All Things Irreligious: Atheism

Showing posts with label Atheism. Show all posts

Saturday, June 29, 2013

More Random Irreligious Thoughts

* Imagine the following: Destroy every religious text of any persuasion in existence; eliminate every religious institution; sack anyone involved in organised religion (or even disorganised religion); purge the name of any and every deity ever proposed, and then for good measure wipe clean the memories of every person with respect to anything and everything to do with religion in any shape, manner or form. Let’s turn the entirety of humanity into a flock of another kind, just like real sheep who presumably have no concept of all the sorts of things religions go on, and on, and on about.

Firstly, that would make for a much more peaceful planet, but that’s not my real point here. If the human race all of a sudden had no inkling of religion and associated rituals like prayer, deities, and thou shall nots, and miracles, and associated baggage - the slate wiped clean – would we invent it all over again and if so would it all be in the same old form as we know it now?

All of our religions cannot possibly be correct, but all of them could be wrong. Assuming that’s the case, could there be out there a really bona-fide god or gods – supernatural deities – with some sort of associated baggage that we have no comprehension of? Say these hypothetical supernatural entities have never made contact with Planet Earth.

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* Why is religion (and history too for that matter) so popular vis-à-vis say science or economics. Religion (and history) is told in story form and we’re natural born story tellers and recipients of say bedtime stories. Whole bookstores and libraries are filled with variations of “once upon a time” “they lived happy ever after”. There are multi-tens of thousands of movies and TV shows that play upon our need for stories. So that’s one reason. Another reason that religion is so popular is that it comes as a package deal. All the Big Questions (is there a God, your purpose, the meaning of life, free will, your soul, an afterlife, etc.) are wrapped up together in a nice box with a lovely pink ribbon. Reject religion, reject the pretty box of answers to your Big Questions, and you have to actually do some hard intellectual yakka to find out your own answers to those questions, individually, one at a time. So most take the easy road, the package deal, instead of striking out on their own, seeking their own intellectual answers come what may.

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* In May of 2013, the current Pope (as noted on the “Huffington Post”) said that atheists were okay for salvation and a place in heaven providing they had lived the sort of life that God intended. Alas, the very next day a spokesperson for the Vatican refuted that – no way can an atheist get on the good side. Well, so much for papal infallibility! It really is all so phoney – an absolute joke.

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* Miracles (if they exist) are God’s correction fluid (whiteout) – assuming God exists. If existence is affirmed on both counts that actually makes a mockery of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural deity since it would have been logical and preferable to have set in train the necessary conditions that would have negated the need for a later miracle. For example, don’t bother to raise the dead; rather ensure they don’t snuff it in the first place!

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* Despite many references in the Bible of God talking to someone, Adam and Eve, Cain, Jacob, Jonah, Moses, etc. we never get an actual description of what God looks like. He speaks in a cloud or as a burning bush. All images of God, artworks, are of the human imagination. So, what did God really look like and why was He ashamed to actually show His face (something true unto this very day). Perhaps God doesn’t want to be seen because He was starkers – absolutely naked – and perhaps, assuming some mortal actually saw God, well no one dares mention the ‘emperor’ who has no clothes. If humans were made in God’s image, and God was ashamed of His nudity (as Adam and Eve were ashamed of there lack of clothing post their nibbling on a forbidden snack), then perhaps that accounts for our reluctance in most public environments to show off our birthday suits.

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* If you’re really honest about things, what’s THE most important wish list part or objective or goal or aspect of your life? Is it money? Is it power? Is it reputation? Is it winning the Nobel Prize? Is it success? Is it having the most perfect family? Is it pitching a perfect major league ballgame? Is it becoming POTUS, or perhaps Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Is it (fill in the blank)? No! More likely as not, your number one priority it is NOT DIEING! Well good luck with that ‘cause it ain’t gonna happen.

