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6月17日 Atheist AlmightyIf God ever takes a vacation and puts me in charge for a while, here are a few changes I would make in the world.
People would still have free will, but I wouldn't be so laissez-faire, which is to say, non-existent.
I would turn all guns into pogo sticks, and all bullets into jelly beans. If you eat too many jelly beans, you can work off the extra calories on your pogo stick.
If you don't care for jelly beans, you can help yourself to a tuna sandwich.
Every time someone pushes a button to fire a deadly missile, a jet of water will squirt in their faces. This would be a nice gentle reminder that firing missiles is naughty.
All those huge metal tanks would be turned into plastic and shrunk down so kids could play with them. They can still play with them as adults, since there won't be any real tanks to kill people.
Anyone who wants to stab another person will certainly have free will to pick up a knife and try to kill their intended victim, but as soon as they try, but I will create an invisible shield to protect my earthly children, every single one of them, all 6 billion, and they will be safe.
Anyone who tries to do anything more than hug you or kiss you or cuddle you or give you gentle nuggies will be immediately tickled by me in their most vulnerable spot.
So you better not try to stick a shiv into anyone, or I will tickle you.
After a while, people won't be able to hurt you except by calling you names, and then you can say "sticks and stones will break my bones" and then everyone will get tired of being meanies.
I will free all non-violent offenders from prison. I will read the minds of everyone on death row and free all unfairly convicted innocent people.
All destructive hurricanes will be turned into gentle rains. Gentle rains get the job done just as well.
All tsunamis will be redirected toward Malibu and turned into gnarly waves for surfer boys and surfer girls.
I will write a really good Bible, with fascinating provocative stories. No boring lists, no ridiculous rules, no moral atrocities, no hateful propaganda. Anyone who refuses to read my Bible gets tickled.
I will cure AIDS and cancer immediately, forthwith, and forevermore.
Every disease which brings nothing but suffering will be jettisoned, never to return.
I will feed every single one of my children, and give them clothing to wear, books to read, decent teachers to enlighten their minds, and decent parents to love them unconditionally.
I am the Lord thy God. I will have no other Gods before me. If you worship another God, I won't invite you to my birthday party. So there.
There will be no more drought or starvation. We really don't need anymore of that. I really don't know why God invented drought and starvation.
Everybody can live to the age of 150 if they like, and enjoy good health. Death won't be terrifying anymore. It will be like a peaceful retirement at the end of a long happy life.
With all of the prosperity and all of the trillions of dollars saved because war is a thing of the past, people can afford to make better rockets and space stations. When Earth gets too crowded, people can live on Mars, which will overflow with milk and honey.
Evil people in power will come down with terrible explosive diarrhea. Every time they exercise their free will in order to cheat or lie or kill, I will exercise my free will and give them explosive diarrhea. Soon enough, they will learn how to be nice again.
Eventually, governments and politicians and policemen and soldiers will become a thing of the past. People will get along fine, if only to avoid getting tickled or Montezuma's revenge.
All adolescent girls and boys will no longer get pimples. I hereby abolish pimples.
Any child who wants a puppy and a kitten, gets a puppy and a kitten. But you have to play with your pets, and feed them every day.
I won't take any interest in the Superbowl. You quarterbacks can pray for victory all you want, but it won't help. Only skill and talent can come to your aid, because I am just watching for the commercials.
Don't bother praying at all, in church or anywhere else. Use your extra time reading a book or writing a poem or taking a long walk. I already know that you want good health, a cool car, a nice home, someone to love, inner peace, an enjoyable career, and a pleasant neighborhood to raise your children in, so you really don't need to pray anymore. Fear not; I already have your backs.
I am omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, after all.
