An Abstract Idealized Deity

There are those philosophers who are religiously inclined who have tried to conjure up their idealized version of a deity – God for all practical purposes and have been doing so ever since Methuselah was in diapers.   However, versions of God as represented by them aren’t really the Biblical God. Rather, their God is the ideal abstraction of God or the philosophical concept of God. So any similarity between their abstractions and the attributes given God of the Old Testament is purely a matter of coincidence. No matter – either way it’s all nonsense. 

God is many different things to many different people. God is everywhere (omnipresent); God is Mother Nature; God is love; God is the creator; God is dead; God doesn’t exist; God was an ancient astronaut; God is all-knowing (omniscient); God is all-powerful (omnipotent); God works in mysterious ways; etc. Whole books have explored the issue going back, well ever since humans could think and express their ideas on paper, or carve them in stone, or whatever. However, many of these abstract and idealised and philosophical versions of God (often contradictory) usually bear no relationship to the God of the Bible, or specifically God of the Old Testament.

I’m not exactly sure what an abstract idealized concept of God is supposed to achieve, apart from being an intellectual exercise like trying to put a numerical value on angels’ chinwagging on a pinhead, but it has nothing to do with putting bums on church pews.

God is an immaterial being who doesn’t exist in space or in time. That is a common Godly attribute, but one which is absolutely nonsense*. If God creates something that’s energetic and physical (possessing energy and matter) then God has to be something that’s energetic and physical in order to do that; that being creating that which is made of matter and is running on or off energy. You can’t create something from nothing that is immaterial or create something by nothing that’s immaterial. If God is therefore a physical and energetic something, then God must exist in space and in time since all material things (matter and energy), including a material creator and a material creation, exist in space and time. If God speaks, for example, God must be physical and possess energy. 

But the Bible provides ample examples of God existing in space and time starting with the creation itself (Genesis 1 and Genesis 2). Wasn’t the creation once dated in fact to 4004 BCE? A date is a location in time! If God talked to Moses via a burning bush, then God existed in space and in time – at a specific point in space and at a specific point in time. The goes ditto for events in the Garden of Eden and ditto anywhere and at anytime the Bible recounts some event where God did something; where God strutted His stuff, like in ancient Egypt and all those events related in Exodus.

Another variation on that theme is that God is everywhere. Well, God was somewhere, not everywhere when He was having a go at Adam and Eve! If you are physical, you cannot be everywhere at the same time.

God also has to be physical since He has a physical home turf (Heaven) and sits on a physical object, a throne – so God exists in space and occupies space.

If God is physical, and possesses energy, and expends energy, and there’s no real wriggle room there, then God is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics – entropy. God may be eternal, God may be immortal, but God still has to refuel (i.e. – eat presumably) and by implication, God has to go to the bathroom! God also needs His sleep, or at least rest, as per that seventh day of creation.

God is unchanging is another Godly attribute some religious philosophers associate with Him. Well, if God is composed of matter and energy, if God exists in space and time, and if God is subject to entropy, then God can not be unchanging. If God rested on the seventh day, well, that’s change. In fact God didn’t do or perform the exact same operations each and every day in Genesis 1 and 2. So that too is change. In fact God changed His mind, creating animals before man in Genesis 1; man before the animals in Genesis 2. God was also willing to change His mind when it came to Sodom and Gomorrah – that’s obviously contemplating change even if S&G still got zapped. .

God is eternal is yet another philosophical given. That God is eternal is consistent with the Bible giving promise to life everlasting or life eternal. However, the concept of eternal, forever, or infinity is fraught with paradoxical dangers. Since the Universe is a finite 13.7 billion years old, that would imply that God pre-existed the Universe, which is alleged to have created all of space, time, matter and energy. Okay, that’s consistent too since if God created the Universe, God must have predated the Universe (which negates the claim that the Big Bang was the first cause that created time, space, matter and energy; there must have been a before the Big Bang). But the issue arises, if you are eternal, and thus have already existed for an infinite amount of time, then what changed in God’s circumstances to have brought about the creation of the Universe, or rather why the ‘all of a sudden’ “I think I’ll do this” when for an infinite period prior to your creation you had no plans to do this, yet you are apparently all-knowing, so presumably an eternity before you created the Universe you knew you would do so, yet bided your time and twiddled your thumbs for really no apparent logical reason. Maybe God was of that common human frame of mind: It should be done; it shall be done; it will be done - tomorrow.