So, what’s the next best objective? An afterlife! Why? What’s really annoying about snuffing it is lose of consciousness. The idea that your consciousness that you spent a lifetime building up from scratch will just dissolve into grey goo to be consumed by bacteria is pretty abhorrent. If you have an afterlife, the minimum you must retain is consciousness or self-awareness. You may still be old and grey and can’t get it up; you may not have access to alcohol and tobacco and other similar addictions; you may only get TV reruns and old magazine issues to read; you favourite pizza may not be on the menu; you may even have to share your afterlife with your ex-boss, or your ex or your in-laws, others you’d rather not share anything with or be within ten miles (or kilometres) of; in short not everything will be just hunky-dory, but at least you’ll retain your consciousness for all eternity (and be bored witless even before the first several thousand years or so passes by). Is that a price you are willing to pay?

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* There are many, probably a majority of the population, who will claim to have had some sort of up close and personal experience with God, or Jesus, or angels, or some sort of supernatural entity. They will of course use that very personal experience as not only evidence, but proof that God, etc. exists. And it is extremely difficult to counter argue their conviction based on their experience. However, I too have had an intense up close and personal experience too, but one which I’m sure shows that these sort of profound spiritual experiences are some combination of wishful thinking (a desire to believe) and mental hallucinations.

Now like many hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, I like to put out food for wild birds, especially in environmentally stressful times like winter or during a drought. Over the course of many years, I’ve had thousands of visitations – what bird is going to turn down an easy free feed? At the end of the day, there’s usually some cleanup to be done like sweeping up all the leftover birdseed husks, etc. And so it came to pass one early evening, I was waiting for two birds to finish up before I did the daily cleanup. And in due course they flew off, up over my roof. And so I went outside to start the cleanup, but there sitting on the apex of the roof were the two birds. As I looked up at them, they looked back at me, and for some inexplicable reason, I received a telepathic message from the two birds: “thanks for all the food; we’ll be back tomorrow”. And then they flew off. It was so real an experience that I just stood there stunned, in fact so moving was that experience, so bonding was that human-animal encounter that tears immediately started welling up in me.

This was the first and only time I ever had such a vivid even spiritual feeling that remains as vivid and as spiritual now as it did seconds after the fact. But clearly I was imagining the whole thing. Birds cannot speak the human language. Telepathy doesn’t exist far less exist between birds and humans. Birds probably have no concept of being given a gift and thus no mental concept of giving thanks.

So yes, when someone says they had an up close and personal encounter with God (or equivalent), I’m sure that they are 100% sincere and a believer. But I’m equally convinced it’s a case, as was mine with the two birds, of self-deception.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Religion: Some More Random Observations

Do you have greater credibility for your personal worldview and biases, or are you taken more seriously if you invoke God, Jesus and/or the Bible in support? Perhaps you may think a wicked city like Las Vegas should be destroyed. Thumbs down, but then you say well look what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah. You’d get short shrift if you advocate executing disobedient children, until you can cite the Biblical chapter and verse which states the exact same thing. Wacky ideas get the thumbs down; Biblical wacky events that mirror those ideas – thumbs up.

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Anybody reading the story of the crucifixion in Matthew, Mark or Luke will note that for three hours, between noon and three pm apparently, it became very dark. John doesn’t mention this, and Matthew and Mark only note the three hours of intense darkness. But Luke (23:45) notes specifically that “the sun was darkened’. That clearly implies a solar eclipse. However, there are several problems with this. The first is that the crucifixion of Jesus took place at Passover. Alas, Passover happens or is celebrated when the Moon is in its Full Moon phase (or when the Earth is between, but not quite in direct alignment with, the Sun and the Moon). A solar eclipse can only happen when the Moon is totally dark, that is when it is in its New Moon phase (when the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun). So, when the crucifixion happened, that is at Passover, the Moon was Full, not New, therefore no solar eclipse. The second problem is that the New Moon only covers the Sun causing a solar eclipse thus causing intense darkness, for a maximum just shy of eight minutes. That’s just a tad less time than Mathew, Mark and Luke allow for. The third problem is that the crucifixion happened as far as can be determined in April of 30, or 33 or 34 CE. There is no solar eclipse in Jerusalem in April in any of those months and years and is therefore irrelevant, misleading and immaterial. So, either it’s all just fiction, added in for dramatic effect, or it was a miracle (which is probably the official church line). I’d opt for the fiction myself.

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Be sure to check out Wikipedia’s entry for “List of scandals involving evangelical Christians” – very, very enlightening. Also, if you have access, read the following:

Gardner, Martin: “Prime-time preachers” (in) The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher; Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York; 1988; p.223-245.

