What has the one and only god got to be jealous of? Why are the Abrahamic religions so concerned about the jealousy of their god? Couldn't they have invented a nicer and saner god?

The jealousy of God is truly pathological, of the ten commandments four, the first four, are all about servicing his need for exclusive worship.

1 And God spake all these words, saying, 2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 "You shall have no other gods before me. 4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments. 7 "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. 8 "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labour and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

It's all about Him. Isn't it?

If he was a person would you love him or would you think he was a manipulative psychotic control freak? Now consider that he has set up a system of constant surveillance to watch you all the time. He says he loves you, and if you don't love him and worship him he will burn you, for all eternity. Would you let your daughter see such a man?

What are false gods? If you read the first few chapters of Genesis it is quite clear that the Hebrews knew there were many gods, real gods, but they knew better than to mention the names of the other gods around the jealous Yahweh. Later the theology changes from polytheism through the monolatry of the times of Moses acknowledging that obviously there are lots of gods (duh!) but only one which the Hebrews should worship through to a strict monotheism, with any lesser gods being demoted to become angels or declared to be heathen inventions. The jealousy of a one-and-only god does not really make sense without the stage of monolatry. If people are worshipping gods which don't exist they are just wrong, aren't they? Not evil, just mistaken. However, many religious people prefer not to consider the possibility that men may invent perfectly functional gods and rites entirely from their own imagination and prefer to insist that there has to be some diabolical entity behind other religions. Once again religion is insulting humanity, we are not even smart enough to be wrong.

If there is only one god and he gets annoyed if people worship false gods then he has a very simple solution. He can set fire to the false idols. I am sure that if each and every image of a false god spontaneously burst into flames and its maker broke out in boils from head to toe (to dissuade the use of idols as firelighters) it would not take too long for people to start to come up with a theory to account for this which would rather rapidly end the problem of people worshipping false gods.

God, if you have a problem you sort it out. You are the one who can do magic, not us.

Why would an entity with the power to create the universe have a brittle ego? Why would he have anything resembling a human ego at all? The religious chide atheists for imagining something being formed out of nothing and yet they ignore the mystery of where God's peculiarly human ego comes from. Which is harder to imagine: the universe spontaneously erupts out of quantum variations in nothing at all (because nothing is unstable) or that before there was even nothing there was a being with desires, plans, love, wisdom and psychotic jealousy?

I find it difficult to say for certain that there could not possibly be some kind of creative force behind the existence of the universe, I do not think there is any need to allow such a hypothesis, we can understand existence at least as well without one, but I do not have enough faith to say that there could not possibly be one. However none of the god concepts invented before about 1750 or so are remotely attractive to me or remotely credible. These gods clearly show their origins in the human imagination, and the imagination of men who had a very hazy idea of how the universe operates. All such gods, including Jahweh/Allah, are essentially magical men. They have magical powers to create things and change things in a way only a god (or a cartoonist) can do, by the inexplicable power of their will or the use of magic words, commands or gestures. When the people are told that the god made the world out of earwax or whatever it is it is clear that the storyteller is not going to explain to you where the earwax came from, what the god was standing on or how come they know about it when there were no people around to see it happen. Myth-making is not a two-way process, the audience grants to the storyteller the right to be heard and not be questioned. If the people like the myth they will pass it on. They will also change it to suit themselves better, or to sound better or to explain anything new that requires an explanation. In the beginning was perfect ignorance and perfect authority to pontificate out of ignorance. The tribe saw the myth that had been rendered out of the ignorance and found it good. Thus ended the second day.

No explanations are ever given for why the god would prefer there to be something (including things which would make him angry) rather than nothing, and his own perfect self. If you think about it for a few moments for a perfect god to make anything which is not perfect is actually an evil act. If he wants to create something without doing evil he could create himself an equally perfect partner and together they could live happily ever after or he could create a universe of possibilities and then do the decent thing and annihilate himself or at the least remove his own magical powers. All other actions are self-indulgent, evil and crazy. Creating people and then demanding that the people worship him and judging them just once after they are dead is utterly bizarre and thoroughly evil. Of course we don't have to believe in such absurd notions these days.

It is far easier to understand how stories of gods developed than it is to understand the actions and characters of gods.

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