WHY BEING UNFAITHFUL TO GOD IS A COMMENDABLE THING

Religion says that being true to God is a beautiful thing.  Now you can be committed to God mainly, if not entirely, for the wrong reasons.  That is not commitment.  You can be committed for you are conditioned.  That is not commitment either.  You can be committed to a fictitious version of God.  That is not commitment either and deserves only pity.  You can be committed to aspects of God.  For example if you are about the mercy and ignore or downplay his justice you are not really committed to God.  Like any person he comes as a person not as a pie to be cut up into different slices.  You can love your perception of a person not the person.  It is possible for that perception to be accurate but only by luck.  That means that even then you are still not loving the real person but it sure looks like you are.  For all those reasons, those who say they committed their lives to God are boasting and are self-righteous.  You have no way AT ALL of knowing if a person really is connecting to God or something else is going on.  They should give you resources for your own journey and let it be your choice.  But the fact remains that all faith really comes from the influence and example and sometimes pressure from others.  So it is a no-win problem.

Religion claims that man does not make God but God makes us.  Suppose that could be true.  Even then man not creating God is an irrelevant detail. All ideas about God are potentially man-made. You cannot prove that God must be good. Even faith in God’s love admits that it might be misplaced. You just have faith for it shows you at least have your idea of what kind of God should be there even if he is not like that. Faith is about you.

Think about this argument, "We are all living for something and we are controlled by that, the true lord of our lives.  Emotionally, regardless of what we think, researchers believe that, we do treat certain things and ideas as sacred or as gods or divine. In this view, the atheist has a god, the denial of God. It makes no sense but feelings don’t have to. So it follows that you can have what looks secular and which might be actually religious. Moral feelings tend to turn religious and see themselves as sacred."

Is that an argument for trying to find God and getting it right about him?  It would seem so.  It is saying that without God something else becomes God to you.  But if we are compelled to have a God/god whether we want one or not then there is no such thing as really intending to find God.  It should be free seeking and free finding.  No compulsion.

It is arguable that just because you put something first and cherish it, it doesn't have to be some kind of god.  Doesn't Christianity say that strictly speaking the pagan gods were not religious divinities.  They were just what one was running after instead of the God who made the universe.  If a pagan god like Zeus with limited power and who could be killed should be called a god then why not say perhaps that some robot stronger than me is a god?  Zeus would only be a creature ultimately.  St Paul helps us here by saying idolatry is centering on the creature and not the creator.  It doesn't have to be religious. Jesus called mammon or money a god but did not see it as a fake God in any religious sense.

We have learned that God belief is not the issue so much as the blackmail implied by it and upon which it reposes.  Look at these two approaches to God and comfort.

# Feeling God will protect you from the worst calamities.

# Feeling that he will not protect you from the calamities but from feeling too overwhelmed and emotionally destroyed by them.

In say Britain, people may hope for safety from earthquakes and volcanoes. That is what they feel safe from. Things that won't happen anyway! The real dangers are conveniently left out! In times of dire turmoil, the vulnerable and the children especially will grasp at any straw. They try to feel it is less bad than what it is.  God belief tells them they need to.  Yet many can deal with not feeling safe at all.  We must see how cruel it is to have people in desperation over God. Accepting what is coming is better and the energy of stress can be energy for bonding with others instead.

Emotional devastation is often as bad and sometimes worse than any natural catastrophe. And it is natural too in its own way. People will imagine going through a trial that is possible to get through. They conveniently do not think of a crippling incurable depression!

So we conclude that as feelings deceive and we always have less data than we think, that both of them are bad.  Feeling God protects you exposes you to the harm for you are not taking enough precautions.  Feeling he will protect your feelings from hitting the very pits of agonising despair is strange.  A level of pain over a long time can be worse than a month of horror that is so bad you can hardly breathe.

Feeling safe from worst calamities or feeling safe from your emotional response being too severe? Which then if you have to choose?  Which is the best and most responsible? We can have both but we are deciding what if we have to take one or the other?

Clearly it would be for your spirit to survive anything but that blames the person for seeing no lightening of the turmoil or the situation. It tells them to feel worse than they do.  It tells them to stay in their pain longer.  Lengthening the suffering will be a consequence.   It is also a lie.  Also, if God is going to help protect you from evil wrecking your inner self completely then why just that?  Why did he not just erase the bubonic plague?  It is too convenient.  It is thus an emotional crutch, a lie you tell yourself to help you feel better and to feel that your loved ones will never be completely overcome.  If you truly care for them you will break the crutch in two with your bare hands.