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This is the latest Right Wing Watch Cindy Jacobs story.

“Cindy Jacobs’ five-year-old daughter can stop tornadoes.”

Apparently her trick is to shout out “I told you to be quiet in Jesus’ name!” and the tornado just goes poof.

My response: Hello, my name is Alice and I’ve gone through the looking glass into wonderland – whee!

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Speaking of the Right Wing Watch, their coverage of the extreme right wing fundamentalist religious personalities like Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer (especially Brian Fischer), Cindy Jacobs, Glenn Beck; and dozens more, show that these individuals and the organisations they represent (like the American Family Association) are stridently anti-President Obama, and have been since Obama rose to the fore in 2008. I’ve never witnessed any American president being subjected to the vitriol and abuse that President Obama has routinely been by the religious right. Amazingly, it doesn’t seem to be a racist thing, it’s just Obama stands for everything the extreme right wing is against like gay marriage. So, Obama is the antichrist; Obama doesn’t believe in the Bible; Obama hates America; Obama isn’t even an American citizen; Obama is anti-Israel; Obama is pro-Muslim; Obama is a closet Muslim; Obama is a closet gay; Obama is

America

’s Lenin or Stalin; Obama hates the military; Obama is an illegitimate president; Obama should be impeached. There’s a lot more negatives, but you get the drift.

But it’s not so much about what Obama is (sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me) but what Obama’s agenda is. Obama will declare himself God; Obama wants to destroy the American economy; Obama wants to raise a black army and kill whites, especially right wing Christian whites; Obama wants gun control to disarm his enemies; Obama wants to precipitate another Civil War; Obama will turn America into an Islamic state; Obama discriminates against Christianity; Obama declares war on white America; Obama is out to destroy the family unit; and on and on and on it goes without any shred of evidence whatever.

While that might be an example of America’s freedom of speech, I wonder whether or not any of these individuals will apologise in January 2017 when Obama leaves office and nothing whatever has come to pass that even remotely confirmed these outlandish shock, horror, it’s the end of the world or at least of America, claims. My gut feeling is that there won’t be an “I’m sorry” or “I got it wrong” from anyone that’s a member of any one of the extreme right wing fundamentalist religious groups. By then they will have moved on and will be bucketing some other person.

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Why is it that a select number of those with a religious conviction feel they have a moral and ethical right to disturb and inconvenience you, at their convenience of course, in order to shove their religious worldview down your throat? The nice thing about atheists is that they don’t disturb and inconvenience you; they don’t do doorknocking!

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Ancient art works that depict ‘flying saucers’ all seemingly have a religious, especially New Testament, Jesus/Mary themed context: Why? Perhaps because the religious figures central in the artistic works aren’t supernatural but flesh-and-blood of an ‘ancient astronaut’ variety.

Monday, August 6, 2012

The All-God: All This, All That, All the Next Thing

God is certainly considered by the faithful to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and of course omni-warm and omni-fuzzy. He’s also as omni-conceited as they come. But all that’s irrelevant since the All-God has the all-quality of non-existence.

If you tend to accept much of the theology surrounding the concept of a monotheistic God, then you accept that that God is infinite in terms of various attributes like being in all places at all times; possessing all knowledge (past, present and future); having infinitely more powers than Superman with no worries about heavenly or hellishly kryptonite, and having an infinite amount of compassion for those great unwashed moulded in His image, etc. Not only is that theology total nonsense, there are various other attributes of a near infinite nature that God possesses, like a massive ego except that theology too is flawed since you can’t have an ego if you don’t exist.

Is the All-God All-Present, All-Anywhere, All-Everywhere?

Since the Almighty is a physical being, after all He utters sounds and physically causes physical things to happen, as such He cannot be in all places at all times. A physical object, even a deity, cannot be in two places at the same time. That’s just total nonsense. Scratch omnipresent.

Is the All-God All-Loving, All-Merciful, All-Compassionate, and All-Forgiving?

