Then why call him God?

Oh, man. What a past few months it's been. I am still here. I have not forgotten about my blog! I've been extremely busy! It's getting better. I'll post more soon, but want to share this gem:



Isn't that the truth? It really is the quick and easy guide to God. I know, I know, logic hurts. It's painful, but it's gotta be done. Theists will go down the arguments in this chart, and conclude that "God works in mysterious ways." Well, that's just bullshit. If he is almighty, all knowing and all good, working mysteriously serves no point. It is just a cop out that theists give God; they try to pretend that all the pain and suffering is part of a Master Plan. God is all knowing, all powerful and all good? Ok, fine. Take a look at this picture:



Look at it. Really look at it. If you are a theist, understand that the God you believe in sees this too. He knows about it, and all the other horrors of the world.



He sees this too. He knows about it, and he can change it, but he doesn't. He is so powerful and so loving, that he does nothing.

If he was lonely and created us, he could have made us to be completely perfect. He could have designed the world in any number of ways that would have not made suffering and evil possible. If you had the power God has, wouldn't you abolish suffering? Or would you keep it around, just to be mysterious, because it works into some nebulous Master Plan concept?

If that's God's plan, it sucks. I don't care how powerful and loving he is--if this is the best he can do, God is either not very powerful or a complete sadistic asshole. Under what circumstances is it ok to allow these things to occur? None.

If there were a man who knew about his child being repeatedly stabbed, for example, and this man could put a stop to the stabbing and immediately heal all his wounds, but he just... didn't... we would be outraged. The morality is the same. God doesn't get his own custom morality unless you want to believe that morality is relative. But since God's law is eternal, unchanging and just, I doubt many theists believe that morality is relative (and for the record, I don't either, but for different reasons).

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God? - Epicurus

Does your ferret have religion?

Do you ever wonder why your ferret doesn't have faith? Why your dog doesn't have religion? Why your cat doesn't give a damn about church, morality and whether or not he was created? Has your fish ever hosted a Bible study?

When I was a child, I couldn't understand why animals didn't get married. Even as young as 5, I knew that having babies outside of marriage was wrong. I didn't know why, but this dogma had already been pounded into my head. There seemed to be a double standard: one cannot have babies outside of marriage, but animals do it every day and animals were loved and praised and protected. But that nice woman down the street who never married the father of her child? What a harlot!! So why do animals get a free pass? Why can they fornicate with reckless abandon and still rank higher than the human members of society when they all do the exact same thing?

It was this same time that I wanted my Kermit the Frog doll to make an honest woman out of me, and so in a very small and private ceremony, we wed. I didn't want to marry Kermit because I felt we loved each other but because I thought our relationship should be made proper--yes, I was brainwashed early.

One day I asked my mother why it was that animals could joyfully do the very things that we Christians were forbidden from doing. Because humans have souls, she explained, and animals didn't (never mind that humans are animals too--I wouldn't realize this for another 20 years). At the time, this made perfect sense. Animals didn't have a soul to blemish, so they could rape, murder and pillage each other and still be innocent. "Dog be dog" my mother would say, when my dog would mangle a kitty or hump another dog or gleefully spread his legs and lick his balls with gusto.

Without realizing it, the religious community embraces this kind of thinking and creates a giant moral conundrum: morality has become subjective. No longer is the morality of the act itself judged, yet the morality of the act is entirely dependent on what species you are. Morality, dependent on biology? Heaven forbid! I thought morality was God's Standard, unchangeable and perfect. How, then, can it be dependent on what species you are?

The other major problem is that no one asks for proof of the soul. What is this soul thing? Can it be seen, touched, felt, heard, measured? No. Like everything else in religion, it must be taken on faith. It is another one of those dogmas that you just decide to believe in it, rather than have a reason to believe in it. Why do we have souls, and all the other animals don't? What makes us so friggin' special?

Nothing. That's my answer, anyway. Doesn't mean we're not awesome (we are!), but do we really need to make shit up to have a basis of morality? I wish the religious would stop and think about how suspiciously human God is. God thinks this and that, likes this and that, hell--he even looks like us! How cool! Somehow God always manages to believe in the same things you do, and those people over there who believe differently from you... well, they've just got it all wrong. They don't understand God. They are bad, evil people who willfully reject God's Truth.

