Saturday, May 24, 2008

What is this God of which you speak?

I'm an atheist. I look around at the suffering take place everywhere in the world, and I have to admit I'm shocked every time I hear some news agency give a percentage of people - in the US, for one example - who actually believe in God and go to Church. And then we get radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity invoking God's name ...and I just have to shake my head.

This is what brought on today's comments, an article in the New York Times about some Jews defending the Reverend Hagee who said the following:

In a reference to the Book of Jeremiah, whose author predicts a scattering of the Jewish people but saying God would bring them back to the promised land, Mr. Hagee says in the sermon: "How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."


and there's another fascinating blurb in that article:

"Viewing Hitler as acting completely outside of God's plan is to suggest that God was powerless to stop the Holocaust, a position quite unacceptable to any religious Jew or Christian," the rabbi said.


So, according to these religious folks...yes, God is all powerful, he could have stopped the genocide of WWII if he'd wanted to.

Since he didn't, obviously he didnt want to. He wanted millions of people to suffer, suffer, suffer on a daily basis, horribly, until they died.

But Jews have been the "Chosen People" of God since Moses' time, haven't they? Like 2,000 years or so? And what does God do for his "Chosen People"? Let's them stay in slavery under the Egyptians..has Moses lead them into the Wilderness for 40 years...all that crap... Why? Why?

First off, if God created everyone and everything on the planet, why does he "choose" the Jewish people over everyone else he created, anyway? But then he has a habit of slamming one of his creations and lifting up another, doesn't he? Cain and Abel have to give him sacrifices and he likes Abel's and doesn't like Cain's, and are you telling me this "all-knowing" God wouldn't know that Cain was going to kill Abel?

Then we've got the Black liberation movement of the Reverent Wright and others, who state that Jesus was black. Therefore, God must be black, and God has seen them through slavery and the "long night of racism."

And I'm thinking to myself, again, what kind of God is this that these people are worshiping as their own??? A God that "sees them through" slavery instead of stopping that slavery before it starts? A God who sees them through the "long night of racism" instead of helping his chosen people by, oh, I don't know, snapping his fingers and putting the blacks on top and the whites underneath. Their all-powerful black God couldn't do this?

But oh, you may think. God lets them suffer all that time, thousands of years, millions of people suffering, so that now, today, the tables could be turned and blacks get to be on top and the whites get to be underneath and now there will a thousand years of suffering in the other direction.

That's humam nature... but is that God's nature??? To let his "chosen people" suffer for four thousand years...individual human beings suffering and dying, to make the revenge all the sweeter when it finally does come?

Then of course we've got the Muslims, who stone people to death, and set off suicide bombs without compunction. Yes, that's obscene, but don't forget a lot of innocent people were murdred by the IRA in England - oh those Protestants and Catholics, both of whom ostensibly worship God - only they didn't go as far as commit suicide as well...

What else is there?

The US is horror struck when the uneducated people in various countries cheered when Hurricane Katrina struck and destroyed the city and killed a thousand people. "God's will," they say, and believe it.

And what do Christians like the Rev Falwell say? "God destroyed New Orleans to punish the rest of the country for letting gays in the military." Something like that.

And there again... what kind of a God do these people worship? God, who created everything (let nothing be created that is not created by me, is that right?) hates gays - whom he created - and because gays are allowed into the US military, he destroys...not the gays in the military...but a whole city and a thousand innocent people - many of whom were not gay?

Where is the logic behind that?

Where is the compassion?

I could go on and on and on about this.

Frankly, here's the scoop. I don't believe God exists, and if he did actually exist, I'd refuse to worship him, because he's clearly a psychotic individual who enjoys nothing more than watching his creations suffer and die.

That's what it is, you know, in all likelhood (if you actually believe in God). Just as we have television and theater and watch this entertainment (and how many people like to watch all that suffering on display, eh?), so does God, or the Gods, whatever... sitting in the clouds above us, enjoying the suffering, laughing at the people who continue to believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary that God exists or is "just and merciful"...

Let's face it, people. There is no God. There's just us. The sooner we accept that, the sooner all this religious hatred can end and there might be some peace in the world.

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