotional God being proof God is a woman)

Most importantly is to ask why is he subject to time? Our only concept of existing or being alive is tied to time: thought is a change of state, and change is defined by a progression of time. But if God is everything, why is he subject to time? What's "outside" time?

I'm assuming you're looking for a basic answer from Christianity. In that case, the TL;DR is that Humans are created in God's image. We're endowed with God's emotions, not the other way around, and emotions aren't necessarily bad, they're just corrupted in us by sin.

God experiences all kinds of emotions in the Bible, he is "jealous" for us, he's also depicted as sad or angry in many cases. Even Jesus, a "perfect man without sin" feels anger and flips the tables of a synagogue when he sees people turning that religious practice into a corrupt business.

So a religious answer to "shouldn't God be beyond human emotions?" would be that emotions aren't inherently bad. We should be angered by injustice, for example. Emotions can be bad, if you let them control you and fly into a rage for selfish reasons, for example, but they don't have to be bad.

The answer depends on your religion, but in the monotheistic traditions of the major religions, the notion of God might be better aligned with “oneness” or “integration” than a personification as we think about them. In that way, God is “everything” (including the contradictions) which would also mean emotions. To say God feels things, it means “God has the capability to feel, because God is all powerful.”

Whether God is impacted by those emotions or their reasoning changes because of them, I think the realities and contradictions are a part of faith. If it all made sense, faith wouldn’t be necessary. You’ll find reasoning similar to this in someone like Kierkegaard.

I’m a UU (raised Catholic, was an atheist for 20 years, followed Buddhism for a few years). My internal conception of God has changed a lot over that time: mostly expanded and includes more grace about this “grand everything” rather than “Old man in a cloud who can be sorta weird and spiteful.” I like that the UU lets me ask questions and develop my own faith.

Human is created in God's image.

Therefore human emotions are similar to God's emotions (this does not tell whether or not God's emotions are superior in some way or other)

Perfection is a malleable thing. To Christians humans are made in gods image, including emotions. In the minds of people they only think of the emotions that are reflected by god as the positive ones; like caring, empathy, love, ect. But if you take into account that god made everything it is reasonable to say that god gave us the negative emotions as well, since Satan (gods creation) harbored these feelings when it made Adam and eve sin in the garden of eden. Even if god only has positive emotion it does have emotion.

Giving a serious answer with serious consideration that follows serious rules, is impossible with religion, as all the rules are made up, there's no consistency, and they're all silly.

The answer will, of course, vary depending on religion and even depending on sect or school of thought within the same religion, but here's the Sunni Islamic answer as I understand it: God has emotions befitting of His grace and perfection, as opposed to our imperfect human emotions. For example a human might get angry and say or do something that they regret, but God's anger doesn't take away from His wisdom (I think Christianity has something about God regretting flooding the Earth in Noah's time, but islam rejects that sort of thing out of principle). God's mercy doesn't make Him commit injustice, as a human might. Etc etc. We humans don't need a deeper understanding of Allah than this, so Islam doesn't really get into the details of these things, but that's the gist of it. This does contradict your premise that God should be beyond emotion, but there's really no reason for that to be the case. God should obviously be beyond imperfection, but emotions aren't inherently imperfection; only humans' flawed emotions are.

What gets me is in that belief god is essentially is the real person in the real world and he is the head honcho but there are other angels there. heck some things in the bible suggest other gods. definately a we oftentimes. well then our existence is created by him and he has totaly control of it. so from gods perspective our universe is essentially virtual reality. the matrix.

Because main evolved advantageous uses for emotion. We cry, and no longer have to communicate with words that something is wrong. It is advantageous to us to be able to communicate with emotions in more than a vocal manner. Things make more sense when we consider the real reasons they came into being. "We" have probably had these emotions for far longer than we could be considered humans.