Spoiler alert, I’m an atheist.
At one time, when I was a child, I was taught about God, and ever since then my natural curiosity has led me to ask questions. Most of my questions couldn’t be answered by parents or religious preachers or any source I can find.
There are any number of flaws with the mythology, the Bible, the creation story, the ark, getting history and science and geography wrong, but really, ultimately, believing in Christianity or similar faiths ultimately boils down to do you believe in God or not?
Let’s say we humans got it wrong about everything else, but were correct about one thing, the universe was created by God.
That’s fine, I could almost buy that much. Especially if we assume he/she/it did this miracle and then went away, off to more interesting experiments. If that’s the case then all we’re talking about is someone who set things in motion and wrote the laws of physics. I don’t believe it but it’s much less repugnant than some of the other stuff people say about God.
Such a being is probably astoundingly intelligent. And so where I go off the railroad tracks is when religious people describe God to me.
God creates man, without a woman companion. However, he creates all sorts of animals, all of which have companions. He just plain forgot to give Adam one?
God takes one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve. Why? Couldn’t he just snap his fingers, or make her out of dust? Why the special hocus-pocus magic to make Eve?
God allows Adam to eat anything but this one special fruit. God also knows that Adam is a complete moron and will do anything Eve tells him to do, because she waxes his carrot. So, after Eve plays with his forbidden fruit, Adam does his characteristically moronic dumb thing and disobeys God.
But really, Eve does it because God also made an Evil, Talking, Snake whose main goal is to tempt Eve and Adam into doing stupid shit.
So, God designed incompetent boobs, and designed a test SPECIFICALLY for them to fail, which he knows they will fail, and when they fail, he curses them with pain and death FOREVER AND EVER!!!
Why not skip directly to that step? If we want to punish humanity for being innocent and stupid, why do we need the flimsy entrapment to begin with? Why not just design Adam and Eve to feel pain and eventually die? Punish them right from the start for things they had no control over anyway.
And why are we punishing them to begin with? If your baby child puts something in their mouth that you tell them not to put there, is the punishment SUFFERING AND DEATH?
Quite honestly, what sort of ***insane ***parent does that? First offense: You and all your progeny will feel horrendous pain, the stress of labor, and death forever and ever.
Oh, and since I went lenient on you for eating that apple, I’ve also designed this wonderful pit of eternal hellfire for you to suffer in horrible agony merely for not believing in me. Or for dying before getting to a preacher to confess your sins. Bad luck for the Native Americans, all hellbound before the spread of the word of Jesus, through no fault of their own. What a pity.
And we have Satan of course, whose purpose is to tempt and torment mankind while he watches, probably while touching himself, since he’s such a sadistic voyeuristic omnipotent superbeing.
The folks who believe in Demonic Possession- I really gotta wonder. You believe in a kind and loving God who also imagined and created the concept of Demons who can enter your body, torment you mentally, physically, and spiritually, even if you’re a good Christian who prays every day and wears a cross.
So my question is, why don’t Jewish folks and Muslims and Buddhists get possessed by demons? They obviously aren’t protected by the cross… duh. No holy water either. No exorcists, not a one. How come atheists don’t get possessed by demons?
How about ghosts haunting us? We believe in a kind and loving God who leaves people behind to torment the living while experiencing a kind of supernatural limbo where they can see and barely interact with the living world, but must suffer to walk the earth forever?
How come these ghosts always seem to come from the 1800 and 1900s? Why aren’t there any post 9/11 ghosts wandering around? How come we’re not haunted by Julius Caesar? Or cavemen? They weren’t particularly Christian fellers. Surely they’re cursed to walk the planet. Or someone from that era would be. Why aren’t there caves haunted by cavemen? How come castles aren’t haunted by the thousands of people who lived in them over the centuries?
Why does God come up with the laws of Judaism if he’s just planning on revoking most of them come Christ-time? What’s the deal with shellfish and menstruation and pigs?
Why does God send a series of contradictory prophets to tell his tale? Why couldn’t he just appear before all of mankind and go “Yup, I’m real, and the one true religion is blank”
You see, the fact that countless people claim they’ve spoken with God all throughout history, once people started believing in just the one God instead of many or countless gods, kind of makes it hard for God’s real message to get through, assuming there is one. Just seems extremely illogical for an omnipotent superbeing to have to inform you of his existence by visiting only the man in tattered rags on the streetcorner who has no job and has been muttering to himself since he was twelve.
Not only that, but visiting dozens and dozens of these men, over the course of many different centuries, even millennia, to each give another piece of the story. Each piece of the story ever so slightly inconsistent with itself and other parts of the story. And once it’s all accepted as true, suddenly he sends another prophet or even his only son to clear it all up. But that’s not the end! Why, angels continue to visit and speak to Muhammed, and Joseph Smith! There’s *still more space dust *on the cover of this space cookbook: How to cook for forty humans.
It’s almost as if the people who visited before these new prophets had somehow gotten the story wrong.
How could that happen? Either the stories they told were pure fiction, and we should toss it all out, or God is batshit crazy and has multiple personalities and changes his mind every few years about what the ABSOLUTE RULES FOR HOW YOU MUST LIVE YOUR LIFE are, LEST YE BE JUDGED and sent to hell. If there is a hell.