It's been a few years since I read the unholy bible all the way through, so I honestly don't recall if the phrase "free will" is ever used by god's holy ghost writers. I just happened to see the first half hour of Bruce Almighty, and it really astounded me when Morgan Freeman tells Jim Carrey that he cannot toy with free will. How truly ridiculous. I believe that the concept was invented out of a kind of desperation to explain god's silence and inactivity since fictional bible times. How nice of god to give us humans the gift of free will, pseudo-religious people say, because he didn't want us to be robots. Nonsense. Look at both old and new testaments, where god is active, visible, tangible, speaking to people, appearing as a burning bush or a pillar of smoke, where he lays down the most ridiculous rules covering significant and trivial behavior, where he punishes infractions not in the next life but in this one, where he preaches and teaches and heals the sick. So where has this god been for the last 2,000 years or so? Pseudo-religious people claim that god is still with us, everywhere, in complete control of our lives. I see no evidence of this at all. I think the notion of free will came about because religious people saw so much unexplained evil in the world, and continue to see it, and god is clearly not in control, nor does he seem to care. I wrote the above blog to gently satirize this desperate notion. Personally, I don't think life has to be easy all the time. A certain amount of suffering would make us grow and change for the better as humans. But tsunamis that wipe out 200,000 people in an afternoon and child molesters that rape and murder for years and years and never get caught? 9/11, the Shoah, mass extinctions? Clearly, these natural and man-made evils which have afflicted humankind for thousands of centuries show the absence, or the indifference, or the malevolence of god. I refuse to blame adam and eve for the evils in this world, and I refuse to believe that the state of this world and the state of humanity is god's "gift" to us. Of course humans have free will, but no god gave it to us. We can do whatever the heck we want, and sometimes we get punished, and sometimes we don't. Yes, it's possible that every injustice may be straightened out in the next life, but I find it hard to believe that god would be so ambiguous and ambivalent in this life and so perfect in the next. It all just seems like specious wishful thinking to me. The bible writers created the fictional character of god because they dislike humanity so intensely. Adam and Eve are punished for their intellectual curiosity. The tower of babel builders are punished for their artistic pretensions. I have no doubt that the people of the exodus existed, even if there was no exodus. Their constant whining and complaining and lusting after other gods makes perfect sense, but only if they have no real god to worship. If a real god had rescued them from Egypt, they wouldn't have dared to make that golden calf. If people had really seen jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, they would have had no doubt that he was the son of god, and jesus wouldn't have been so alone when he died. The bible stories only make sense as fiction; they only make sense if god is a fictional character. So how would people behave if god actually existed? Undoubtedly, no priests would molest children if they really feared eternal hellfire. Clearly, they do not fear hell; clearly, they don't believe god is watching their every move, or they would cut off their own dicks before touching a child. In his book called Justice, Dominick Dunne claims to believe in a higher power that rights all earthly wrongs in the next life. I am not picking on Dunne, but he represents the delusions of hundreds of millions of people who claim to have that belief even though their actions in this world make it blatantly clear they have no such faith at all. Because of the horrific thing that happened to his daughter (while god did nothing to stop it) and because of terribly unfair thing that happened to the man who killed her (while god did nothing to change it), Dunne has every reason to fight the unfairness of justice on this earth. But if he really believed that he would be reuninted with his daughter in heaven, and if he really believed that god would punish her murderer in the next world, I don't think he would put so much effort to attain justice in this one. Why do people cry when their loved ones die? Because they are dead. Would they cry if they really thought their loved ones were happily in heaven? No, they would rejoice. Why do fanatics rejoice when their loved ones blow themselves up in suicide bombings? Because they are insane. Why do so many pseudo-religionists support the death penalty, and why are so many anti-abortion? And why do they try to fight for these causes legally? Why don't they just sit in church and pray for god to execute criminals and stop abortions? Do they honestly think that god is on their side, and if he is, why doesn't he do the work for them? Clearly, these people have no faith in god at all, and they know full well that god isn't doing jack shit to serve their cause. If they truly believed in eternal hellfire, they wouldn't be in such a rush to kill criminals. If they truly believed in the sanctity of every human life, they would let god protect unborn children, they wouldn't execute anyone, and they wouldn't be so enthusiastic about sending young men off to die in wars. If god really existed, and if people really believed in him, that faith would be reflected in their actions, and not their empty words. So what are the statistics, and can they be trusted? Is it true that 90% of the human population believes in some sort of higher power? Even if that is accurate, even if people aren't lying to themselves or to the statistician, let's take a cold hard look at who these people are. Mostly ignorant, mostly uneducated, mostly brainwashed and indoctrinated into one culture and one religion, mostly uninterested in other ways of looking at the world, mostly devoid of intellectual curiosity. These are people that also believe in astrology, ufo abduction, and bigfoot, and they have no idea that the earth moves around the sun. Why should I be bothered by the great number of people who believe in things because they have never bothered to look further than their own shallow minds? Throughout human history, the dumbest ideas have been held by the most people for the longest periods of time, and the most brilliant ideas were formulated by one person, and this person was scorned and ridiculed for decades or centuries before the idea finally gained acceptance. Today, here and now, people still refuse to give up astrology, and people still refuse to accept evolution. If I was the only heathen on earth, that would give me pause, but since some of the most impressive thinkers on earth have made atheism and agnosticism logical, I feel quite assured that I am not blind, foolish, or insane. I trust in the minority opinion. The majority opinion still rules, because it is a whole lot less terrifying for most people to believe in god. I look at the world, and I see its many horrors, and I truly fear the idea that some god is "in control" of such a world. I know that Tolkien, Eliot, and Lewis were all