God, Part II: Functional Irrelevance

    I was talking to my cousin, who incidentally is a protestant minister, about my recent observation of religious phenomenon, to which he naturally opposed.  He believed that the claim suggested I was pretending to be God himself.  While the strong reaction to my recent posting , "Does God Exist?" may have been motivated by similar ideas, it is a misunderstanding of the idea that God is 'irrelevant'.  Nothing per se was being stated in my posting about the existence, or lack thereof, of God or of the religious world-view per se.  The claim was merely an observation of the routine facts of modern living--both of how we conduct ourselves in daily life.  God has long ceased to be a 'functional criteria' in the vast number of serious social exchanges and transactions.   If a home-lender were to go to a bank today and claim that they should borrow you money at a 2 % interest rate because "God said so", the most protestant of banks will laugh and deny the loan.  If a lawyer were to make a legal argument pertaining to the innocence of a client based on the "will of Allah", the presiding judge will impeach the claim.  Finally, if a doctor would base his medical evaluation on holy readings from the First Testament, he would rightly be disbarred from the medical profession.  The concept of "God" has long ceased to be a functional criteria in modern society--and rightly so.  Were we to revert to the medieval religious view, and use miracles as basis for evaluation of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural phenomenon for example, we would in fact be 'throwing away' the achievements of the last 2,000 years.  (After Katrina, who can now deny the importance of the modern science of meteorology?  Many of us are now more addicted to global satellite images than ever before.)  Oddly, the inevitable question that arises is, "if we lo longer use this criteria, is it (God) worth the trouble keeping?"  This is a much more complex issue, and I have yet to make up my mind on that one.  Give me a decade or two to consider it.