On God, Afterlife, and Egomania.

Let’s replace God with Me. I am now God, and I’m getting ready to do a little creating. Those readers who can’t cope with me being God should replace me with George Burns. He played God a couple of times, and did a fine job.

I have created my universe, which consists of a large round room. I have populated the room with plants and animals, pretty things to look at, and ugly things to look at. It’s time to move on to the main project. Along with 9,999 others, I’ve created you. I call you human. I infuse you with a soul, with the ability to think and reason, to love and hate, to do good and evil. I didn’t give you a choice, offered up no pre-life agreement, just created you and turned you loose.

So here you sit, my creation in my world. My world is not an easy place to live in. You have to find food, clothes, and shelter. It is difficult to interact with the other 9,999 creations I’ve made because they’re just like you, meaning that they have free will, and the ability to do whatever strikes their fancy. In addition, I throw things like natural disasters, disease, aches and pains as you get older, dangerous animals, and chance itself. You might find a boulder will fall on you for no other reason than bad luck. I call these things challenges.

In addition to me creating you and placing you in my special room, making it difficult to live and thrive, I now expect some things from you. It doesn’t matter if you agree with the things I expect of you, I expect them nonetheless.

The first thing I expect is that you’ll give me a little respect, because after all, you wouldn’t be here unless I went to all this trouble. So, of course, you’re not allowed to throw respect towards a tree, for instance, because I’m not a tree. You have to give your respect to me.

I also expect that you won’t make any funny little statues of me. It’s not your business why. Maybe I’m shy, maybe I’d rather you show your respect in a different way, whatever the reason (and I’m not telling) you’re not allowed to do it. You’re also not allowed to bitch about me; particularly you’re not allowed to say, for example, “Welby is a Dick.” After all I’ve done for you there ought to be a way for you to question me without getting nasty. We’ll get to your questioning of me later, though.

I expect you to pick a day and chill a little bit. After all, I’ve made you, so I can give you a vacation. You shouldn’t do any work on this day; you should just relax, perhaps gather together with the other creations and spend a little time telling me how wonderful I am.

You have to honor your secondary creation units. By that I mean the couple of creations that I made that in turn got together and, at least in the physical sense, made you. I can’t control whether they’ll be good creation units or not, after all they have free will. If they are good, you’ve lucked out. If they aren’t, then your life will be a challenge. Either way, you have to honor them for creating you, just as you should honor me.

You’re not allowed to kill any of my other creations. That’s just not kosher. Don’t worry if the other creations ignore this rule. It doesn’t matter if they deserve death in your opinion, you should let me deal with them. Granted, I won’t deal with them until their natural creation life expires, so until that time you should just consider them a challenge.

I expect that you’ll keep your own little set of creation tools in your pants until I’ve blessed your desire to use them. Never mind the fact that I’ve made the creative act pleasurable, indeed I’ve almost made it an automatic urge, you’re not allowed to diddle until I (or a designated proxy) give the okay. After I’ve given my blessing you’re not allowed to use your tool except with the authorized partner.

Don’t think about taking something that’s not yours. It’s not cool, and it makes someone sad. It’s a total dick move. Ignore the fact that I don’t provide you with everything you need, much less everything you want. Getting those things is a challenge.

Don’t lie, because that’s pretty bad too. Not as bad as killing one of my creations, but pretty low. Speak honestly at all times, even when you think the truth is going to hurt someone. If you discover that the truth will hurt someone, don’t worry overmuch about it, because you’re just providing them with a challenge.

I expect you to keep your hands to yourself and not look at your neighbor’s stuff, much less desire it. Never mind that you may not have been given the ability to obtain any of these things for yourself. Perhaps you’re one of the creations that slipped passed quality control. Think of it as a challenge.

Now in addition to all of this, I expect that you kiss my ass in a general way. Of course, I don’t call it ass kissing, I call it worship, but however you look at it, it comes down to ass kissing. I expect not only respect, but appreciation for all my hard work. You’d better be thankful, or else. I know I didn’t give you a choice, but hey, I created you, so you should do as I say.

If you aren’t thankful enough to kiss my ass, I’m going to make your eternity a hell. I’m going to send you to a place much worse than the one I first created, and I’m going to make you suffer. This isn’t a penalty phase, and I don’t expect you to learn any lesson other than I was right and you were wrong and that you have to suffer as a result.

So let’s summarize. I’ve created you without your consent, put you in a harsh environment, given you a set of rules to live by, expect a boatload of thanks for all of this work, and will totally ruin your eternity if you don’t comply.

In the most basic sense, isn’t this kind of dickish, egomaniacal, and cruel? I get off in my own Welby way on your attention to me, worship of me, and your thanks for what I’ve done to you, despite the fact that you have no control over why you were created and what will ultimately happen to you.

