Throughout my life I’ve been plagued with a nagging doubt, inherently distrusting most anything I hear or see till I can get a close examination of it. This is because my life has not exactly been filled with rainbows and buttercups. Some people are shown a different world through their experience than others. Some may have viewed their school days, for example, with fondness. Others may only remember the awkwardness and the petty cruelties imposed upon them by others. As an example of course, because I certainly don’t relate to the latter at all. Because of this distrust, a person becomes somewhat difficult to manipulate or be told things that they cannot confirm. Of these things, religion is definitely one of them. I was raised Southern Baptist, went to crazy churches full of yelling and carrying on, when behind the scenes things weren’t much different for me than school. I got picked on by the church kids… in the damn church. My family has always made the assumption that due to this fact, I viewed all Christians as hypocrites and distanced myself from the religion.
I’d say that they are half-right. Most Christians, it seems, tend to bypass the parts of the bible that are inconvenient for them and exaggerate others for their own benefit. That’s not my problem with Christianity, or any religion based on the teachings of the bible. My particular issue is much more complicated than that. It wouldn’t be fair of me to dislike an entire religion because the followers don’t always heed the words they profess to base their lives around. Some people have a problem with people basing their life on a book written thousands of years ago and, as a result, is not relevant to modern life; but those are the same people that just are too lazy to see how the old viewpoints are applicable to today. It’s not hard to infer generalities from old literature, people do it all the time. You’d hardly consider Homer to be a waste of paper, even though it’s not relevant to today, you can still get something out of it. Hence why they teach it in schools.
No, my problem lies with the very heart of the religion itself, God. The Creator. Science claims that one day a big wad of crap exploded and made the universe, but little is offered to explain where said wad of crap came from or why it decided to erupt. Christianity professes that god did it. Well, lets explore that. Why did God create the universe? An all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing being was just floating around in nothingness since… forever. We are given no explanation as to where this being came from, what created him, and how the hell he has so much power. So this supposedly all-powerful force was just sitting around one day, got bored, and decided to make the universe. From that point he decided to create life. What’s the motivation exactly? Maybe he was lonely. Maybe it was a test to see which of the very beings he created would stay loyal to him after he put a little pressure on them. So heaven goes to war, they kill each other off, and the survivors are cast down to Hell. Giving God a place to send those who he decides he must punish. Beings he created. Beings he knew would react in a certian way no matter what he did because he’s omnipotent. Yet he went ahead and did it anyway. He made man.
He made man for self-gratification apparently. Since he cast Satan down he know Satan would tempt Eve. He knew that as a result, he would have to cast his creation out of the garden of Eden. He knew all this and did it anyway. Caused endless suffering to those involved just for a juvenile test of loyalty, that he already knew would turn out the way it did ahead of time. What possible motivation could there be for setting off a massive chain of events that led to many wars, deaths, and billions upon billions of souls being cast into Hell to burn forever and suffer forever and all those lives on the surface to suffer and die and kill each other? As Jessie Custer in the Preacher comic series says… these aren’t the actions of a loving god, they are the machinations of a dangerous egomaniac, seemingly hell-bent on people choosing to love him in order to sate some latent desire for affection because man was the first creation that had a choice whether to love him or not.
Viewing the creator like this, free will doesn’t really exist. In essence God already knows what you are gonna do. Every conversion is part of his plan. Every child tortured. Every war. Every ounce of human suffering and misery we inflict upon each other has already been determined to happen. It has to happen. It needs to happen. He made lives just to toy with them. To see who would pick him and who wouldn’t. Conspiring with circumstance and fate to push people down and to torment them, as if Earth were little more than an ant farm that he decided to shake every now and then and see which workers curse him to mark them as bad and send them to burn in eternal hellfire for doing what he had already programmed to do. Punishing them for fulfilling their role that he has given them! That’s like a director casting someone as the villain in a movie and after shooting is over, taking him out behind the studio, strapping him down, and setting him on fire. All as part of some sort of massive ego-wank in order to get his rocks off and garner affection and pleasure from those that cling to this insane pretense that a being so powerful and responsible for so much misery actually cares about them deep down.
History has shown us what power does to people, and having the kind of power to destroy the universe in the matter of perhaps a day wouldn’t create a being that values and understands each small life he affects or how deep the ramifications of his actions go. God, in my opinion, if he does in fact exist, has quite a bit to answer for. We have free will, of course, but if mankind is on a crash-course with the end of the world because our creator gets off on watching us kill ourselves off just to fulfill a desire to be loved even in the face of grotesque punishment, then I have to question why anyone would follow such a belief system and why anyone could love someone who does to them and those around them such wrong on a daily basis.
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