“Yes” you say? You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to the small-scale, even individual (Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, God is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn’t conceive of such death and destruction as God inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. Would a compassionate God create hell, fire and brimstone to hold over the heads of His subjects as a means of potential eternal punishment like a sword of Damocles? If ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase ‘loving God’. I’d sooner take my chances with ‘a loving person-eating shark’! Please scratch omni-warm and omni-fuzzy from your theology.

Is the All-God All–Knowing?

If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of your future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance and that nothing could be altered? Nothing unexpected; no surprises would ever happen. So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be an all-knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That’s why people don’t usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven’t yet seen. If you’re told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical Book of Revelation. The Bible is God’s Holy Word. Revelation is therefore God’s Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. God knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what’s the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite God’s utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line – they have no Free Will. Scratch omniscient.

Is the All-God All-Powerful?

If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (i.e. – not omni-warm and omni-fuzzy). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for that evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

God is not all-powerful since not even God can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle’s precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, God, like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can’t operate at faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is ten light-years away, then you’re safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If God exists in a physical location within the Universe, then God can’t know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the ‘dark’ as it were until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, God (as well as the rest of humanity) won’t know about it for other eight-plus minutes – the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun. God is powerless to act until that eight-plus minutes have elapsed.

Not even God can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a “No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You” sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Not even God can accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper.

If God is all-powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day? Scratch omnipotent.

Is the All-God for All-People?

If you believe the Bible, God has His Chosen People – the Hebrews. God has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn’t America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren’t the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that God is the “God of Israel”. So, if you ain’t associated with God’s Chosen People and God’s Promised Land, it’s impossible to believe that you are one of those in God’s holy grace! In short, it’s safe to give God your Big Middle Finger, even both of them!

On the other hand, some will quote Romans 3: 29 which indeed suggest that the All-God is for all-people, Jews and Gentiles alike. But then too that’s part of the warmer and fuzzier New Testament. The God of the Old Testament showed a lot more bias towards just one tiny segment of society. The proof of that pudding, neatly summed up, can be found in Deuteronomy 7:6 “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.” The LORD thy God wasn’t referring to Americans despite some Americans referring to the United States as ‘God’s own country’ and California as ‘the promised land’.

Is the All-God All-Up Himself?

Well let’s just say the phrase used by God in reference to Himself, “I am” is very, very frequently used. “I am the LORD” can be found 161 times in the King James Version of the Bible. This is clarified 33 times – “I am the LORD your God” and clarified an additional 7 times as in “I am the LORD thy God”. What do you make of the phrase “I am the Almighty God” or “I am Alpha and Omega”? What about “I am a great king, saith the LORD”. Not even former baseball star Reggie (“This team, it all flows from me. I’m the straw that stirs the drink”) Jackson, or boxer Cassius (“I am the greatest”) Clay (otherwise better known by his alter ego pseudonym of Muhammad Ali), just to single out two individuals from tens of thousands of similar mindsets from all walks of life from around the world, had as big an ego as the Almighty!

Finally, the All-God’s All Non-Existence

God does in fact have one ‘All’ quality. He’s an all-nothing. God, the supernatural deity, doesn’t exist. He’s been a no-show for thousands of years. If God, assuming a God, really did exist; it would be simplicity itself to prove His existence to the faithful believers and atheist alike. No Old Testament person who has claimed an up close and personal contact with God can in turn be historically verified from any non-Biblical source(s). There’s absolutely nothing within the sum total of life, the Universe and everything that can be attributed to a deity and only to a deity. Those who choose to put faith in non-verifiable supernatural happenings that orbit around a Supreme Being are of course entitled to do so. They are equally as entitled to believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. At least that holy trinity has bona-fide evidence to support their existence, as any child will testify to!

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Reasons to Question an Alleged Supreme Being’s Bona-Fides

There are lots of names applied to our monotheistic deity. There's God, the Almighty, the Supreme Being, the Lord, and so on. But no matter the name, no matter which way you slice and dice the concept, it retains such philosophical baggage that any rational being has just got to question the bona-fides of such a deity.

There’s something odd about God’s origin and nature. It’s downright illogical at best; in fact it’s really quite impossible! The concept of God has the same degree of believability as the concept of Santa Claus.

