HOW THE NOTION OF A CREATOR GOD MAKES A PRISONER OF ME
The feeling that at least enough of the time, nothing is looking at you, over your shoulder can be considered a fundamental human right. It is not about the watcher judging or approving or supporting or whatever. It is about being you and owning your solitude, your space. We do not like even a person who cannot hurt us watching us. Darby would not want Joan having cameras on him for vice versa. Their devotion is irrelevant. A human right to not be looked at must never be turned into dirt with talk of God and Jesus or whatever.
How can we like the creator of the universe, who supposedly and totally gives us all we have and experience, observing us? And especially when he can unleash harm on us indirectly at least. Remember the Church says that if you keep God out then evil and the the rampant random rushes in (Random? Really? When God makes and sustains all 100% through having made all things from nothing making them utterly dependent on him? Science believes in the random yes but religion only pays lip service to it!) for you don't want his love to keep them at bay. The Bible says he punishes directly too. Both concepts may be true if there is indeed a God. People try to put the thought that there is a God in our heads. Some of these people may impress us. The fact remains that no matter how much we think it is good of them or okay, it is neither. Whatever about them, it is not a good idea anyway. Surely the real prison when you are in jail is not the bars and walls but how the environment is watched to control you. The watching alone is horrid and its a problem for it is down without regard for what you want and chooses. It is the real prison.
So when you offer faith in God to a person you are putting shackles on that person. If they like that that makes you worse not better. They are blinded to the freedom they need and deserve.
Even that is not enough.
Christians say there would be absolutely nothing at all unless God created it and we owe all to him and even our power to sin depends on him for he gives us our free will. We have free will because of God and even when we rebel we do it because he allows us to do what we will. So it comes back to him. He has more responsibility for what we do than we do. Religion confusingly says this does not mean he is responsible for us sinning. He is only responsible for going along with us if we chose to do it.
Let us discuss free will. We simply have no evidence that if we have done x that we could have done y instead. We cannot go back even a second in time to test it. Free will then is impossible to test scientifically. To be clear, if we had a machine that could read all about a person even it cannot tell what they will do. That is what we mean by free will. When we say you have free will we are making a guess. Yet is the reason why we hold people responsible for what they do and don't do.
Many wonder if you could call this free will as it means you can blow up the world as easily as you would take a bath. We tend to think that people are more readable and reliable than that. The best answer is that people want to say they know you and know what you will do - ie they invest you with predictability - but once they don't like what you do they will change and invest you with that libertarian version of free will. This is all about what they want to believe you are not what you are.
It is a misconception that those of us who think free will is too weak to count or does not exist are the only ones saying that feeling free does not mean you are really free. Feeling free, many say, means something for it can hardly be an illusion. The assumption is that nature or God would probably not make you feel free, that you created your action when you could have created a different one, if you were not genuinely free to choose. But it is not an illusion for it is simply about an emotion that is there when nothing is obviously forcing us. You cannot feel free in a small jail cell but you would feel free if your prison was a luxury resort. The subject of whether something is forcing us in the background, in the recesses of our minds, is another one altogether. It is a misreading not an illusion. And we have the habit of going along with silly stuff anyway so it is nothing special.
People are tricked to take a leap of faith that this feeling free is telling them they have free will when all it is saying is that there is no obvious threat controlling them. Key word is obvious. And this says nothing about not-so-obvious threats. How often do we feel we are doing the best thing for our freedom and end up showing we have wrecked it?
Plus what about how we feel we are some kind of being in a body? We feel the mind is like a spirit in the body or separate from it. But brain damage will show that to be false.
Too many in the Church are there for like many manipulated people they do not see that they are in chains.
We will see that if there is a creator God then we are controlled like a pawn even when we rebel. And God or not, if we think there is such a being and commit ourselves to worship him, we as good as make such a God true. We as good as make the chains for ourselves and others. And we open the door to worse chains for errors lead to errors. You cannot get away from the truth and that may be very restricting and scary but lies are fake truths and are worse. They try to force consequences on you for defying them just like truths do.
In the Christian religion you are told that God is all-good and sin and evil is a void, the lack of a good that is not there. Make no mistake. This presumes, "Evil is whatever is not in line with God's will therefore God is all-good." That is a lie as much as it would be if, "John has to be right when he says the bank will collapse in ten years and it will happen for John says so." It is disguising nonsense as an argument. The God argument is mostly about what you want people to think. It is not largely about you. You are not arguing for you but to persuade others. You are potentially and likely actually lying to them. By living your faith you are living a lie for you know you can rub off on others. Faith says you are meant to rub it off on those who meet you.
Evil by merely happening leads to more evil so it acts like power. Religion cannot make a big deal out of evil not being a real something for if it acts like one then that is all that really matters. Religion would show itself to be a friend of evil for ignoring that.
The way evil acts like an energy and a force is consistent with a God who cannot make evil as a power but who is doing his best to do the next best thing. These things show that there is a pile of incoherence around God and religion and evil. You cannot affirm that there is an all-powerful and all-good God for evil says different.
If you need a God theory in order to make the word evil mean something, then you don't know what evil is at all and are trying to sound smart. You are taking advantage of those who harm and those who are harmed.
