i dont understand this quote

That maybe God is fallible?

When he says "our fathers were models for God," the implication is that God does not exist, but is an idea created by man...and everything we think or believe about God is based on our fathers. When you read it that way, the answer to his question is that God will fail us just like our fathers have, because God's actions inevitably parallel those of our fathers.

Tyler Durden: Shut up! Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?

Narrator: No, no, I... don't...

Tyler Durden: Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.

Narrator: It isn't?

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III. Fighting begins to fill the vacuum left by the absence of materialism, which has already replaced religion

A. As seen before material items are “worshiped” and there is a “blind following” of all that they offer and promise (“We’ve all been raised to believe…”) Fight Club is a kind of atheism against materalism

B. “Our fathers were our models for God…” : Freud, Civilization, pg. 22 (Furthermore, on page 22 he criticizes the notion of God as an "enormously exalted father," and religion as being "patently infantile and "foreign to reality." He reduces love to the search for pleasure in a longstanding sexual relationship, and spiritual love as the love for someone who represents your ego-ideal. Even the superego, which Freud utilized in an earlier work to prove that psychoanalysis recognized man's higher nature, his greater capacity for good, is here revealed as nothing more than the internalized prohibitions of the parents and authority figures and the aggressive instinct turned inwards. Finally, he characterizes art and intellectual work as sublimations of sexual energy. Going even farther, he remarks that "such satisfactions seem ëfiner and higher.' But their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our physical being")

C. “Shouting in tongues like a Pentecostal church.”

D. “In Tyler we trusted” (If your father is your model for god, and Tyler is our model for God, and if our father’s failed, what does that tell you about Tyler…) / “That’s three times you promised” ß foreshadowing of betrayal?

E. “Nothing was solved… but we all felt saved”

F. “Every morning I died and every morning I was born again.”

G. Nietzsche: people blindly follow society

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[url]http://www.geocities.com/aipoissac/Themes_in_Fight_Club.htm[/url]

I think it is just reinforcing the idea of how seriously this generation of men took their fathers, and that to them, the model of god was based on their own father.I think that 'god' doesn't necessarily represent anything directly religious, but just a pinnacle of importance that they set their beliefs and actions on.
...I could be way off with this, I am tired and am known to crap on and look too deeply into things when I am tired...

wait...when I wrote that I was only talking about the first part of the quote...I think it means that "if we have based our actions on how our fathers lived, and they failed, what does this tell you about how we will turn out?"...that sounds unapplicable...

Me and my friends have had many a discussion about that line. I see it that as boys, when we're spoken to about God, a being we have not experienced through the feelings of this world, we automatically see him as a father figure, and our fathers are our models for him. If are fathers, the one who gave us life, are lazy, unmotivated, and don't want us, no matter how many times others tell us that our fathers love us, we know it is not true. Therefore, it is near impossible for a fatherless child to believe in God, since his model for God was a failure. If Tyler was just tryong to be an atheist, he could have been blunter, he was asking The Narrator to examine his view of humanity and his own limitations of perspective.