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We’ll see if we can make it short and quick for today’s Disservice. God has a lot of people who claim to speak for him and his will (see the mentally ill). It’s like certain people happen to have a holy transceiver installed and others, like myself most decidedly do not. I mean when I talk like my imaginary friend is watching over me – my friends make that “keep the freaky-delusional guy happy smile” while someone covertly calls for the nice men in white coats to come get me.
But if you’re wired for God it’s fine:
“Simply put, we did not come up with the idea of God. He came up with the idea of us.
God created you, and me, and all that the eye can see. According to this verse in Jeremiah, He knew us before we ever knew Him. He knew who we were, before our mother’s knew who we were. And depending on your interpretation of this verse and many others in the Bible, it might just be the case that God knows how our lives will pan out long before we know it. He may know the decisions we make before we make them. He may know that we’re going to be “a prophet to the nations.” He may know what our next job will be. Shoot, He may even know what our calling in life is.
Think about it…so many of us are trying to figure out our lives–where to go next, what to do next, who will be in our lives and the like. Maybe, God knows these things all along. And maybe, He wants to tell us that we’re set apart, […]”
Like really, really? – This is some grade A, finely ground, delusional crap being finger-painted on the walls over there and it is *okay*? This isn’t reasoned argument, deep introspection or anything resembling rational thought. This is verbal wanking for jesus why it scares the piss out of me is because is soooooo chillingly prevalent in the blogosphere. Admittedly, it (the jebus-babble) serves as a excellent tell highlighting where the reality challenged are and delineating the rationality free zones, a meagre comfort in he towering shadow of blissfully ignorant religious stupidity.
I’m getting to the topic at hand soon, gentle readers, I just need to point out the crazy as I see it to in order to frame what the title of this post hints at namely, the neat concept of Eternal Sin (ba ba buuuuuuum!).
Jesus saves! Hold and accept jebus in your heart and you will enter heaven… blah blah blah…. Oh wait… you there the atheist looking type, you get to burn in hell *forever* why?? Here’s why :
- Mark 3:28-30: “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven all their sins and all the blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin. He said this because they [the Pharisees] were saying, ‘He has an evil spirit’.”
- Matthew 12:30-32: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, people will be forgiven every sin and blasphemy. But the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”
- Luke 12:8-10: “I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God. But he who disowns me before men will be disowned before the angels of God. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.
Oh shit, there I go, now I’ve done it. You see kind readers, I’ve been a bad atheist. No, I mean it, a really bad atheist. My irredeemable crime? – here it comes… *holds breath….tension so thick you can cut it with a bad cliche.*
I have said (and shall reiterate here) and meant the following statement:
“The holy ghost is fictional character at best and is a big poopy-head”
Whoa there, that wins me eternal damnation. Don’t you feel the kindness and the loving of the christian god? I know I do. What kind of horrible fucking being demands blind devotion or else its a permanent lake of fire vacation for you? Him and his brand of “Justice”” can go frack themselves sideways, thank you very much.
Eternal damnation is immoral in any case, especially when you hand get out hell free cards for everything else. Mass murderer? Repent and accept jebus, go to heaven. Serial rapist and child molester? Repent and accept jebus, go to heaven. Torture cats for fun? Repent and accept jebus, go to heaven.
Frack heaven and frack the despicable “morality” that supposedly gets you there. It’s topsy-turvy bullshit at its very best; I get to burn forever for calling a ghost “poopy” and Ted Bundy after finishing gnoshing on somone’s liver, once saved, is in heaven with his 72 and half virgins (or raisins, depending on translation).
This notion of eternal damnation, lets lump it into the correct category and call it religious morality, is fractally stupid. To the rational mind religious morality is bug-fuck nutz. It is also a maddening splinter punched into my cerebral-cortex as I witness the deluded start dropping these religious bags of spoor into a conversation not realizing the implications of their delusional shit-festooned beliefs.
And thus endeth the sermon. Have a good week folks.
I love it when people try to use their putrid magic books to say that they have a strong basis for their morality and ethical outlook. Of course its mostly these same people who don’t actually read the bible to see what it actually says. For your pleasure and edification a handy infographic on Christian Marriage.
So, when religious people ask me, as an atheist, on where I get my morality from I can happily say, not from the same place *you* do. Mill, Kant are good places to start for rational moral thinking, finish with Lakoff and Singer. :)
Hey I need some help eroding the church/state separation. Lets ask the experts!
