All Things Irreligious: God: Your Invisible Friend: Part Two

Sooner or later, all children come to the realization that the story of Santa just can’t be true and that Santa isn’t real, but part of our Christmas mythology. It’s that human trait, the ability to reason and figure things out rationally and logically.

There is so much philosophical baggage surrounding the concept of a supernatural creator God-of-the-Old-Testament that it is far easier to believe He never had any reality in the first place. Here's some of that philosophical baggage IMHO, along with some suggestions for additional readings on the general theme.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

3) God is a Cruel God: God is anything but an all loving, friendly father figure and benign figurehead.

Let’s start with immortality: I find it interesting that an apparently immortal being, which has therefore no fear of death, creates mortal living things, including some species having the intellect to contemplate the concept of their mortality and death. If we were immortal would we have ever invented or have had a need for a God, or gods, or a religion at all?

Any God who orders up animal sacrifices is no God I wish to have an association with. Societies charged with the responsibility of speaking out and preventing cruelty too animals should speak out on this issue, since animal sacrifices is apparently condoned, and sometimes still practiced by some of the world’s major religions even today!

I gather from the Bible that God has a bone to pick with humans, and only humans. However, if God created everything, like animals, then he also created the various afflictions with affect animals, and which, viewed from a humane perspective, suggest that God is guilty of animal cruelty in the extreme. I mean God could have arranged things such that animals would die naturally, but always quick and cleanly. Alas, that’s not the way God wanted it. He clearly wanted some animals to suffer hideous and long drawn out deaths. While there’s probably an example for every animal species, lets examine beak & feather disease which affects cockatoos (and other members of the parrot family apparently). In brief, this viral disease causes the bird’s beak to grow uncontrollably resulting in something akin to an elephant’s tusks, and the bird’s feathers/plumage falls off. The animal takes one an un-groomed, downright filthy appearance. Death results from a combination of exposure to the elements and starvation. Once you’ve seen a bird in this condition, it’s unforgettable, and heart-rending in the extreme. If God created this condition, the God shouldn’t be top-of-the-pops in the eyes of any feeling human being, rather downgraded to a nasty brute that should be totally and utterly despised.

The upshot is that if God did not create this disease, then logically He didn’t create cockatoos or humans or the world or the Universe. You can’t arbitrarily pick-and-choose between what bits He did and did not create; what bits He is, and is not, responsible for that suit your particular philosophy. It’s all or nothing.

God is a sticky-beak! If God exists as described in the literature, then God ensures that you have no privacy, ever. Everything you do is known to God. God can read your most private thoughts, see even into your dreams (so where’s the scientific ways and means that credits telepathy?). Doesn’t that remind you somehow of Big Brother? So by what right does God have to violate your privacy? You wouldn’t tolerate that from even your closest of relations – child, parent, or partner. But not to worry, even if you sin in your dreams God won’t know. Why? God doesn’t exist IMHO, so that’s a relief. The Privacy Act hasn’t been violated.

4) God’s Ten Commandments: Something’s rotten in the state of Biblical lands when it comes to these gems. A few are decidedly unworthy of the tablets they were carved in.

Thou shall not kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you’d think that God would practice what He preaches. But isn’t, according to the Old Testament, God the greatest mass murder in the history of the world that puts tyrants the likes of Hitler to a status of a rank amateur? I mean there is the Biblical flood story, and what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can’t trust a god who basically says ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

There’s something somewhere in the Ten Commandments about honouring Mum and Dad. I bet a lot of kids who were abused, even sexually abused, or sold into slavery, or had other atrocities fostered upon them by dear old Mum and Dad would have some trouble in accepting this edict, and would probably have a few choice words to say about it.

Then I recall something about not coveting thy neighbour’s wife. Now that’s downright sexist. What about not coveting thy neighbour’s husband? I don’t believe that got a mention anywhere!

Then there’s something (actually several commandment something’s) about not having any other gods before Me (The Almighty God). There’s something disturbing about a God so insecure or jealous that He would have to issue these resolutions. Can one trust such an emotional temper-tantrum-throwing God? Does the very issuing of these (you’d better make Me Number One now and always) Commandments suggest that there is in fact, other gods (extraterrestrials perhaps) that exist?

5) God: The Intelligent Designer: I’ll put it this way, if God created/designed humans, if ‘man’ is created in God’s image, well, next time your back goes out of whack (or any other part of your anatomy for that matter), have a few choice utterances about how great a designer God really is! Or, take childbirth and how often, especially before modern medicine, the baby killed the mother. I believe it was something along the line of 20%. The upshot is that childbirth was, and often still is, dangerous. So, we certainly have a bad design here – the baby that has trouble fitting through the birth canal, so, bad God. If God were an engineer, peer review of His design of the Universe would have Him expelled from any and every professional engineering society in existence. In fact, it’s rather unlikely He ever passed Engineering 101.

6) God Works in

Mysterious Ways

: The buzz phrase that ‘God works in mysterious ways’ has got to be one of the greatest cop-out phrases of all time. It explains absolutely nothing because it attempts to explain everything. No matter what dilemma you’re forced to deal with, this is an ultimate answer. It’s what you fall back on when you don’t have an answer to a penetrating question. Talk about your ultimate security blanket! It’s akin to a parent telling his questing endless series of ‘why’ questions that children are so prone to ask, ‘because I say so’ – it’s highly unsatisfactory from the child’s point of view.

7) In Conclusion: A supernatural God (and associated Biblical baggage) is unnecessary and illogical and in all likelihood doesn’t exist. If God does exist, He is in all likelihood an extraterrestrial – or a cat. There’s a saying that dogs have masters; cats have staff. The dog says ‘my owner feeds me, keeps me safe and warm, looks after me and plays with me – he must be a god. The cat says ‘my owner feeds me, keeps me safe and warm, looks after me and plays with me – I must be a god’! And to be perfectly honest, I’d far sooner worship my cats than the Biblical God! No matter which way you slice it, a cat has a far better disposition or personality than the Biblical God – and they catch mice too!

All Things Irreligious

Friday, April 20, 2012

God: Your Invisible Friend: Part Two

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