And how about descriptions of heaven? Haven’t you heard of these descriptions before, don’t at least most of these descriptions include golden streets and pearly gates and all manner of precious metals and stones adorning everything?
Doesn’t that sound exactly like the feeble imagination of a mortal human being who is only familiar with the values of materials on planet Earth? A person trapped helplessly in an earth-centric economy? This isn’t Godly at all, it’s a poor person imagining that when they get to heaven, they will get to live like Donald Trump.
Why would God be fascinated with gold? It’s just one of the many elements he conjured up in his mind. No more interesting than the others. What do the pearly gates do? Keep out the demons?
Why not snap your fingers and slay every demon?
Why not snap your fingers and erase Satan from history?
Why have a pit of eternal hellfire? This sounds exactly like the kind of thinking done by people living in the dark ages to frighten others into belief. Believe in God or burn forever, because a burning death looks rather painful. That oughta scare em.
Notice how God is referred to as The Lord. And he expects tribute, tithes, he expects to be revered, and prayed to, and worshiped, and he loves you, but if you don’t love him back he’ll fry you in his dungeon of pain.
This isn’t a loving omnipotent superbeing. It’s the imagination of bronze aged people who live under a monarch or emperor or other dictator, who imagines that God must be a lot like a King.
The Kingdom of Heaven, where God sits atop a Golden Throne! Oh yes, because God needs a throne of solid gold to seem important-er than an Earthly King. And he wears a crown and has a chorus of angels of all sorts, some really bizarre in shape, not even remotely human, who sing his praises nonstop for all eternity.
These are the descriptions of God I hear from the faithful. None of it makes any sense.
Why is God so insecure he demands constant singing of praising his name nonstop forever?
What sort of hellish fate would it be to be forced to stand still and sing God’s name over and over forever? Why would hell be any different than that? Why would a sentient being want to do a single task for all eternity? Wouldn’t you go INSANE?
What’s the deal with the story of Job? Who cares how much Job loves God, if God on a whim decides to obliterate and slaughter his family just to prove a point to Satan? Why the hell does God care what Satan thinks of him?
How about I want you to sacrifice your son to me? That sound Godly to you?
It sounds rather barbaric to me. I want you to kill goats and burn them for me, just to remind me of how swell I am.
He doesn’t sound particularly moral, or selfless. In fact he seems a bit self-absorbed. You must always do exactly as he says or there will be extreme, painful, eternal consequences. If you question his existence, you’ll be punished forever. If you don’t believe in him, he’ll nail his son to a cross so you will. If you don’t believe in him after that, he’ll send angels to talk to another guy in the desert, who will conquer part of the world and spread the message of his love via the sword. Tough luck once again for the Native Americans who God seems to neglect terribly, until they lucked out and Spanish Conquistadors came to spread the merciful word of Jesus Christ, and not by a sword, but by gun this time. Woot!
I don’t get it. You’re told to pray, but obviously prayer doesn’t work. How many people have prayed for how many years for there to be world peace? An end to world hunger? An end to rape, or spousal abuse? How many victims of rapists and murderers prayed that God would save them? I imagine he ignored most of those prayers.
So why pray? He’s obviously going to do what he wants anyway. And it’s not as if you REALLY need to tell him (A) that you believe in him after you’ve dedicated your life to worship, and (B) you’d mind it terribly if that raving psychopath kept you in his basement for a year before torturing, killing, and eating you.
Shouldn’t God just sorta know that intuitively, and stop it from happening, if he were actually there, and gave a crap, and had any inkling to listen to prayers?
But it’s all part of the divine plan, that everyone has, God designed it.
So, that leads to Republican politicians telling is that when we’re viciously beaten within an inch of our lives and forcibly sodomized and raped by a sociopath, that was part of his awesomely inspirational divine plan, and that he wanted you to have that baby.
This is the kind and loving God. The one who designed the fruit you weren’t supposed to eat, and designed the snake that tempted you to eat it, designed the demons that possess people, designed the shellfish and unclean animals and the concept of menstruation, gave people homosexual feelings, then made all of these things something you’re not supposed to eat, touch, or give into. He also designed a nice little hell to torment you in. The guy who decided to commit genocide on humanity, and stuffed every animal in an Ark, just to be absurd. I imagine there were any number of innocent children left behind wondering why God wants to mass-kill children. I guess he got tired of looking at their smiling faces.
Oh, and bonus points if you’re captured, tormented, raped, killed, and eaten by a violent sociopath and you happen to not believe in God, because your fate is to be shipped directly to hell where God can do that sort of sadistic crap to you personally.
Nice guy. Really sweet fellow.
This is what the people who WORSHIP God say about him. One reason I’m an atheist I can’t believe anyone who would do these sorts of things is worthy of worship. I mean he’s like Hitler on steroids with magic powers and the ability to torment you even in death.
But he obviously cannot be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. I can’t actually attribute a whole lot of benevolence to such a deity, and I can’t imagine what the purpose of his repeated rule changes and flip-flops could possibly be, other than to intentionally harm humanity. Further his use of prophets who can only spread his word to a limited number of credulous followers is completely inefficient. Again, what about the Native Americans? What about the Japanese? What about the cavemen? How come they never got to meet Jesus? How come only people living in places where there’s no water and the sun bakes your brains have seen God?
Oh.
Nevermind…