bright, educated, well-read men. So how can I account for their faith? Wishful thinking, I suppose. If they are right, and I find myself in hell after death, I will send them each an apology for my disbelief. People who live for their faith? They have my grudging respect, as long as they don't kill for their faith, and as long as they are genuinely good people, non-judgmental and non-hypocritical. You have to live for something. Personally, I prefer books and movies. People say I live a lonely life, but my books and movies are real. Living for god is living for an illusion, but we all need our illusions, we all need to imagine our lives have some value. For many millions, the idea of god seems to do that. But for many other millions, god does nothing to change people for the better. They are still miserable, inside and out. People who die for their faith? Well, they're going to die anyway, so you may as well let them die for something they imagine to be worthy. People who fight and kill for their faith? Absolutely worthless, completely insane. I have said in another blog on myspace that people like the 9/11 hijackers lack true spiritual feeling (whatever that is), and I am not convinced that they believed for one second that they were acting in the name of god. Consciously or unconsciously, violent fanatics have no faith at all, they are completely consumed by doubt and despair, and that is why they wish to kill and die for their alleged faith. They are homicidal and suicidal, and they use god to give some worth to their useless lives. People who blow up abortion clinics and kill abortion doctors in order to save the lives of unborn babies? Just naturally violent people who would kill anyway, even if they didn't have god to tell them they are doing good. What about pseudo-religionists I have personally known and disliked? I have spoken about Cipri the pushy asshole, Danielle the lying whore, Bridget the self-righteous yunt, Sue the presumptuous moron, and many others in blogs on myspace. Not one of them ever inspired me to convert or become closer to god. Everyone of them poster children for disbelief. Hypocrites, liars, shallow, full of baloney. Yes, I am just as bad as they are, morally speaking, but at least I know how full of shit I am, and I don't pretend to have god on my side, and I know I'm not going to heaven when I die. Do I sometimes fear eternal hellfire? Yes, I do, and I am ashamed to admit it. By catholic standards, purgatory awaits me. By christian standards, hell awaits me. By my own moral standards, I am not fit for any kind of heaven. What is hell? Perhaps you sit in a room until the end of time, watching a never-ending movie of every single nasty and stupid thing you did during your life. If Gandhi is in hell because he never accepted jesus as his savior, and if Hitler is in heaven because he was baptised as an infant, then I will gladly and proudly face hellfire with the Mahatma. If god wanted to convert me, he would only have to make his existence known to me in no uncertain terms. He could have sent the very opposite of Bridget to me, to love me and change my life by example, but he sent that unmitigated yunt instead. He could raise my Uncle Bill from the dead, and I would become a god-loving and god-fearing man from that moment on. Why did the friends of jesus get to witness an actual resurrection, while we poor saps are forced to have faith? Faith, just like free will, yet another specious concept invented to rationalize the emptiness of belief. If god wanted to settle the silly and violent disputes between catholics and protestants, or the silly and violent disputes between sunnis and shias, he could have done so hundreds of years ago. He obviously has no interest in what we humans consider heresy and true practice. If god wanted to settle disputes between christians, jews, and muslims, he could have ended the Crusades definitively, but he obviously has no interest in this everlasting conflict. If Dubya really speaks with god, and if god really told him to invade Iraq, why did god give Dubya such incompetent advice? A real god would not fear me or hate me for my atheism; he would be amused by my pretension, and perhaps flattered that an atheist spends so much time obsessing over him. If god gave me my intelligence, then he would be pleased I am trying to use it. If god can know my every thought, then it would be sily for me to feign a faith I haven't got. A real god wouldn't need the constant adoration of his followers; he would have more important things on his mind. So why do people still believe? What is the cause of this astounding disconnect between horrific reality and blind faith? Fear, ignorance, hatred, all completely understandable human failings, all eventually curable in time.
I have heard stories about concentration camp survivors emerging from Auschwitz and no longer believeing in hell after death. This makes perfect logical sense. They have just endured hell on earth, a hell created by mankind in this world, far worse than any hell imagined after death. This is what perverse humans do so well, creating hells in real life when imaginative hells no longer satisfy them.
Some ultra-orthodox jews believed that the Shoah was god's way of punishing jews for not following his commandments. This is sad, pathetic madness to me, the same kind of reasoning Pat Robertson uses when he blames human behavior for deadly hurricanes.
I have also heard of some jews who retained their belief in god even after surviving the camps. They say, "Hitler took my life, my country, my job, my livelihood, and my family. I won't let him take my god." I can understand the bitter spite in this remark, but I cannot fathom the logic. What good has god done in this person's life? Is this a god worth believing in? A god worth worshipping? After god has done this to you, or let this happen to you, what value can you possibly find in your faith? God has removed all meaning from your life. He has performed his one and only job with complete incompetence.
Pseudo-religionists see god's presence everywhere. Is this a kind of madness? What is wrong with me, what connection is missing from my brain, that I look at the world and see only God's malevolence, his injustice, his random arbitrary scattering of goodness, his apathy, his inefficiency, his non-existence?
Pseudo-religionists believe that atheists are insane, deluded, foolish, blind, or satanic. Atheists see pseudo-religionists in the same way. I would like to think this is just a matter of opinion, but there may very well be a clear right and wrong here. Agnostics will tell you that we cannot possibly know the full truth. I think the truth has been revealed to us through history, through science, through the failure of religions to rid the world of evil, and through the apparent silence of god.
7/3 Does god really speak to our beloved president? Did god really tell him to invade Iraq? Does he know something we don't? Why do people feel so sad when a mother drowns her five children in the bathtub, one right after the other? god told the mother to do it, so it must be the right thing. Why do people say she is crazy, just because she talks to god? She wanted to send her kids to heaven, and they are in heaven, isn't that so? Why is everyone so darn upset about it?
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