If a Supreme Being created the Universe, then what, or who, created that Being? Who are the Almighty's parents in other words? Causality applies to Supreme Beings as well as anything else. And if something or someone created the Supreme Being, what then created that something or someone and so on and so on down the line? It's an infinite regression. It's far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn't mean our Universe didn't have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to 'who created the Almighty?' is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created the Almighty in mans' image (and probably all other supreme deities as well), rather than the reverse - The Almighty didn't create humans in His own image.

However, as an afterthought, perhaps man was created in the image of the Almighty. Based on the texts of the Biblical Old Testament, our Supreme Being has to be described as a dictator what with all those "thou shall not..." commandments. The Almighty is also a hypocrite as in 'do as I say, not as I do', for example "Thou shall not kill". Further, the Almighty is someone who's vain and petty always demanding all and sundry to bow and scrape to Him. He's also someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name, such as the Battle of Jericho, which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes. All up, the Almighty is just someone who's cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist; someone who's totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around Son of a Bitch. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of, like your average run-of-the-mill Homo sapiens?

If cats have a deity, I'm sure their supreme deity would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go 'meow-meow'). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question - the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if the Almighty has always existed, then He is infinitely old, beating Methuselah's longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I'll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) creation of our Universe - which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was our Supreme Being doing the 'day' before He created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that He has always created universes, one after another after another - creating universes, that's the Almighty's thing! And if the Almighty is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many - the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that's an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if Mr. Supreme Deity created everything, then He created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can't see Pluto with the naked eye. Even with a telescope Pluto is just a tiny dot. If Pluto didn't exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that's a fairly safe bet). Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn't it have been easier on Mr. Supreme Deity not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of the Almighty's efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It's sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn't see 99.99% of the observable universe, and 99.99% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What's the point then of creating all that extra 99.99%?

If the Almighty exists, why doesn't He show His warts-and-all face today? I mean, He wasn't all that shy about getting in humanity's face way back in the days of the Old Testament, so what is He so wary of today? Maybe He's afraid of our nukes! But that's silly seeing as how He's all-powerful. That aside, it wouldn't be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a showing today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If the Almighty so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to an Almighty that something only an Almighty (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to "Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light". Just one simple little sentence - that's all it would have taken - something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn't have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks the Almighty missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, our Supreme Being could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell!

If a Supreme Being exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring an Almighty hypothesis, then the Almighty has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

In conclusion, the Almighty, the supernatural deity, doesn't exist. That’s the most obvious logical option when looking at the Almighty’s bona-fides. One line of evidence in support of that is that our alleged Supreme Being hasn't struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless 'crime'. And no, I don't hate the Almighty. You can't hate something that doesn't exist.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part Two

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Impossibility Three: Is God All–Knowing? Hardly! If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be an all-knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That’s why people don’t usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven’t yet seen. If you’re told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

Impossibility Four: Is God All-Powerful? Hardly! If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see Impossibility Two above). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for that evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

If God is all-powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day?

Impossibility Five: Is God A God for All People? If you believe the Bible, God has His Chosen People – the Hebrews. God has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn’t America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or

Russia

, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren’t the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called

Israel

; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that God is the “God of Israel”. So, if you ain’t associated with God’s Chosen People and God’s Promised Land, it’s impossible to believe that you are one of those in God’s holy grace! In short, it’s safe to give God your Big Middle Finger, even both of them!

Impossibility Six: God versus Intelligent Design? Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems? Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? God, that’s who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say “God”? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say “God” again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don’t think so! Did God fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

God does in fact have one ‘All’ quality. He’s an all-nothing. God, the supernatural deity, doesn’t exist. One line of evidence in support of that is that God hasn’t struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless ‘crime’. And no, I don’t hate God. You can’t hate something that doesn’t exist.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part One

I spotted a book* a while back and looked over the dust jacket. It was regarding the afterlife, and the jacket said something akin to God was One; and you were part of His oneness; and your afterlife with God was outside the realm of time and space. And I thought to myself what a load of utter claptrap! God is One – One what? Who knows; the book jacket didn’t say; it’s not explained for those thinking of buying the book. If there is an oneness, then that implies there must be a two-ness and a three-ness and a four-ness and so on down the line. If you exist in an afterlife outside of space and time then whatever you are in that afterlife, you have no volume, no area, no length – you are a zero dimensional dot point. Further, nothing can ever change in that afterlife since there is no time which is what gives substance or reality to change. So, what other impossible things of a godly nature can we pour the waters of scepticism on?

