CHRISTIANITY AND IT'S VIRTUE-SIGNALLING FAKE COMPASSION AND LOVE
Caring looks right and good and laudable even if others are
deliberately neglected. People are so biased and they have a need to believe
there are enough good people around for it stops them worrying about their own
welfare so much. So the good person is praised while the bad they are doing is
ignored or excused. Doing good is not enough to make you good for saints can be
fakes. Your heart may have secret motivations that are on the dark side or it
could be about showcasing how wonderful you are. Cherry-picking good is a sign
of badness not goodness for it shows you are capable of doing good properly but
won't. The brain rewards good deeds even when they are not really good but about
you doing good not because it is good but because you feel like it.
Complying with the moral code of people around you makes you feel you have power. You have power to fit in. You have power to make notable changes. Morality is about power: right over wrong. You can cherish the trees not the forest. Morality can attract not because it is good but because of the sense of power. You satisfy the desire for power and get the reward.
Having a desire to help the other does not mean it is in any way about the other or mainly about the other. It can be about the helping. You can only guess that anybody is really good. As God is revealed through the love of others for you it follows God is inherently a guess as well!
THE SUBTLE VINDICTIVENESS OF THEISM
People confuse sympathy and compassion. Sympathy is a feeling of pain at the
pain of another. By itself it is not compassion. It only becomes compassion in
so far as you do something to help be it listening or something else.
Compassion also includes feeling how vulnerable others are in life even if they
are okay now.
Compassion is better than love. The two are not the same. If there is a choice between love and compassion choose the latter. A religion of love is as a result intrinsically flawed and thus must take the blame for the evil that people do even if it disapproves of it.
Love and compassion are always treated as simple answers
and simple but they are not. That is why they cause so much trouble. The
idea of God makes it far worse. God becomes a rationale for making it simple.
God is thought to be there to make sure your love and compassion work for the
good as he is love and compassion and all-powerful so they have to win!
Those who give these simple answers do so for they do not really care and want
to feel as if they are good people.
A chapter of the book, Sex and Marriage – a Catholic Perspective, is totally and
utterly offensive to the sick and shows how terrible it is to serve or care
about God and shows how thin Christian love actually is.
A gay man writes that he has AIDS and is dying and asks what God is doing to him
and is scared that God’s judgement has fallen on him.
The priest tells him that he is correct that God is doing this to him. The
priest admits that God said in the Bible that he takes final responsibility for
everything that happens. And since God is so powerful he must have wanted, at
least under the circumstances, the man to get AIDS. If God does want to do it
one way another way he does.
Before we proceed let us quote evil pope, Benedict XVI. He said in May 2011 of
the homosexually populated cities of Sodom and Gomorrah: “The Lord was prepared
to forgive, he wanted to forgive but the cities were locked into a totalising
and paralysing evil without even a few innocents from which to start turning
evil into good. This the very path to salvation that Abraham too was asking for:
being saved does not mean merely escaping punishment but being delivered from
the evil that dwells within us. It is not punishment that must be eliminated but
sin, the rejection of God and love which already bears the punishment in itself.
The Prophet Jeremiah was to say to the rebellious people: “Your wickedness will
chasten you, and your apostasy will reprove you.”
The pope would be too crafty to tell an AIDS victim, "You brought it all on
yourself" so the nastiness is couched in softer language. Real candour should be
praised in the Church if only that its true colours be seen.
The priest strangely rejects the idea that the man is being punished and says
that God just sent AIDS to stop the man destroying himself and losing his soul
for all eternity through the sin of homosexuality. He then says that AIDS had to
be allowed and sent to keep the world in check for if sin is allowed to thrive
the crazier things get. He tells the man that God sent AIDS to him because he
loves him and cannot bear to lose him for he is his son. He argues that Jesus
ruled out the idea of sickness being necessarily punishment in John 9.
The hint is that it could be punishment for it is Christian teaching that loving
fathers have to punish at times. Remember the priest is only claiming to be
giving an OPINION. An opinion isn't much.