And there are problems with calling somebody evil for they do terrible harm perhaps to a child. You are saying they are conduits for something bigger and worse than anything they try to do. Thus they need harsh treatment - perhaps even destruction. Perhaps you are using the child's pain to shine your halo as if you know what evil is and don't do it. If you use evil that way then you become evil for you are not against it for being bad but because you want to look good. Also your claim that you love the evildoer but hate their evil actions and evil thoughts is hollow. To slam evil because you want to look good is about trying to be superior to the other person. You do not love them for you are using them to make yourself feel good.
Anyway the religion is saying that sin and evil are words not for a force but for a failure. They amount to good being abused. This is a scheme to fit the doctrine that God only makes good. This all presupposes that nothing has the slightest say in making itself and it is all down to God.
There is a jump here. They say that we need to know what good is. Then we work out that whatever is not good must be evil. That is not necessarily true. Something can be morally irrelevant or as good as it is bad. For example failing in a quiz question is falling short of a standard but it is not evil. And they say that evil is a lie that looks good so it gets more and more confusing.
It means you never really know if the great deeds that are happening are really as great as they are caused to seem. People may be intending to simply not do evil and make it look like that they are intending to be good. As harm and helping are mixed it is impossible to tell.
Contrasting good and evil seems to be a recipe for disaster if you want to learn the difference correctly and be safe. So they use good to justify lying that they really know what bad and evil means. Contrasting good and evil in practice means sorting people into bad and good and it is no wonder religion is so divisive.
They look at this dubious good through their deceiving eyes and then work out that as there is no real good without God, there must be a good God. They decide what good means. They cannot then claim that their goodness comes from God when they are making a God out of their own vision of good not his!
Look at how odd their argument is. Here it is, "You can only know God in shadows for he is so immense and mysterious. You see his image in the good around you. He is goodness itself. Good points you to him and is from him." This does not line up to how certain you feel that there is no mystery about the good you see around you. You are not as certain as you feel but that is not the point.
Religion says good and God are the same thing in a sense. How a being can be an abstract value is not explained so their answer only adds to the confusion. Confusion is a prison itself.
Religion says that even when we choose evil we use God's own good creation, effectively God, to create distortion. So we cannot get away from God even as we rebel. This arises from the teaching that all things utterly depend on God. They deny that God creates evil but they say he creates the entire world that will be impacted by my evil. Creation is not a past act for them but is ongoing.
Our next topic is is in that light, how we can talk about divine intervention. Does it make sense?
If you think God does not intervene as we sin for he respects our free will then you will say yes.
If you think God turns things around miraculously, when the course of events is changed or when Jesus' death is reversed and he comes alive, you will say yes.
But there is no way this can this fit how much control and say God has over what we do. He has more to do with who I am than I do. He makes all. Intervention may look like it happens but this is an illusion for God is acting when we look and think we see he is doing nothing.
If you are in a small cell, your jailers are not creating the walls. They are not creating you. So God has more to do with you being jailed than them. The hard bread you are given to eat has everything to do with him and those who made it possible for you are mere instruments. What the jailers do to you takes your freedom yes but it does not compare to what God does. Even then in that tiny cell the jailers do not create you and all that you are and have. God does that. So he is the only jailer worth talking about. Even when you sin you are using God to do it and that backfires though it may not be obvious yet.
In this straitjacket, there is no real room for divine intervention is there?
If you feel free in your straitjacket you are only free in your head but not free at all. If you could take a pill to make you feel free when you are tied up you are both free and not free. You may be psychologically free but you are using your freedom to throw freedom away. Here is how. You are trying to feel good about and lie to yourself about the freedom you have lost. So the freedom you have is paradoxically bondage. I wonder if people who claim they want real freedom not just psychological freedom really mean it? After all, you could be as free as a bird and this could be an illusion. Psychotics may feel freer than the rest of us. They think they are in their own universe which gives them all that they ask for.
So we may feel free. But that feeling free is fundamentally irreligious and atheistic though the religious of us frame it as godly and spiritual. It has to be freedom from the creator straitjacket. We have found that God belief denies that feeling free means anything and indeed that we are free in any meaningful sense. God belief needs us to have free will to blame us instead of God for evil but that does not work at all. The goodness of almighty God is incoherent. And we know what that says about the goodness of those who say they get it from him as a gift?
Medicine assumes a standard for human wellbeing. Suppose we had a virus that could remove our sense of freedom. It would treat it. Now we feel free and have a sense of freedom because of synthetic drugs. Perhaps they are made from coal, herbs, some plant at the bottom of the ocean? Whatever. They do not technically belong in the human body. Yet the result may be freedom but is it freedom or synthetic freedom? If we can't tell either way then we cannot boast that we help people become free. We don't know. It is obvious that giving a person with psychosis something to calm the hallucinations is not restoring their faculty but giving them a crutch. The latter does the real work.
Synthetic free will is clearly not free will. All it is good for is if you want to think you are free and feel it even if you are not. But it does not compare to what God is doing, how he is a metaphysical prison cell. A prison that sprays a gas to make everybody want to be there is still a prison. It makes no sense that a prison that is horrid and dreadful is the only real prison. Both are equally against your freedom.
To sum up there are multiple ways in which God belief does not line up to the freedom we want to feel we have. It is fundamentally degrading.