Impossibility One: The Concept or Nature of God is Impossible: There’s something odd about God’s origin and behaviour. It’s downright impossible!

If God created the Universe, then what, or who, created God? Who is God’s mother in other words? Cause and effect apply to God as well as anything else. And if something or someone created God, what then created that something or someone (and so on and so on)? It’s an infinite regression. It’s far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn’t mean our Universe didn’t have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to ‘who created God?’ is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created God in man’s image (and probably all other deities as well, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy), rather than the reverse – God didn’t create humans in God’s image. [Actually, perhaps man was created in God’s image. Based on the writings in the Old Testament, God has to be described as a dictator (‘thou shall not…’) and a tyrant, a hypocrite (do as I say, not as I do), someone who’s vain and petty, someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name (which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes), someone who’s cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist, someone who’s totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around SOB. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of?]

If cats have a deity, I’m sure their god would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go ‘meow-meow’). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question – the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if God has always existed, then God’s infinitely old, beating Methuselah’s longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I’ll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) creation of our Universe – which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was God doing the ‘day’ before He created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that God has always created universes, one after another after another – creating universes, that’s God’s thing! And if God is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many – the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that’s an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if God created everything, then God created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can’t see Pluto with the naked eye. If Pluto didn’t exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that’s a fairly safe bet). Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn’t it have been easier on God not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of God’s efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It’s sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn’t see 99.999% of the observable universe, and 99.999% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What’s the point then of creating all that extra 99.999%?

If God exists, why doesn’t He show His face today? I mean, He wasn’t all that shy about getting in the human race’s face way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Maybe He’s afraid of our nukes! That aside, it wouldn’t be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a show today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If God so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to God that something only God (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to “Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light”. Just one simple little sentence – that’s all it would have taken – something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn’t have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks God missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, God could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell!

If God exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring a God hypothesis, the God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

Impossibility Two: Is God All-Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Forgiving? Yes you say? You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to individual (Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, God is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn’t conceive of such death and destruction as God inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. If ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase ‘a loving God’. I’d sooner take my chances with ‘a loving person-eating shark’!

*Spong, John Shelby; Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell; HarperOne, New York; 2009.

To be continued…

Monday, May 28, 2012

Polytheism, Monotheism, Extraterrestrial Theism or No Theism?

Is there one God, many gods, extraterrestrial ‘gods’, or no gods? Nothing is set in concrete and everything is grist for the speculative mill.

For the majority of mankind, for the majority of time, polytheism has been the be-all-and-and-all of explaining life, the universe and everything. Lots of phenomena; lots of things to explain; lots of divisions of labour resulting in lots of gods required to explain all.

Then some bright spark comes along and suggests that all these different roles can be in fact rolled into one. So because one God, is easier to come to terms with than dozens of gods, well, make it so, or so be it.

But, does than shift ultimately mean that one God is better than many gods? Are there in fact other gods and God, or other gods but not God?

Well, according to all things Biblical, God’s Commandments verify the existence of other gods

My quick summation goes as follows:

“I am the Lord your God” [Translated, ‘I’m top dog’.]

“Do not have any other gods before me” [Translated: ‘that’s because I am top dog’.]

“You shall not make for yourself an idol [presumably of other gods], whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. [The latter might be the Greek Poseidon, or Roman Neptune, for example.]

“You shall not bow down to them or worship them [presumably those other gods]; for I the Lord your God [He repeats Himself here] am a jealous God [top dogs tend to be wary and even envious of lesser dogs least they gang up on Him] … punishing … those who reject me”.

An analogy strikes me as if there were a group of school kids (gods) all playing relatively nicely among themselves, when the school bully (God) enters, chases them away and spoils everything for everybody!

Or, it’s as if the General (God) is rather miffed – not all that pleased – if the adoring public idolise the Private, the Sergeant, or the Lieutenant – rank has it’s privileges, or at least some rather serious expectations.

Okay, the Bible, being God’s word and all, verifies God has rivals!