Doesn’t this seem a little sick?

Why yes, yes it does!

Your point?

To quote Douglas Adams myself: Who is this god person anyway?

Well, I think it’s a bit of a caricature.

Let me just take one for-instance:

Sometimes the ‘why’ is out there in plain sight: because people will worship the dumb statue, and forget about the deity. I think that’s been amply proven in our own time by the inerrantist Christian crowd, most of whom seem to do that with the Bible.

Mangetout I guess my point is that’s God’s a dick.

RTFirefly it does seem to be a little bit of a caricature, but I think the basic presmise still holds. Any human who did something like this would be reviled, but for some reason there are people who accept the situation and don’t question it.

Well, that’s the problem. As a Christian, I too would revile a being who did what you describe, but I don’t exactly see that as what God is doing/has done. So I’m saying your caricature changes the picture sufficiently to change my moral response to it.

tru dat

That may be your point, but what you should conclude is that the god of Christianity simply cannot exist. It’s like that paradox about the Russian village where every man who doesn’t shave himself is shaved by the barber; does the barber shave himself? Instead of putting forth a paradox, we’ve established that such a village cannot exist. The same holds for a loving and immutable god, for example. Here is a survey of the incompatible traits arguments.

Uh, yeah, your little parody of the God of the Bible which I worship is sick. You evidently have a lot of anger toward Him.

Ah.

Well, certainly the character in your story is a bit of a dick, but how can we be certain you are describing God?

RTFirefly I disagree. Granted the caricature is written in such a way as to exaggerate the thinking or motivation in creating a universe and populating it, but I think that the basics of the writing are pretty spot on from a Christian perspective, inasmuch as:

  1. God created the universe, populated, infused something with a life and soul, and placed that something on what we call earth.
    Genesis

  2. As far as you know, you had no choice or say in the matter.

  3. The world is not an easy place to live. It’s dangerous.

  4. In the Christian sense, God does expect you to worship him. I refer you to Exodus on this point.

  5. As for much of the other points covered, I refer you to the Ten Commandments (PDF with multiple versions of TTC).

  6. Concerning the eternal suffering, I offer up Revelations 20 .

So again, the gist of the thinking here is that in the Christian sense, God is a sicko.

His4Ever, though I didn’t address your comment directly, I do invite you to discuss what I’ve presented above.

Welby, your questions, statements and observations are right on and expressed in a interesting and funny way. Well done. I look forward to more of your insights on this subject…Mozart

His4Ever I will, however, take a moment to point out that the link provided in your sig. has much to offer in the way of support for my thinking. This most of all:

From the “Five Basic Truths” section of the site.

So God created everything specifically so that men and angels will worship and adore him? Again, that seems a little sick to me. If he was so lonely, why not create a being that could offer more in the way of friendship? You know, somebody that can mix up a few magaritas and play some chess instead of a bunch of lesser creatures to sit in judgement of?

In more serious terms, I think that this shows a pretty serious flaw in both the morals and judgement of God. Instead of creating something that is not beholden to him for anything, he creates creatures that are expected to “worship and adore” him. There is no way out for the creatures God has created, other than to beleive and worship or suffer God’s wrath.

Please show me the other alternative. The one that consists of a condition in which this entity, titled Welby, having a mind and soul, is able to not only reject God’s “justice” but God’s “wrath” as well, and simply live my life without interference or fear of eternal suffering, retribution, or harm from God. Of course, it apparently doesn’t exist. Or at least, that chapter didn’t make it into the Bible.

In the strictest sense, the Christian model of God reminds me of a child with his toys. He plays with them, creating situations and experiences (in his own mind, anyway) for them, and envisions himself as the all powerful in relation to his toys. Occasionally, he’ll break one to show his “power” to the other toys. How is God different? He has created some “toys” and lords his power over us with threats, occasionally breaking something to show his displeasure.

Mozart thanks for the compliment. I frankly figured that this thread wouldn’t get much in the way of responses, because of not only the subject matter but the way it was presented. There is room for humor in a great debate, I think. The title is a little misleading, but I would have felt a little weird titling the thread “God is a Dick. Discuss.”

Mangetout I concede that my take on God could be completely wrong, but my take on the Christian God feels pretty accurate to me.

That’s a very good point. After all, shouldn’t we be judging what god has actually done and not what’s hearsay? Given that, I just can’t completely trust other people’s recounts about god, especially when they have the audacity to speak for god himself. The same goes for trusting books written about what god allegedly has done.

So, I guess I’ll remain skeptical until god himself decides to speak for himself again. Welby’s take on god, the things the church and other people are saying about god is really painting a bad picture and I deem it only fair to give him / her the benefit of the doubt and the chance to convince me personally that he / she is a decent being.

Optihut, I think that is an excellent plan.