Another variation on that theme is that God is timeless. If time is God’s way of preventing everything happening at once, then if you’re God, everything does happen simultaneously since by being timeless, or in a state of timelessness, there’s nothing to stop all things happening simultaneously.

God apparently is pure perfection. God doesn’t screw things up. Ha! His creation of the human species was the biggest screw-up of all time! God Himself acknowledged His screw-up with the 40 day and 40 night rain hence flood event). Even if you put the initial blame on Adam and Eve and not on (an apparently all-knowing the future) God (who knew what Adam and Eve would do before-the-fact) He still enacts miracles in order to correct His mistakes. If God had ensured an adequate supply of loaves-and-fishes in the first damn place, there wouldn’t have been any need for waving the magic miracle loaves-and-fishes wand. 

A common attribute is that God is all-knowing (omniscient) and that He knows the future. But if God knows the future, what was the point of sending Moses and Aaron to Egypt to get the (unnamed) pharaoh to “Let My People Go” when God knew perfectly well He would ultimately have to do the hard yakka Himself and kick ass. It was all wasted breath. By the by, that’s an excellent example (along with the flood of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah) that God is anything but all-loving. Speaking of the flood, what was the point in creating all of humanity in the first place when the all-knowing God knew He was going to have to drown nearly the whole bloody lot of them a few generations on down the track! Creating humanity was just wasted effort. 

Another common trait given to God is that He is all-powerful (omnipotent). That too is nonsense. He maybe more powerful than a speeding locomotive; faster than a speeding bullet; able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, and He’s certainly up in the sky. However, there’s this paradox: can God create a rock so heavy not even He could lift it? If not, He’s not all powerful; if so He’s not all powerful. It’s a no-win situation. More relevant might be an observation, since God is physical, and presumably subject to the laws of the Universe, could God ever escape from inside a cosmic Black Hole? 

Speaking of those universal laws, one Godly attribute is that God is the creator of all physical laws, principles and relationships, but God is also a miracle worker and can override those laws, principles and relationships (God’s get out of His Black Hole jail card). In other words, God is also a miracle worker. That at least conforms to some Biblical events (like loaves-and-fishes) but it is also nonsense, or at least illogical. 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

Lastly, and this is my philosophical contribution to Godly attributes, God is naked as a newborn babe. 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 their 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.

By the by, this is not meant to be an endorsement that a supernatural and Biblical God actually exists (IMHO He doesn’t), only that the logic of some so-called professional religious philosophers is sadly lacking by not taking into consideration texts that billions of people have and had defined as the absolute and definitive description of Godly attributes. Maybe those religious pie-in-the-sky philosophers couldn’t get a real job in the real world and had to rely on tossing around abstract concepts of godliness as well as juggling those angels and pinheads.

* For an example, here’s an incredible statement by academic philosopher Gerard J. Hughes: “Plainly, God cannot do things which are impossible for an immaterial being, such as walking, speaking, or exerting physical force on things.” [Varghese, Roy Abraham (Editor); Great Thinkers On Great Questions; Oneworld, Oxford; 1998; p.223.]

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!

oooooOOOOOooooo

* 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.

Where Was God When…?

Humans can and do die prematurely through no apparent fault of their own. It’s a common feature on the news. It’s reasonable to ask who’s responsible. There are various agencies that can be held accountable: God, Mother Nature and Mankind. Since God is allegedly the Top Banana, the buck stops with Him when it comes to a ‘please explain’ those premature deaths. So, here’s an analysis of possible explanations with God taking centre stage.

Either God exists or God does not exist. If the latter, God cannot be held accountable for anything good, bad or ugly. But, if God exists, and has those positive attributes given to Him, even by His own words in the Bible, then God has a lot to answer for when it comes to explaining why humans are allowed to die prematurely through no fault of their own. The basic charge is premeditated murder at worst, almighty godly negligence allowing death at best.

Let’s review some positive Godly attributes:

God is Loving – Jeremiah 32:18.

