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The Devil Hypothesis
The motives of God
This is the ultimate blasphemy. Questioning the motives of God. You are allowed to ask any questions you want, except this one. This one is out of bounds, off limits, off the agenda for ever. One thing the writers of the Bible did understand about human nature was that man would never resist the temptation to eat of the tree of knowledge. We need no serpents to tell us to do it. It is human nature. Those who are not under the thumb, afraid of God, are free to ask the question.
What would a hypothetical supreme and perfect being want to do? Human motivations are easy to understand but they offer no clues as to how a god would act like. We want to get laid. We want children. We want riches, success, status. We have bodily urges to satisfy, such as hunger for food, and sensual pleasure to be obtained through stimulating our senses. What use has a supreme god for any of that? God has no penis, testicles, womb or taste buds. He has no rivals. He has nothing to be envious of, nothing to be jealous over, no need for spite. How can the creator of the universe be impressed with anything, take pleasure in anything, want for anything, need anything.
If you have shaped the nebulae, flung the islands of the Pacific across the face of the Earth, carved every contour of every living thing how can you take pleasure in beauty? How can you take pleasure in anything? How can you be motivated to care about anything? Are we really supposed to accept the idea that God has made us with freewill and put us here to be tempted in order to test the mettle of our souls that he made? What kind of a pervert is this God? Worship him? We would be better advised to seek to have him put in an asylum. If we found a man acting in this way to animals, putting them in danger then punishing them with eternal torment if they made a “bad” decision we would rightly consider him to be some kind of criminal psychopath.
Why does God the unchanging one tell men at different times about his different nature? My explanation is simple, everybody who claims to have heard the voice of God is mistaken. Prophets and false prophets alike. Those who tell of his jealousy and urge to commit genocide and those that hear her tell them to be lesbian bishops to glory the femininity of God the almighty mother. All of them mistaken, deluded or possibly charlatans.
Making mistakes is human, normal behaviour. How could a perfect god make mistakes? How could a god create a world and allow so much evil in it that he needed to destroy it by flood?
How could a perfect god make a world so corrupt that he would need to go down to it and be crucified? And how could a crucifixion solve anything - who or what was Jesus sacrificed to?
How faulty is this perfect god's telegraph service? He apparently mastered the art of talking from burning bushes and pillars of smoke and the like long ago and yet he manages to get his message garbled so often. Prophets contradict each other. False prophets put about a different story and yet the god that can raise the dead, part the seas (make the seas!) cannot manage to get them to shut their blaspheming mouths. How can so many millions of people hold onto such ideas and defend them with their lives? All religions have adherents prepared to martyr themselves.
Lindow Man |
A close neighbour of mine (in space, not time) got himself garroted and thrown into a lake to placate his gods, hundreds of years before the first Christians came this way. The capacity of man to hear the voices of gods has existed in all cultures, the depth of their feeling is totally irrelevant to the truth or other status of those messages. As long as people are prepared to believe the stories of other people and accept them on good faith because they recognize the sincerity of the deluded prophet then we are likely to be stuck with religion. |
If there really was a God would there be any religion?
I see the existence of different religions as being excellent proof that there is no god. A jealous god who cared about the beliefs of his people would not allow there to be competing religions. An all powerful god could make false religion an impossibility. Why would any god allow some people to know the truth and other people to know an untruth just as sincerely? People are martyred for conflicting versions of the god-given truth. That is simply bizarre behaviour that cannot be explained in the nature of any god worthy of worship. If there was a god that was perfect and powerful he would either not communicate with any people or he would communicate with all people. How can any other behaviour be explained? Why would the ruler of the universe have a chosen people? That is totally inexplicable and out of character for an all-powerful deity. Of course it is totally understandable behaviour for an imaginary tribal god.
Why Pray? Why Worship?
If there is a god who made the entire universe he's obviously very powerful and very wise. How could he not know what we think? So what is the point of telling him? Surely he must know and understand what we think better than we do ourselves. We cannot express our views and needs to God better than he already knows, by praying surely all we do is run the risk of lying or misrepresenting the truth and our feelings. What possible good could that do?
Prayers and hymns express sentiments created by other people. They are not ours. In reciting them (obeying requests to recite them) in many cases we would be parroting words without understanding them, revealing insincerity or lying to God. In what way could that be a good idea?
Is God all powerful and yet at the same time shallow and insecure so that he needs to be worshipped? What is worship? What does it do? Do we worship anything or anybody else? No. In the real world worship is rightly regarded as inappropriate, unhealthy and juvenile behaviour. Having heroes and people to look up to is considered healthy only up to a point, past that point it is rightly regarded as damaging to both the idol and the idolizer and anybody who is idolized who is seen to demand idolization is rightly regarded as a kook deserving vicious ridicule. So why is it OK for God to demand worship? And why would he feel the need for it? None of the “explanations” I have been offered come across as anything other than pathetic excuses.
Religion is just a whole series of pathetic excuses for doing ridiculous things.