I’m not really sure what is so shit-hot about the attitudes and conventions of the Dark Ages, but Harper and his government have decided to fecklessly dive into the land of pants-on-head stupid and establish a official government bureau of “Religious Freedom”. Let’s be clear, not something useful like an office sponsoring freedom FROM religion, so sorry Rishma of Pakistan, you still get be sentenced to death for allegedly burning pages from a magic book. Because, obviously we need MORE religion in the world because rational thought is too fucking hard to deal with.
“The federal government’s long-awaited Office of Religious Freedom will be unveiled soon, officials say, after months of delays caused by difficulty in finding the right person to head the office.
The new body, which will be housed within the Department of Foreign Affairs, was expected to be up and running earlier this year.
But a senior government official told CBC News that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has had a hard time finding someone to fill the role of ambassador to head up the office. Two people who were approached ultimately turned the post down for logistical and personal reasons.?
Reasons why? Because being head of the Canadian christian god brigade overseas is not appealing. I’m really flabbergasted at my government right now. I’m imaging that in some meeting some wonk pops this ass-blister of a suggestion and throws it out there –
“Hey, you know that separation of church and state thing, its dumb, lets set up an office and get the government officially involved in delusional religious shit”. Ohh the meetings goes quiet. “But where are we going to get the money?” says Economic Wonk, our resident member of brain trust of turdistan says, “oh, well we closed a bunch of science and research down there is plenty of money saved from that…”.
And then there was cabinet/Harper approval. Yes, lets close down scientific research on one hand and fund the promotion of stale religious brain-flatulence from the bronze age. Brilliant! How can we lose? It is astonishing that people voted for people that actually endorse this sort of thinking.
“Some supporters of the idea have grown frustrated with the long wait. The $5-million office was first announced during the May 2011 election campaign as a centrepiece of the government’s foreign policy.”
A vesitgal bone thrown at the dumb-as-dirt religious value voters that worked. Apparently jebus said lower corporate tax rates so we can screw the rest of society over. To my idjit right of centre commentators, did you notice that you only get lip-service paid to your nuttily-regressive ‘social conservative” goals all the while the economic conservatives who hold the real power happily continue to gut the bastions of the social democratic state? You think getting screwed over would become tiresome after the nth time, apparently you thought in 2011, *this* time it would be different.
Bhatti argues the new ambassador must be objective.
“The person shouldn’t be one-sided,” he said. “He doesn’t focus on the one religion, or one persecution. He will treat every religion equally and give his recommendation to the foreign office and government regarding truth and reality.”
I don’t even know what this means. But I think I would be a good candidate for the job. I all religions the same, with contempt, would this make me a good candidate for the job? Probably not since the ability to think clearly is not selected for when trying to get a job within a religion.
“As CBC NEWS reported last year, internal Foreign Affairs documents showed nearly all of the panellists who participated in a closed-door consultation with Foreign Affairs last fall in Ottawa were drawn from Western religions, primarily Christianity. Few Muslims were in attendance and there were no Muslim panellists.
Arvind Sharma, a Canadian scholar of religion, has been carefully monitoring the government’s plans, and says the idea presents a great opportunity for Canada on the world stage.
But the McGill University professor warns that’s only if Canada avoids promoting proselytization.”
Yep, Canadian Christians for Christ, sponsored by the secular government of Canada? *sigh* Canada is a secular democracy and really needs to axe this crumby idea.
Giving government support to mythology is stupid and needs to stop before even more people get that idea that religion is an still acceptable choice in the 21st century.
You would think that after your Dad has been thoroughly trashed by making bogus claims you would, oh…I dunno… learn from his mistakes and not repeat them? Frak the facts, (creationist SOP btw) lets get the good word out there accuracy be damned.
“Do you believe in god?”
“No.”
“Well, do you believe in love?”
“Sure.”
“Then you must believe in god, as god is love”
“Wha…?”
