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.



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