On the matters of faiths, beliefs, sciences and worldviews.

This is a re-post of a story that reddit user assfly0 posted in the atheism subreddit, which I thought was so good that I wanted to share it with as many more people as possible. Enjoy!

Today was a dreary, drizzly Sunday. Wet, cold and raw, it decided. I lounged in the house, eating breakfast, completing my easy homework assignments, looking outside at the rain, wondering about a good time to get a run.

Hours went by and the rain went on, unrelenting. Unbelievable, I thought. It cannot last much longer. It can’t! I have to go running. Running is the only thing that can remedy a spell of smashed asshole syndrome (SAS), which is what I felt like.

Eventually, the rain subsided into a mere sprinkle. I figured, Ah, it’s going away. I better run for it and take my chances before it’s too late. So I put on running pants, my black hoodie, my Nikes and my mp3 player and took off in the rain.

Pretty soon, I realized it was coming down harder than I thought. Fuck! It’s too late. Can’t turn back. I’m already running, and I’m only doing four miles. About two miles in, it really starts coming down, soaking my shoes, saturating my sweatshirt heavy. God! Cock! Shiiiittt!

This makes no sense. It was raining all day and then it lets down to make it seem like it’s going to stop. Then I decide to run and when I’m too far out on my route to justify going back, it begins pouring worse than all day. What the hell? What’s your god damn problem, God? Huh? Are you enjoying this? You slimy omnipotent turd!

This is what was actually going through my mind at the time. I really and truly felt as if there were some mocking entity out there doing this to me, if for only a brief moment. For that fleeting time, Descartes’ evil prankster was doing this to me.

Thankfully, a moment later, I remembered that I don’t believe in God. I’m a semi-Christian turned agnostic turned militant atheist. After I realized this, something remarkable happened: my anger evaporated, like steam off my hot face. There was nobody doing this to me, no reason to be angry; there is only apathetic, negligent mother nature—god bless her. There is no reason to take anything personally. It wasn’t my fault or anyone else’s; there is only circumstance, like everything in this world.

It was during this time I insighted why people believe in God. They believe in him because it is so fucking easy. It is automatic. It is so natural when feeling pain or hate or any strong emotion, to attribute human qualities to anything, even when it doesn’t make sense. It feels incredibly, extraordinarily good to personify things. We see faces in everything, in clouds, blankets, even three dots—two on top, one of the bottom—can make us think of a face. Our cars, computers, or anything that requires our input, has a “personality.” In a highly emotional state, cognition is hijacked by more primitive and dominant neural pathways, which negotiate social interaction. Personification reflects this regression or crosstalk of circuitry.

Much of our nature is defined by the environmental significance of the other. Our brains in particular, have evolved so quickly and to such great heights largely to accommodate for language ability, so to better anticipate and manipulate the other. Our brains are wired to understand the other and the extent that we do this is nothing short of remarkable.

Our brains are, thus, specially configured to understand phenomena in terms of humans. Of course, then, there is a God!

written by assfly0

Ok, so what wacky analogy did Ray go with this week? But of course, one of his favorites: the thief and the judge!

How would you react if you were guilty of violating civil law, and your dad loved you so much that he sold his house and spent all of his hard–earned savings to pay the massive fine, so that you could get out of prison? Would you point at your father and accuse him of some sort of crime? How perverse would that be? If you did that, you would not only be despising his incredible sacrifice, but you would also reveal something horrible about your own character.

Ok, so let’s break it down:

First of all, Ray will jump between severe criminal law and punishment, and misdemeanor or purely civil case law whenever and however it is most convenient. Usually, he’ll liken regular, decent people with pedophiles, murderers and rapists, to emphasize that we are utter scum, and we don’t even deserve to exist. However, in this case, he wants to lower the impact of what the father, in this example, does for his son. To make it sound reasonable, the “crime” in question is merely a speeding ticket, and the “sacrifice” is the guy’s father having to take a loan to pay for it.

Secondly, the problem isn’t really with the perpetrator, but with the victim. If we take Ray’s example and imagine a father paying his son’s speeding ticket, the only thing that matters is that the fine has to be payed. There’s not even really a victim to speak of, it’s a perfect example of a victimless crime. This isn’t at all like the situation with God and Jesus that Ray describes. If it were, the son would be accused of something much more serious, like murder, adultery, theft, etc etc. In short, he would be guilty of essentially everything. Rightfully sentenced to death (ironically, Christians seldom seem have a problem with capital punishment), his father would then offer to be executed in his son’s place.

With a crime that isn’t victimless, and where you yourself were the victim, would you accept this switch? Would you think it fair that someone else took the punishment that was personally set for your attacker? What if the person who offered himself in the sentenced man’s stead was a man who wasn’t a man, and who would be resurrected three days after his execution? How would you, the victim, feel then?

This is my problem with Jesus and his “taking of our sins”. It’s a racketeering game, where humans are born already guilty of the crime of sin, and where Jesus has already decided to take your place at the execution, regardless of what you yourself want. Not only that, but for that you are also required to be thankful. Imagine that.

While Christians describe Jesus as the most loving man ever in existence, I can’t see his sacrifice as being anything other than completely selfish. He doesn’t care what we want, he doesn’t care what we feel and he did it all for himself – he was really God in mortal form, after all. He set a trap for humanity, and proceeded to create us already caught in it. Is that an act of love?

I am reminded of the many people in the world who are victims of spousal abuse, and who repeat to themselves that “he really does love me” or “she really does care about me”. They don’t, but they like to think the do. Just like God likes to think that we’re grateful to him for forcing us to worship him.