And what if you are more offended at the thought that God has to put you off
something through which you will make the world crazier than that he is
punishing you? A person who is that big of a threat is worse than anybody who
needs punishment!
There is real vindictiveness in condoning the ways of Almighty God to this sick
man especially when the priest is not an AIDS victim or lying in that man's
sickbed. It is easy for the priest to say that God who he believes is always
right did this to the man when he is not suffering himself.
This man’s life and his pain are more real to him than God whose existence is
less certain. God then cannot expect us to approve of what he sends. And if he
cannot expect that then the love he asks for himself from us is immoral and so
he should not have made us to suffer and die. It is offensive as well because it
is better to believe in a God who is sometimes bad and who does not expect all
this love and devotion than in one who is perfect or even in one who wants to
cure the man but cannot for his power is limited. This has to be done because
what is evil to our eyes should not be condoned.
There is a great vulgarity in him telling the man that God did this to him to
check his sin. And it is vile to say that it is better to send AIDS than let a
man practice homosexuality. How could God or the priest love the man and say
that?
What about the more promiscuous men who use condoms? There we have men who
compound their so-called sin by using condoms forbidden by the Church! How could
the priest love the man and say that when sin is down to motive meaning that the
worst and most common sins are the sins we have in the dark recesses of our
hearts?
The priest is condoning the AIDS because the man physically sinned but is this
right when the worst sins are in the heart and are not acted out? And if sin
leads to complete chaos and needs checking whose fault is it? Who put us in a
world where such chaos would be possible? God did though he could have put the
man on a planet with only a thousand people on it so that not much damage would
be done and AIDS would be necessary.
It seems that if God allowed the AIDS as a stepping stone to some distant good
that we will never know it still does not mean that God is using the AIDS to
check the sin. Christians may say when he hurts the man he will want the
suffering to correct him for it may as well. But what if God needs the suffering
in some scheme to reduce the sinning in other people and then he won’t want the
man to correct because of that? But sin is in the heart and so is virtue so God
could correct him and still have his plan work as long as he watches the man’s
actions. There is no avoiding the notion that suffering is meant to be
correction if you believe in God.
And the world has not got any better since that man took AIDS and died. How dare
the Catholic Church suggest it has!
Also, what if the man believed naively that promiscuity or practicing serial
monogamy was morally right? The priest dares to judge him as immoral or needing
AIDS to restrain him when he tells him God is saving him from his sin not caring
what the man believed? It could not be punishment if the man did not agree with
the Church that gay sex is immoral even if he started to believe when he was on
his deathbed.
What about the people who get AIDS through one mistake? What about the rampant
homosexuals who use safe sex and never get AIDS? To say a person who commits
harmless homosexual acts and who gets AIDS just through pure bad luck and most
harmless activities can lead to accidental harm should have it for sin has to
have bad consequences like sickness is inhuman and unforgivable and fanatical.
It insults everybody who has got any STD be it syphilis or whatever.
The priest is saying the man deserved to get AIDS because if AIDS were worse
than sin and the man would not stop sinning then he could not disapprove of God
inflicting AIDS on him. If you say the man deserves AIDS is that really any
better than saying AIDS is a punishment? Of course not!
And if the man deserved it as the priest says it has to be punishment. Why?
Because it is worse to hurt somebody innocent for a good reason than it is to
hurt somebody and make it punishment for the same good reason.
This priest is a true Catholic and that makes him a persecutor of homosexuals
with his sickly sweet tongue. The priest cannot have sympathy for the man for
that is criticising God for punishing him and God expects approval for all his
actions.
It would be blasphemy to say the man did not deserve it for if the Christian
idea of divine justice is right the most the Christian can say is that it may be
punishment or it may not be. This is still very offensive. It is saying,
“There’s half a chance that he deserves it so I can only give him half my
sympathy”. This bad attitude wouldn’t be possible without belief in an almighty
and all-good God.
It is actually better if you believe in God to say the person deserved it if
there is a God because you don’t want to just accuse God of hurting an innocent
person even for a good plan. Even if it is not punishment, we must assume that
it is and that the person is not suffering to be disciplined but being punished
to be disciplined.