The main thing that separates humans from the rest of the animals is our brain: our brain is uniquely capable of rational and complex thought. So capable, in fact, that we are the only species able to believe in shit that doesn't actually exist! We can also communicate immaterial things like concepts, ideas, and philosophies that certainly do exist even though they aren't material. The bad stuff happens when we diverge from ideas based off of observations of fact and jump into the crazy world of ideas based on It Would Be Really Neat If This Were Real, or I Don't Know All the Answers So God Did It!

In my opinion the "I Don't Know All the Answers So God Did It" concept is what birthed religion. Over time religion has become exceedingly diverse, and Weird Shit gets compounded onto Older Weird Shit and before long you have a Really Big Ball of Weird Shit but It Must Be True Because It's So Old and Complicated!!!! I remember when I first told my sister that I was questioning religion. It really freaked her out. How dare I presume to know more than what the Church had taught me? "The Church is over 2,000 years old--I figure it knows what it's doing," were her exact words. *facepalm* Neither the age nor complexity of a religion has anything to do with the factuality of its claims. Christianity is by no means the oldest religion, nor the first. There are a number of sociopolitical reasons that the world's major religions have survived this long, but again, that's another post.

My point to this whole rambling post is that humans are animals, and are unique in their ability to think complex thought. This ability leads to imagination and false logic as well as good logic; unfortunately it's the false logic (or lack of any logic) that has led to the invention of religion and imaginary deities. Our brains can work for us and against us. How do we fix this? We make sure that our logic, our beliefs, our investigations, our thoughts, our everything are rooted in FACTS of testable, observable phenomena. I'm not talking about being militantly scientific--although that would be awesome--but I'm talking about making sure that you have concrete reasons to believe in what you do. Investigate and challenge everything that you believe. I'm open to believing in anything, but the time to believe in something is when there is evidence for it and not before.

We don't have all the answers, but please, let's not Make Shit Up to solve mysteries. It's ok to say "I don't know, but I am working to find out."

Where does morality come from?

The answer to the above question is so utterly obvious to most people, yet there are some who insist that the Invisible Sky Daddy is the being who instituted ethics and morality, and without this morality we would immediately devolve into murdering one another for fun. The ones who believe that they could not hurt others without their faith in religion are the ones who really worry me.

In short, the answer to the above question is this: as humans, we generally don't dig it if someone murders us, rapes us, steals from us or burns our house to the ground. So as a society we have, over time, agreed to not do this to one another (because if I do it to you, you then can do it to me), and have decided to punish those who transgress anyway. We don't need God in order to understand this. We're not born understanding right and wrong--it comes as a result of being able to think and reason and understand that if I do this to that person, than he can turn around and do it to me, and I don't want that done to me, so I'd better not do that to him. This is the simplified idea of a society with law and order. Even animals do this.

But if you still believe that morality comes from God, then you must ask yourselves the next questions. Which God from which religion, and from which flavor of a particular religion? Is it Zeus you follow? Mithra? Jesus? Allah? Yahweh? If Christianity is your religion of choice, who is your leader?--Joseph Smith, Martin Luther, Benedict XVI? And if you've chosen Christianity, you need to justify why you've chosen one church over the other. If you've chosen Catholicism over Anglicanism, or Southern Baptist over Mormonism, it must be because you believe that your particular choice has it more right than any other. But why? Didn't you exercise your own intellect and come to that observation yourself? Either way, you still make some choices on morality based on your own reasoning.

Christopher Hitchens makes a rather simple and eloquent statement about the origin of morality, and I'm going to share it now.

"Answer me this if you think morality comes from the supernatural and we require celestial dictatorship permission for it. Name me a moral action committed by a believer, or a moral statement or an ethical statement uttered by one, that could not be made or uttered by a non-believer....If I was to ask anyone in this room, however, could they name a wicked action performed or a vile statement made by someone attributable only to their religious faith, there isn't a single person here who'd have to hesitate for a second in discovering what that was and saying it."

In addition to this idea, there could be volumes of books written on the many reasons why "God" is actually quite immoral, but that's a whole other post entirely (or several). What Hitchens successfully says is that if murder/theft/rape/etc is inherently wrong as prohibited by God, why can both a believer and non-believer agree on this? Why can obscure aboriginal tribes come to this conclusion without so much as hearing of Jesus or Allah or Yahweh? Because basic, fundamental morality is universal and a common desire to all human beings.