God is Merciful - Exodus 34:6; Psalm 103:8; Joel 2:13.

God has Compassion – Psalm 86:15; Psalm 145:8.

God is Forgiving – Daniel 9:9; Ephesians 4:32.

God is Kind – Nehemiah 9:17; Joel 2:13.

God is Gracious – Exodus 34:6. Psalm 86:15; Psalm 116:5.

God is Righteous – Psalm 24:5; Psalm 116:5.

And there’s a lot more besides but you get the idea. God is the good guy. God is your friend. God looks after you. Pure bovine fertilizer! In fact the extreme Christian Right Wing, those televangelists, the Westboro Baptist Church, etc. all like to stress some other of God’s attributes, like being a jealous God, a vengeful God, a God quick to anger and a wrathful God – they like a God who hates and who kicks human butts, hard, and fatally. To them, any premature death to anyone by any cause is attributed to God, thank God, full stop. That also strikes me as pure bovine fertilizer. 

Humans die thanks to God before their time is due:

Why God’s rush to judgment? Since everyone is doomed to die anyway, there’s no apparent need for an immortal deity to rush their demise. To God, a billion years either way, either side of now, is of no consequence, so a human lifespan is just a piddle. If other words, since God will get His pound of flesh, or the devil his due in the fullness of time, there’s no need for any human not to be granted the right to live to die of natural causes – old age.

Innocents have been put in harms way through no fault of their own. Who’s responsible? Where does the buck stop? The buck ultimately stops with the chief cook and bottle washer – the Almighty. 

We have humans killed by deliberate Acts of God:

An Act of God usually implies wilful death and destruction, pain and suffering, inflicted on humanity by well, guess who, the Almighty Himself. That’s murder in the first degree. What else would you call Sodom and Gomorrah; the Egyptian tenth plague on the firstborn; the invasion of the Land of Canaan? Nor does it have to even be a mass murder scenario – even God smiting a single individual is premeditated murder. Fortunately, there have been no unnatural actual Acts of God (as opposed to natural Acts of Nature) in way, way over 2000 years plus, at least defined as a major destructive event that happened without benefit of a natural cause, or even a single death that can only be attributed to “God” and so listed on the death certificate. So in the Common Era, God is off the hook for premeditated murder, though God should still stand trial for atrocities committed in the Old Testament. 

We have humans killed by random Acts of Nature:

That’s wilful negligence since God, if there be a God, ultimately controls nature, God being all-powerful and all that. But first, if it appears to be a natural disaster (flood, drought, famine, hurricane/typhoon/cyclone, tornado, bushfire, volcano, earthquake, hail, epidemic, pandemic, asteroid/meteor impact, solar flares, blizzards, icebergs, lightning, tsunamis/tidal waves, etc.) then lets adopt the duck philosophy – if it looks, sounds, swims, flies, and otherwise behaves like a duck, it’s a duck, or in this case, it really is an Act of Nature and not something deliberately set in motion by Mother Nature’s boss, God, though that’s not set in any philosopher’s stone by any means.

Acts of Nature have an apparent natural cause, but of course that could mean that God is hiding behind an apparently natural causality curtain, but in reality forcing Mother Nature to do His bidding. But why would an all-powerful God hide behind Mother Nature’s skirts? - Back to the duck philosophy. So let’s just assume that God just sits on the sidelines (if He’s still in the neighbourhood, don’t forget He hasn’t been seen or heard from in over 2000 years) and lets Mother Nature strut her stuff – the nice balmy spring mornings; the multi terror-tornadoes that strike in that afternoon.  

Now what does He do from His heavenly sidelines? Well, He can do nothing and wash His hands of the unfolding events, whether it’s the twisters that form in Tornado Alley, a Hurricane Katrina moving towards New Orleans or an Asian tsunami about to strike. But God failing to take action is akin to the parents of a toddler who’s crawling across a road busy with traffic and failing to take action to prevent the inevitable tragedy. That’s wilful negligence. Or, God could manipulate apparently natural events to suit His purpose – create winners and losers.