The priest and Catholic doctrine make out that God letting evil happen implies
it is an absolutely necessary evil. People who do necessary evils do not like
what they did exaggerated or misrepresented. A necessary evil is serious
business so only the truth about how and why it happened and the whole truth
will do. Faith that God is doing necessary evils is itself a necessary evil at
best. But you would need to prove faith in God is necessary and that cannot be
done.
The priest will say that we all have faults and all of us bring punishments and
misfortune on ourselves when we tell him he is sanctimonious. But the proof of
his sanctimonious nature is that he may be older and have lived a happier life
than that man and does not have AIDS and he is approving of God letting the man
get it.
If the man had not believed in God but just believed in an afterlife of bliss he
would not have had the worry about being punished. To hell with God even if the
man had misunderstood for if he had not been manipulated to believe in God he
would not have had this pain. He had a painful misunderstanding over an
unnecessary and repulsive belief!
And Jesus did not say that sickness was not a punishment. He only said that the
blind man in John 9 was blind because of God’s plan for a miracle and not for
punishment. It could have been punishment before but not then. And when
everybody else who is sick is not sick for the sake of a miracle it could well
be that they are being punished. The blind man was an exception and under
unusual circumstances.
The man was being discriminated against. If he had not believed in Hell or
mortal sin the Church would still be saying he brought AIDS on himself as
punishment or correction (which is still saying the man is being punished for
God can only correct those who bring his correction on themselves and so the
deserves it) for his sexual relations with men which would be totally unfair.
Many in the Church believe that God does not punish but we punish ourselves by
doing evil so if we have too many sexual partners we will be punished by pulling
AIDS on ourselves (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, page 293; The Kindness of
God, page 66). In other words, God does not punish but sets the stage for
punishment to follow our sins which amounts to the same thing as punishing us so
the God does not punish stuff is not very palatable. God should have made it
possible for us to love others without jealousy and practice free love with some
mechanism for those who wish to have children to conceive them at will. If a
gossip ends up with no friends it is not a punishment of any kind because the
gossip is not suffering for gossiping but for not being careful and crafty
enough. These considerations show how ugly and vindictive the doctrine of the
Church is. God is just like a parent who severely punishes his child and then
says that the child punished itself by doing wrong. Many project their own
hypocrisy unto their God.
Some seem to think we punish ourselves as opposed to God punishing us. If there
is a God, then death proves that God does punish us and we do more than punish
ourselves for God made death and made it inevitable.
Believers suffer just as unbelievers do. The only difference is that the
believer still keeps believing that God knows what he is doing. If you mistake
nature for God then you are trusting in cruel random and cold nature and that is
bad in itself for what use is belief and the comfort you get from it when you
are like somebody who trusts holy water instead of the hospital to cure their
cancer? The belief and comfort contribute to your unreasonable risk-taking and
to your downfall.
Belief is an act of the believer. Witches believing in their magic also claim
that no matter what life throws at them they will be okay in the end or even
after the end! So the enemies are not really hurting them at all. In that case,
how can the enemies be doing wrong? The harm isn’t really harm for God is
letting it happen and God never gets it wrong or lets his people down. Any pain
is for some good.
We conclude that to tell somebody God had to send evil on them or let it happen
to them in order to halt some sin is judgemental and cruel and fanatical. It
borders on saying they deserve it. But it is more accurate to say that it
amounts to saying they deserve it even if it is not punishment.
WORKS CONSULTED
AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS, John Hospers, Routledge, London, 1992
CRITIQUES OF GOD, Edited by Peter A Angeles, Prometheus Books, New York, 1995
GOD THE PROBLEM, Gordon D Kaufman, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1973
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
East Sussex, 1995
SEX AND MARRIAGE – A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE, John M Hamrogue CSSR, Liguori,
Illinois, 1987
THE KINDNESS OF GOD, EJ Cuskelly MSC, Mercier Press, Cork, 1965
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL, CTS EXPLANATIONS, Fr M C D'Arcy SJ, Catholic Truth Society,
London, 2008