Ancient Romans, Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, Celts, Maya, Aztecs, Incas, Polynesians, etc., etc. all had many gods – these ancient peoples weren’t dummies in their belief, so why should they be rubbished for polytheism when you’re not rubbished for monotheism?

One problem with God or gods is with respect to creation. God (or the gods) created the Universe which contains therefore God’s (or god’s) creation, Planet Earth. God (or the gods) created on Planet Earth human beings in His image. Humans are the pinnacle of His (their) creation. We are the jewel in His (their) crown. Humanity is the be-all-and-end-all of all Godly (godly) things. We’re extra special in the eyes of God or the gods. 1) That being the case what fraction of the volume of the observable universe is devoted to providing His (their) supreme creation with a home? A grain of sand is far larger when compared to the size of the Earth it rests upon, than the size of the Earth compared to the observable universe. Translated, God (or the gods) created a heck of a lot of space for no apparent reason since it has no relevance to His (their) special creation – Planet Earth and its human inhabitants. 2) That being the case, what fraction of the age of the Universe has been occupied by – give us a Supreme Creation pat on the back to – humanity? Well, what fraction of 13.7 billion years is the reign of Homo sapiens? Homo sapiens have been making their mark on Terra Firma for some 100,000 years. Do you begin to see something odd here? The Apex of God’s (gods) creation, the creation that gives ultimate meaning to God Himself (gods themselves), humanity, has existed for as close to no time at all as makes no odds. If we’re not special at all in space and time, then we’re not special in the mind of God (or the gods). Or, perhaps what this suggests is that there is no creator God or gods at all.

If you accept the general verdict of history, there has been a transition from polytheism to monotheism; if both God and gods have, or had, reality, how is this explained? Assimilation or conquest by a monotheistic culture over a more primitive or weaker polytheistic culture is one way – missionaries rule! Still, it’s difficult to overturn the establishment, especially an establishment that’s held sway for thousands of years. Most people, cultures, societies don’t like to have new ideas rammed down their collective throats.

Okay, time to abandon that suggestion and have a bit of fun, speculate, and jump into the deep end of the pool. The basic idea is that the old gods just pack up and leave. If that’s the case, God replaces the religious vacuum left behind. Where did the ancient gods go, assuming they existed in the first place? Back home presumably, wherever home is – probably somewhere out there.

So one other viable alternative to the existence of bona-fide supernatural gods or God is to suggest their bona-fides, while real, isn’t within the realm of the supernatural. That is, presumably, the gods, and God, were flesh-and-blood aliens from space, or in ancient times and human perceptions, a being(s) from a Heaven or from the sky – as in sky beings. One could object that the gods (or God) are visualised or depicted as very human or humanoid (some of those ancient Egyptian gods are a bit suss) and thus the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is O U T – out. However, human-like alien beings are not unknown from within the modern day UFO era’s literature. So, appearances might be deceiving.

One could further postulate that all of the mythological beasties part and parcel of the realms of the gods actually are extraterrestrial creatures – ET’s pets, like say Pegasus! And some of the more humanoid beasties, Medusa, the Cyclops, the Minotaur, well let’s just say they wouldn’t be out of place as aliens you might have to deal with on another planetary abode!

Back to the deep end of the pool and boldly going where angels fear to tread: I’ll start by speculating that it’s relatively easy to envision two separate and rival extraterrestrial civilizations – the gods on the one hand vs. God plus associated crew and underlings (angels, etc.) on the other. Perhaps there was a ‘Star Wars’ of sorts with God sending the gods packing! That’s the most likely scenario since there’s no love lost between God and company, and the gods. Or, perhaps, if you like the Zoo Hypothesis (we’re property – the zoo ‘animals’; ET is the zoo keeper), there was a changing of the guard – the old shift (the gods) clocked off; the new shift (God, etc.) clocks on (except of course God nearly destroys our terrestrial zoo in a fit of temper! Then again, Zeus nearly did the same!) Or, maybe God is a cosmic sheriff with local jurisdiction within our stellar neighbourhood. Sheriff God had to chase the bad guys (the gods) out of Dodge (Planet Earth) for violations of their version of the Prime Directive. But, once a lawman, always a lawman, and so our cosmic sheriff rides into Dodge and imposes His version of the law (‘Thou shall not…’) on us.