In any natural disaster (Acts of Nature) there will tend to be ‘winners’ (survivors) and losers – the newly deceased. If God got down off His throne and intervened then presumably He wanted the ‘winners’ to live and the losers to die and made sure the natural dice were rigged to ensure that outcome. If so, then the ‘winners’ can “Thank God”, at least for the surviving part, though God should still get the Big Finger from true believers for allowing that Act of God under the guise of an Act of Nature to have transpired in the first place. Is the credit due God for saving some lives outweighed by the blame for the deaths and overall destruction God caused in the first place?

We have humans killed by Acts of Man at God’s direction.

That’s God being an accomplice to murder in the first degree, for example the Battle of Jericho. Of course today such a defence holds no legal water. If I murder someone, the jury is unlikely to be swayed as to my innocence if I suggest that God wanted and directed me to carry out that murder. So let’s let God off the hook for Acts of Man, even if humans were inspired by God setting a bad example, summed up by that old chestnut, “do as I say, not as I do”. God may say “Thou shalt not kill”, but God’s own track record matches anything Jack-the-Ripper accomplished by many, many orders of magnitude over and above Jack, the serial killer.

We have humans killed by Unintentional Acts of Man:

Friendly fire is one such term, ditto collateral damage. It’s quite apparent from reading the newspaper or watching the evening news on TV that human related accidents cause the death of other innocent humans. A driver has a heart attack, loses control of his vehicle which slams into another car killing the occupants. A hunter shoots at what he assumes is a deer only to discover it’s a fellow hunter he shot by accident. It’s not a difficult assignment to come up with dozens upon dozens of accidental death due to some human error or unintended scenario unfolding, like that cigarette butt tossed out the window which starts a bushfire which goes out of control and ultimately kills dozens. The issue arises; we know why Hercules or Superman can’t come to the rescue, but why doesn’t an all-powerful deity, believed by the multitudes to exist, come and save the day? Doesn’t the deity, say God, care for the innocents? Or perhaps the multitudes are mistaken and God has no more reality than Hercules or Superman. If the former, God doesn’t come out of the situation smelling like a rose, that’s for sure. If the latter, the multitudes need to engage their brain into forward gear and question their beliefs, rather than have it idling in neutral, ever unquestioning.

We have humans killed by Intentional Acts of Man:

Though God ultimately has control over the actions of humans; God could argue that because of man’s free will, He shouldn’t get involved or be held accountable, even though parents are morally accountable for the actions of their children, and aren’t we, allegedly, God’s children? That analogy aside, though God probably thought it was none of His business, should He have really turned a blind eye towards what was to unfold in August 1945 at Nagasaki and Hiroshima? And what about the innocents caught up in the events of 9/11? What about tens of thousands of similar, but less memorable happenings like intervening before Jack-the-Ripper ripped? Again, God probably said it’s none of my doing; I’m not going to get involved. But, would such an attitude jive with all of those loving, kindness, compassionate attributes so noted and logged in the Bible? 

We have humans killed by their own stupidity: The Darwin Award:

Many a human has ended his or her own life prematurely through sheer stupidity, forgetfulness, negligence, and similar concepts. There are a whole series of books on what’s titled the “Darwin Awards” – those who benefit humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool and thus not passing on their stupidity genes to the next generation. Some people are their own worst enemy, accidents waiting to happen. While we’ve probably all experienced an ‘oops’ moment, some ‘oops’ are fatal ‘oops’. Now the question is should God save you from your own stupidity? Whatever your answer, God’s clearly answered that philosophical issue in the negative since people do die prematurely because of their own stupidity. Humans have a far better track record saving or rescuing people from their own stupidity – in the nick of time – than any deity.

Conclusion:

By way of final explanations, either 1) God does not exist or has left the building for parts unknown; 2) God doesn’t give a damn which suggests He isn’t compassionate or merciful, etc.; 3) God plays favourites which also implies He’s not merciful, etc. to all equally. It’s also statistically improbable that only those who were the losers in every natural or human related disaster deserved, in God’s eyes, to burn, baby, burn, and every ‘winner’ was a saint in human skin. When it comes to allowing even dictating the premature deaths of God’s children, well, God’s a god-awful parent! And this is the God you want to snuggle up to in heaven? If God really doesn’t have these positive attributes (mercy, compassion, etc.) then it illustrates that the Bible is full of it, and I don’t have to elaborate or spell out what “it” is.

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!