NATURE OF BELIEF COMMANDS UNBELIEF IN GOD
Religion, particularly the Christian religion, is mainly responsible for the
myth that people can be condemned as sinners for having wrong beliefs.
You cannot help what you sincerely believe. Examine yourself.
When you believe in something that there is little or no evidence for it is said
that “this is certainly a belief you can help. The facts do not force you to
believe. If you believe you believe freely. You can just as easily not believe.”
But how could that be real belief when it is your perception tells you that it
is likely to be true? Real belief has to be forced on you. You cannot help what
you perceive. Perception causes belief and perception, as perception, is out of
your control. For example, you cannot turn off your eyesight. Even if you close
your eyes you still see something, the behind of your eyelids.
You cannot have free will unless you use your intellect to some extent first for
otherwise you are being like a zombie. Therefore, your decisions are caused by
your beliefs. So, God can force good beliefs on you so that you will do good all
the time. The doctrine of free will actually contradicts the free will defence
which endeavours to explain that God can do nothing about our bad choices.
What if you pervert your thoughts to trick yourself into believing what you know
is untrue? But you wouldn’t be perverting your thoughts unless you believed in
the first place so there is no freedom to believe anything be it proven or
doubtful. The new belief is faked. Every change of belief is not caused by the
will but by a belief that is there without having anything to do with it.
Self-deception is trying to believe that you don’t believe what you believe and
the result is a pretence. Even if the will is free we are not free to think what
we wish.
Therefore, if God existed God would program us all to believe when we are
compelled anyway by the way we perceive things.
If you change beliefs it is because you believe or perceive that you should
change before you go to change. The belief causes the change. You cannot help
what you believe because you cannot choose to change your belief and if you
trick yourself you do so because belief has already determined you to. It is all
programming by what is outside you and how you see the world.
Therefore all would believe in God if there were a God.
This argument silences all who say that there are aliens or fairies, angels or
Gods out there in space who want us to love them or demons who want us to be
hateful. If we were made by intelligent designers who are now dead they could
still have implanted the right beliefs in us which we could inherit from the
first people.
This argument refutes the Catholic claim that Mary had appeared here and there
for if she did she would ensure that we all believe. The Catholic God does
miracles not as signs but to conceal his incompetence which is impossible if he
has supernatural power that deals with problems magically so miracles must be
manmade lies. (That would make Jesus a liar for he boasted that his resurrection
was the great sign of his divine sonship and mission.)
And it refutes them because they assume that belief cannot be forced.
If God exists then faith comes first. He expects you to love him alone and
everything else only because that is what he wants but when you have no
assurance that God exists but faith then faith comes first. Dogma is above God.
God is really not loved for his sake at all but for the sake of dogma, manmade
principles. They are always manmade for there is no evidence of a divine origin
and to gaze at God through a haze of dogmas smacks of inventing God even when
you are just inventing the same God for yourself that somebody else has invented
for themselves. You don’t want God to be what he is but to be what you want him
to be. You want your idol. It is only the person who knows God and who therefore
does not merely believe in him who can love God. But there is no such person and
there is no proof for God. God would not have made us if he is good if we cannot
love and know him. That would be an injustice against himself. The absence of
proof for God proves that he does not exist. If he did he could not let us think
of believing in him.
Anyway the argument tells us that God would force us to be sure that he existed
if he existed. The argument that God in his courtesy does not compel us is
fallacious. Reason says charity should be more important than dogma so if God
existed he would want charity and would be happy to force us to believe.
That philosopher of fraud, St Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the dilemma about
how to reconcile the fact that a person who sees the reasons for faith is forced
to believe by them and the fact that the Christian Jesus and his Church say that
faith is a virtue that deserves a reward. If faith is a virtue then it is not
forced. His solution was that faith rests on sufficient but not strong evidence.
But such faith would be without merit for it is based more on irrational
feelings than on logic. And sufficient faith is not good enough for saying
things like that we should die for Jesus rather than give up the faith, or that
women should refrain from abortion even to save their lives and that we should
endure the misery of celibacy as priests which is what the faith of Aquinas
taught. You need very strong evidence for very strong demands.
Then, the religion that pored over Aquinas and made him virtually her only real
theologian, Romanism, goes and makes saints of people who said they saw the Lord
Jesus or the Blessed Virgin! How could they be saints when the main virtue,
faith, was not in their hearts? The Church says that faith, hope and charity are
necessary for salvation. Faith is the most important for the other two cannot
exist without it. When Paul said that the greatest virtue was charity and not
trust he meant that it was better for charity was trust and love and not a rival
to trust or separate from it. If you love God you believe him and trust him.
The Bible says that the fool says in his heart (his mind) that there is no God
but the words: “There is no God”, are written in the heart. All one has to do is
to look inside the heart.