But, maybe the ancient gods haven’t left the building at all since if they had, God wouldn’t be so worried about them and about you cuddling up to, and worshiping them. If the gods had gone walkabout and left, wouldn’t it be a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’?

Back now into the shallow end of the pool: In the final analysis however, one has to ask whether it is really believable that Planet Earth should have hosted thousands of supernatural gods over the last several thousand years. I mean, if you were to add up all the various major and minor deities that have formed the ‘religious’ bedrocks for society after society after society, it starts to get a bit like a novel that has a few more characters to keep track of as is really necessary to the overall plot.

So, one can easily imagine that there really are no supernatural gods at all, and by implication no God (I mean why should the one exist when the many don’t?). Or, one can pick and choose from the supernatural multitudes and come up with a reasonable handful – except that 1000 people will come up with 1000 different lists. Or, maybe all (or at least most or some) of the gods and perhaps including a God (as one of the many) exist, or did exist, but weren’t really supernatural, only seen through primitive human eyes as supernatural – back to the ETH again.

“What if” there is no God or gods, supernatural or otherwise? Not now, not ever. If one were to sample the world’s population, the majority will confess to a believing in some sort of Supreme Being. [Since the era of polytheism is pretty much gone, I’ll stick to the singular, usually translated as ‘God’.] However, in factual matters, majority doesn’t always rule. If a billion people believe in a foolish idea, it’s still a foolish idea. Anyway, if there is no God of any kind, then you’re on your own. There’s no one to blame for the bad; no one to thank for the good. Trillions of dollars and man-hours; millions of needless sufferings, have been all for naught.

So what if there is no God? While there’s lots of examples one could cite that suggest that the concept of God is illogical and often self-contradictory, that there isn’t one, or at least a logical one, could be a conclusion reached summed up by examining the logic behind the example of what’s commonly called the ‘end of days’ or Armageddon. The point, regarding the whole Biblical end of days, Armageddon, etc. bit, is that the resolution of the whole Biblical end of day’s event or scenario has already been laid out and the exact ending foretold. So, what’s the point in going through the whole exercise? I mean if you know, absolutely know, in advance that you’re doomed to failure – it’s a futile exercise – if you are to flap your arms and try to fly, why bother going through the process?

So if we conclude that there is no God…

Then billions of people, over thousands of years, have spent trillions of ultimately wasted hours in prayer, attending church, observing/attending various religious rituals, spent in religious/Biblical study, door-knocking, preaching, discussing, arguing, going on pilgrimages, etc.

Then all those religious rituals, the do and do not rules that govern things regarding food, dress codes, ceremonies, relationships, sex, and etc. ultimately have been meaningless.

Then millions of people have been tortured, murdered or executed, imprisoned, ridiculed, humiliated, exiled, and hated for no reason.

Then billions of dollars have been spent on cathedrals instead of say hospitals; Bibles instead of textbooks; educating priests instead of medical doctors, nurses and scientists.

Then for those formally educated and qualified in religious studies, spending entire careers preaching, etc. they have wasted their lives in devotion to an invisible friend that has all the reality of Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

Then multi-millions of animals have been sacrificed and offered up to a supernatural being that doesn’t exist.

Then you can’t blame all your aches and pains, your bad back and creaky joints, on some all knowing great intelligent designer, who apparently bioengineered you (from dust or a rib) while simultaneously failing Bioengineering 101. I mean placing the food tube right next to the breathing tube was a disaster waiting to happen, as evidenced by all those people who choke to death every year. And how many women have died giving birth because the compatibility between the birth canal and the size of the baby, well just wasn’t! A divinely created human wouldn’t be flawed and have need of eyeglasses or a hearing aid. God wouldn’t create a human with jaws to small to allow for wisdom teeth. As to the appendix organ, that’s just another oops.

But “what if” there is a God (or gods). Well, I guess that depends on which one or which version. It all seems to boil down to any one of a multitude to pick and choose from, from monotheism to polytheism to extraterrestrial theism. Go shopping! Polytheism perhaps survives after all. Personally, I find something about the Norse gods quite appealing! They get my vote!

Friday, April 20, 2012

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!