Unlike God, nature does not work in hidden or mysterious ways.  Reason says that you must not create mysteries where they may not be needed.  The person dying in an avalanche just died in an avalanche and no god with a plan put her there.  There is a comfort in knowing that is all there is.  We must grow up.

Hume famously said that a person needing help does not mean it is morally wrong to walk on by.  It is not right either.  It just has nothing to do with moral right or wrong.   An is cannot give rise to an ought.  Why not?  For an is is a different kind of statement from "This is morally right."  IF I want to end pain and if I think I should, then that IF is enough to get me from an is to an ought. How does that work?  Well it remains my IF.  It is me deciding to be my own moral authority.  If God is the moral authority I am defying him.  Now the problem is, what moral standard can say if I am right morally to make that my IF?  None.  This makes me the creator of my morals but it does not mean they are really morals.  In the real world, nobody cares about all that stuff.  They just want you to have the IF as described.  A world where everybody is doing that and which rises in philanthropy is better than one that seeks to ground morality in something outside the person and less is done.  Morality is a human construct and saying it is from God is just sheer lying arrogance. Finally to sum up, a fact cannot give you rules about how to deal with it.  A fact is not about that.  But you can invent a way just for you to make it about rules.  But it remains an invention.

A good person or civil person is usually a person who avoids a negative and sociopathic lifestyle and who is not necessarily adding anything positive to life. That describes most people.  At times everybody is like that.  What if you need God/prayer/faith/religion to help you do better and be pro-active?  If that is a crutch then the crutch will break.  It still means that human nature is at best able to just not do harm while doing no good either.   As for the crutch, people need to say they are using it when they are not to get others to think highly of them and trust them.

God acting and letting evil happen to prevent a worse evil is really saying that he is averting the human from doing worse evil than the evil he allows to happen.  This is the very seed that leads to sociopathic hatred of humankind.  It invites fear and fear is the smoothest trajectory to hate.

The atheist will reason, “Trouble may come. I must do something. There is no purpose or divine guidance so I can’t leave it to chance. There is no guarantee that my body or mind or spirit can get something terrible in life but which is reasonably fixable.” The believer might not leave it to chance either or so it seems. But the believer does not really believe in chance if God is in control. So a believer acting to avert future danger is not worrying about chance. Thus only an atheist can really say he or she does not leave it to chance. Only an atheist can really intend not to leave something to luck.

There are those who describe goodness as a mystery that is not worth explaining and which should only be discovered. So experience should teach you what good is rather than theory.  If that is so then the same is true of evil.  We are prone to getting the experiences very wrong. At the end of the day, we don't realise how much of what we have learned about good or evil is really only what we think we have learned.  The influence of others and our perception of it and them overrules your experience.  Often what you call your experience is only what you think was your experience.

The point is you cannot have human notions of good and evil and pretend that they explain God and evil.  A child doing math is not on the same level as an adult mathematical genius.

God and evil is really more about you than them.  That is why your solutions and mystery-mongering about evil are so repellent.  Trying to be open to an answer is more important to you than giving them medicine.  I mean your world view is deeper than anything you do.

Let us assume that sin is a reality.  To project the best of what is in people unto God presupposes that they sin.  Why else are you picking out the good stuff?  The best is what comes because of and in spite of sin. So sin has to be in the back of your mind. To project human goodness unto God when that goodness came from a learning process where one grew out of doing harm is to tacitly say that God is not truly perfect.  Also, some of the good you see in others that you want to distance from them and plant on God is not really good.  Most of us inwardly smile when someone assassinates a tyrant.  Thus you end up with what seems the right image of God but which is actually idolatrous and blasphemous.

They say that rejecting a God because we only learn from him from morally and spiritually dubious human nature is not rejecting God as such. That is their self-righteous patronising.  "Oh I know how good God is and how attractive but this person has got him wrong."  The woman who rejects her boyfriend for she got the wrong idea about him is indeed in practice rejecting him.  And if Satan has got God wrong why is God not chasing after him like the shepherd and the lost sheep?  And how can there be free will if you cannot truly say no to God?

FINALLY

Belief in God when no answer to evil works or helps (note the difference!) indicates:

#wanting to believe and that is immoral [It is not about what you want to think or feel. Somebody is being degraded by suffering]

#you have no right to want to believe that evil makes sense [It is evil to do so therefore you are trying to reason your way out of evil by using evil]

With all the harms that come from faith and trust in God, God is obviously useless to pray to. Don't waste time on attempting communication.  We are denying that there is a God you can communicate with or pray to. That is a kind of atheism and indeed the essential kind.

Incidentally, it is said that man is too puny to question or criticise how God set things up in the ruthless animal world. But man has a duty to do this for it uncovers if God or any version of him is purely a human concept.

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