I thought I’d start a new category here on PTPOI. Inspired by ExtantDodo’s Hovindism videos, I thought I’d focus on Ray Comfort’s wacky analogies. Naturally, I shall call them Rayologies.

This week, Ray is speaking about God’s “rich mercy” in that he will save those who worship him from damnation for breaking a law they didn’t know about. This is how he likens mankind’s state of sin with a lowly thief getting caught stealing:

Think of a wanted criminal. He has committed multiple and serious crimes. One night, he is stealing in the dark of a moonless night. The darkness gives him a sense of security. Suddenly police spotlights flood the area. He is exposed. The darkness is no longer a cover for his unlawful activity. He hears a loud voice tell him that ten sharpshooters have his pounding heart in their sights. One wrong move and he is a dead man. At this point he has a choice. He can try and make a run for it and die, or he can lift his hands high in surrender and live.

This is, of course, ridiculous, as I already pointed out in the comments of his post. A thief is defined as someone who willingly and knowingly steals something for himself, thereby breaking the laws set up in most, if not all, countries of the world. Stealing something from someone else has direct consequences, that person might really need the stolen goods, they’re lives might even depend on it. However, this in no way represents the situation God allegedly put us in, and then offered us to buy our way out of.

See, God invented sin, and before he even told Adam and Eve what sin was, or how it worked, they happened to do one simple thing that God inexplicably thought was very, very bad. Now, claiming to not have known you were breaking the law when in fact you did is not a good legal defense. You can’t say that you “didn’t know” you weren’t allowed to murder that sweet old lady who lived next door, because every intelligent human being knows it’s wrong to murder someone. However, when compared with Adam and Eve, we see that the consequences of their unlawful act is the very thing that actually gave them that human sense of “right and wrong”. Before they did the thing they weren’t allowed to do, they didn’t know the very meaning of not being allowed to do something, or at least not why it would be considered “bad”.

That isn’t even all. God not only judged Adam and Eve for doing what they couldn’t possibly have known not to do, but also decided to judge each and every living descendant thereafter, for all eternity!

If you start from the viewpoint that God’s word is law, and every command of his must be followed, then I suppose it all makes sense. However, in our modern times, the “I was only following orders” defense is no longer valid. You’re required to question orders from even the utmost highest of authorities, and should they be unlawful then it’s your duty to disobey them. In that case, disobedience is actually considered “good”, turning the whole scenario of Adam and Eve disobeying God’s orders to begin with upside down.

So not only is Ray’s analogy directly false, but it also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you start to really question things. If any Christians read this, that is my advice to you: don’t avoid questioning God’s orders just like you question anyone else’s. God, too, has motives, and as I’ve just explained he doesn’t really play fair all the time either.

In the beginning, God created the world, all the animals, and ultimately a man and a woman, right? Whatever went through the minds of the only two people in existence at that time had to have been put there, explicitely, by God, right? I mean, unless someone else was involved in the whole creation thing. Ok, but one of the things that God put in the brain of Adam and Eve was the, now infamous, capability of free will. This meant that they were both able to make choices, either this or that, go left or go right. Remember, God put that ability into Adam and Eve himself. He hadn’t created himself as Jesus yet, so there’s really no one else to blame at this point.

This is where the fun stuff happens. Adam and Eve, using some of that splendidly glorious free will that God explicitly made sure to put into their heads, ate a single fruit off of a single tree, the one and only tree in the entire garden of Eden that God told them they couldn’t eat of. The ironic part is that this fruit came from the tree of knowledge of right and wrong. Yes, boys and girls, God told Adam and Even not to do something that he would think was bad, before they had the ability to tell bad from good, right from wrong. They also used their free will, something God probably put into their heads to be used, not ignored.

So what happened? Oh, we all know what happened, don’t we? God punished Adam and Eve for doing what they couldn’t possibly know not to do, since they couldn’t know that what they did was wrong and God himself made them capable of choosing whether to obey or disobey, thanks to free will. But he didn’t settle for punishing those that wronged him, nooo… He punished all of mankind, forever! Because, apparently, that’s a fair punishment when you’re God.

The ridiculousness of the Christian creation myth isn’t what bothers me the most. All old cultures and religions have their own explanations for things that they, at the time, couldn’t understand. What bothers me is how they ignore the complexities of choice, morality and free will. They think it’s all black and white because their book says it is. They think that automatic damnation for each and everyone is a fitting punishment for doing, well, what you were made to do. I don’t see how God can have created us, and therefor alone bear all responsibility for how we turn out, yet punish us for doing exactly what we were supposed to do.

God, infinitely omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent as he is, could have created the world without choice, without free will. Had he done that, we wouldn’t have disappointed him by making the “wrong” choice (which he already knew we would, omniscient as he is) and both of us would have been happier today. After all, we humans are only aware of the choices we know about, so we’re still blissfully ignorant of all the choices we never knew about. Imagine how blissful we would have been without the knowledge of any choice whatsoever!

Ok, I began this post with an actual point, and I’ll try to make before sending all of you to sleep. The mythical story of the vengeful God that punishes man for something he made us do is one thing, but the more modern apologetic interpretations of the implications of God’s actions in that myth are completely senseless. They go against all logic, reason and evidence, and is maintained purely for the sake of scripture and people’s own sense of satisfaction. People want the ability to choose, but want to blame God’s “mysterious ways” whenever something goes wrong. They want to have “absolute” morality, but still want to be saved from the inevitable punishment. It bothers me that they don’t understand how oxymoronic it all is, that they don’t even want to understand. Ignorance is one thing, and defensible, but willful ignorance is, in my opinion, unforgivable.

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

“A sense of obligation.”

- Stephen Crane