When I was a little kid, I took what I was told at face value and didn’t question it.
Magical thinking is normal for little kids. By about age 7 you’re supposed to have grown out of that shit though - like it’s normal to still enjoy the concept of magic, but there comes a point when you should have a pretty intuitive understanding that it’s fiction.
For some reason we give religion a pass.
Some old dude in a dress raving about how ghosts built the pyramids is instantly recognized as crazy; but some old dude raving about how the chief master ghost shat out our entire universe in a week is… somehow worthy of respect?
So, my religion is no religion: I believe what can be tested and verified.
The most concise test to disprove the notion of God is one of simple logic: the Epicurean paradox, which recognizes the mythology of God being composed of three core pillars: that he is 100% good (complete absence of evil), 100% powerful (his will is our reality), and 100% omniscient (he knows everything about everything)… but despite those three pillars, it takes no time at all to recognize evil behavior all around us, and for evil to be able to exist in our reality, one of those pillars must always fall.
He either doesn’t know evil is happening in his universe, is powerless to stop it, or is okay with it.
Every single time a religious person attempts to address the Epicurean paradox, the just shuffle the pillars to fill in the gap left open by the missing third (feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Anyway, it became clear that at the very least, my religion wasn’t being honest about the nature of its own god, and that realization was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I think for some people the scale of God simply doesn’t compute, which is why old man with big beard image persists. Look at the size of our galaxy, and the size of the universe as a whole. If any being was the creator of such a vast and complex universe as ours, that being would be to us like we are to a “Hello world” script.
The analogy is flawed, but that is what we are saying if we believe in a being capable of creating our universe, defining its laws and bending them to create us. We could not truly begin to comprehend such a being, and largely we are left to our own. However, if you believe, then this being does care about us in some way. And it has shown us this through inspiring humans to share its path for our improvement.
That is the reason I believe in the teachings of the Christ. The path of loving your enemies, of caring for everyone as one would your own family, forgiveness, that is the path to a better world, revealed to us through a man and his story. I am unable to fully live up to such ideals, but like Data says, the struggle yields its own rewards. Those who take such ideas to heart are worthy in the eyes of the creator, because if all people were such, there would be little suffering in our world. We have the means to reduce our suffering, but we choose not to. God could, remove it for us, but then we will not become the free and good beings we are meant to be.
You don’t need God to have such ideals as the Christ demonstrated, but I find such ideas so much better than any of the alternatives, that I suspect they have divine origin. And even if they don’t, if I follow them, then I will contribute to making the world better regardless. God could take away my struggle and suffering, but that would leave me still flawed and unable to improve, and so it would be for all humanity as well.
(feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Muslim here and sure (I’ve wanted to try this for a while now): The criteria for the first pillar are arbitrary. What’s being proposed is that a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen. You could argue then that the act of creating humans was evil, which would be logically consistent, and in that case my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.
When I was a little kid, I took what I was told at face value and didn’t question it.
Magical thinking is normal for little kids. By about age 7 you’re supposed to have grown out of that shit though - like it’s normal to still enjoy the concept of magic, but there comes a point when you should have a pretty intuitive understanding that it’s fiction.
For some reason we give religion a pass.
Some old dude in a dress raving about how ghosts built the pyramids is instantly recognized as crazy; but some old dude raving about how the chief master ghost shat out our entire universe in a week is… somehow worthy of respect?
So, my religion is no religion: I believe what can be tested and verified.
The most concise test to disprove the notion of God is one of simple logic: the Epicurean paradox, which recognizes the mythology of God being composed of three core pillars: that he is 100% good (complete absence of evil), 100% powerful (his will is our reality), and 100% omniscient (he knows everything about everything)… but despite those three pillars, it takes no time at all to recognize evil behavior all around us, and for evil to be able to exist in our reality, one of those pillars must always fall.
He either doesn’t know evil is happening in his universe, is powerless to stop it, or is okay with it.
Every single time a religious person attempts to address the Epicurean paradox, the just shuffle the pillars to fill in the gap left open by the missing third (feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Anyway, it became clear that at the very least, my religion wasn’t being honest about the nature of its own god, and that realization was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I think for some people the scale of God simply doesn’t compute, which is why old man with big beard image persists. Look at the size of our galaxy, and the size of the universe as a whole. If any being was the creator of such a vast and complex universe as ours, that being would be to us like we are to a “Hello world” script.
The analogy is flawed, but that is what we are saying if we believe in a being capable of creating our universe, defining its laws and bending them to create us. We could not truly begin to comprehend such a being, and largely we are left to our own. However, if you believe, then this being does care about us in some way. And it has shown us this through inspiring humans to share its path for our improvement.
That is the reason I believe in the teachings of the Christ. The path of loving your enemies, of caring for everyone as one would your own family, forgiveness, that is the path to a better world, revealed to us through a man and his story. I am unable to fully live up to such ideals, but like Data says, the struggle yields its own rewards. Those who take such ideas to heart are worthy in the eyes of the creator, because if all people were such, there would be little suffering in our world. We have the means to reduce our suffering, but we choose not to. God could, remove it for us, but then we will not become the free and good beings we are meant to be.
You don’t need God to have such ideals as the Christ demonstrated, but I find such ideas so much better than any of the alternatives, that I suspect they have divine origin. And even if they don’t, if I follow them, then I will contribute to making the world better regardless. God could take away my struggle and suffering, but that would leave me still flawed and unable to improve, and so it would be for all humanity as well.
Muslim here and sure (I’ve wanted to try this for a while now): The criteria for the first pillar are arbitrary. What’s being proposed is that a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen. You could argue then that the act of creating humans was evil, which would be logically consistent, and in that case my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.