Doing God's Work

Does God want or need our worship?

The ancients made burnt offerings, apparently including the Hebrews, in the sense of some sort of sacrifice to appease the gods, or at least please them.  The story is that the burnt smoke of the offering was a pleasant smell for the gods, and in some stories was even essential to their (the god's) survival.

This ties in with the idea of sacrifice -- doing without something or doing something difficult or dangerous in order to please the gods, such as Luther caught outdoors in a fierce thunderstorm being so frightened he swore to God if he survived this he would become a monk.  The idea of doing some penance to get forgiveness for our sin or in thankfulness for some special thing God does for us is certainly popular and found practically everywhere -- so much so that one suspects there is a human instinct (similar behavior is seen in most social animals in the form of hierarchic submission/dominance behaviors) behind it (although of course given the idea of a god with personality (anger, grudges, appeasability, etc., there is a certain logic too).

So we have the perfect Christ dying a sacrifice to appease God for the sin of Adam -- something probably borrowed from other similar Greek mystery sacrifice cults where the god is betrayed and dies a sacrificial death from which, by performing certain rituals, one gains salvation.  It is all unutterably primitive -- curses passed from generation to generation, blood sacrifice to lift it, partaking of that blood to gain personal salvation.  You would think by now many theologians would have figured out ways to downplay this primitiveness and make it into some sort of metaphor, and, of course, some have.

If God is an infinite being, then of course he has no need for us or anything we do, nor does he gain or lose from it, and the idea of, "Doing God's work" is an idea of insufferable arrogance.

It has been said that all these things (sacrifice, prayer, penance, doing God's work, and so on, were instituted not for God but for us, so that we might improve ourselves thereby.  I suppose, but many don't believe in God but still give to charity, practice courtesy and kindness, don't hold grudges, try to do what is best and good and try to correct their mistakes, without any God or other deities to try to please.  Isn't doing what is right just because it is right a better thing than because God wants it?