I’ve heard the ‘god is love’ bit quite a number of times, but never as a proof for its deistic existence. When it is merely an assertion about a god already presumed to exist, it is easy enough to show that ‘god is love’ is an absolutely ludicrous notion. One merely needs to point to deeds/positions attributed to the god in question that cannot be seen as loving. In the case of christianity, the bible helps us out immensely with tales of murder, rape, slavery, genocide, and human sacrifice, all in the name of their god, to make this a very easy task. In addition, one could also point to the innumerable atrocities committed by those closest to god. Indeed, the degree of horror believers can enact seems directly related to the level of zeal they possess. Or, if one took ‘god is love’ to be a part of omni-benevolence, then one could point to the problem of evil to show how god cannot exist. But in this conversation, all this doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t work because a particular god has not been identified. The only characteristic mentioned is that ‘god is love’. To be sure, the person who presented this argument to me had a specific god in mind. If they were to have gone so far as to start describing other attributes of their god, then the thoughts in the previous paragraph would surely destroy their position. But that’s not the point. While the posited syllogism is vague, maybe even a bit flaky, if it works, then the belief in god is validated and the little details about the surrounding nature of god (everything he is that isn’t solely love) can be hashed out later. The important thing is that god has been proven and all us atheists are just being fussy about superfluous factoids.
The thing is, the details may be superfluous, but that these details exist at all is not. If one wants to say that ‘god’ is exactly synonymous with ‘love’, then the concept of ‘god’ is completely useless. There is no reason for there to be two words when one will do. And as ‘love’ is a much more flexible term (how weird would it be -even for theists – to replace the word love and say something like “I’m deeply in god with you, darling”), the term ‘god’ ought to be discarded. Of course, the theist resists this, not only because they don’t want to give up their delusion, but also because, at some level, they are aware of the little dishonesty in the assertion ‘god is love’.
It is dishonesty in omission. No theist ever would ever say ‘god is love and only love’. If they did, as I showed last paragraph, ‘god’ would be rendered meaningless. What they are not saying is “god is love and some other things I’m trying to illegitimately sneak into this argument so I don’t have to go through the impossible task of justifying those extra attributes.” Even if the only thing they wanted to add was ‘god is love and a sentient entity that exists outside of humanity’, they would be right back where they started, with no evidence, no proof, and no reason to think that god exists. Nothing addresses always-unmentioned second half. But theists are never that honest, least of all to themselves.
But hey, I was wrong that one time before. It could happen again. What if some theist comes up with some brilliant argument that refutes what I just said, so brilliant that I cannot answer those refutations? Does ‘god is love’ work then? Not hardly. Consider an exercise in consistency.
Do you believe that the sea exits? You do? Great! That means you must believe in Poseidon, for Poseidon IS the sea. The tides reflect his breathing, the waves his mood. Thus, we can learn a lot about Poseidon just by looking at the sea. As any seafarer will tell you, conditions out on the briny sea can are uncertain at best, displaying how temperamental Poseidon is. Therefore it is always good to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon before any travel by sea, in order to secure safe passage.
Are you convinced? Will you now pray to Poseidon? Not a chance. Why? Because you just can’t attach a real life thing to an imagined being and have it pop into existence, that’s why. If this method worked, you would have to believe in Apollo because you believe in the sun, Thor because you believe in lightning, Gazunga because you believe in cheese, and Eros because you believe in love. Wait! What was that? Love was for that christian god, wasn’t it? Yup, this line of reasoning can bring into existence multiple deities for the same real life phenomenon.
In fact, it can pop into being an infinite amount of gods, an infinite amount of whom require that they be the only god. That either means that this line of reasoning is necessarily incoherent, or it shows that each god concept has an equal chance of being true, which, in this case, is literally infinitesimally small.
‘God is love’, like all such fanciful tripe (eg. ‘God is beauty’, ‘God is truth’, ‘God is justice’, etc) either renders god meaningless and the idea ought to be discarded, or it is dishonest and the idea ought to be discarded. Even on the minuscule chance that I’m wrong on this, the same method could then be used to validate an infinite number of mutually-exclusive gods and the idea ought to be discarded. No matter what, theists using this line are not being deep, spiritual, other-worldly, or mystical. They are just being wrong.
I do love what the commitment to mythology does to people. Religion distorts empathy and reason and allows bigots like the pastor featured in this clip to get away with spewing more than a few spitefully atrocious statements. It is funny though for a religion that often claims to represent absolute morality we observe that claims are presented such as: love thy neighbour. Note closely there is no “but only if they are heterosexual…” is not included anywhere in that phrase.
The heinous nature of christianity continues to stain our history with its bigotry and hate. We should do ourselves a favour and opt out as soon as possible.
Like to watch Christians tie themselves in knots trying to explain/justify sending infants to burn forever? Yah..me too.
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