FAITH IN GOD DAMAGES OUR VALOUR IN BATTLE AGAINST SUFFERING
The Christian doctrine is that God is truth. This is a very big claim. It is a mystery how a personal God can be truth. Truth is not a power. But it forces as if it were one. It is like saying that your granny is literally kindness itself. Kindness describes her but how can a person really be kindness?
If something is real, it is an objective reality. You share the power to see that along with others. It is not just about you. Against that you have subjective delusions and errors. If you think there is no cliff to fall over that does not make it true or half true or partly true. There is no middle way between objective reality and what you wrongly think is real. You can find very articulate clever people who try to make out that there is some middle ground. There is none. Those who argue you must be polite and say nothing are really just trying to let error thrive. They are trying to support people's feelings and alleged feelings at the expense of truth.
The God concept and other spinoffs such as prayer and worship and religion are not the solutions to the problems of the world that they pretend to be. No matter how many heroes you see wearing crosses you will never know if there could have been better ones without the faith gimmick. If humans can be good they should not need religious beliefs to be good.
Suppose God is real. Then there is no true evidence that he does not exist. There may be misinterpretations of evidence but that is different. When God is that which alone is important then there is no evidence against him. That matters most. Then you can proceed to look for evidence to support him. But anyone who declares tghat God the source of good and ultimate value is compelling you to be biased. You are called bad and stupid and harmful if you don't have much time for God. It is biased to look for evidence to fit what you have already assumed. Thus the presumption of honesty lies with the atheist not the theist. There is something amiss with an idea that asks for evidence and thwarts it at the same time.
Many seem to go by this dubious philosophy. It is that, "If a bigger power demands obedience, we should comply for we will be made to pay the price of obedience anyway. So we are better off just obeying.” Is that really true? No – it amounts to obeying to save your own skin and that is not real obedience for it is not based on freely choosing to do the will of the other. It is simulated outward obedience. You wonder how much genuine obedience is around when people think that way! If their God accepts such "obedience" then is it the case that it is really those people who are the problem. Are they trying to get us to do what they want by luring us into such faux loyalty?
Psychologists notice that how we see others and any other such as a god or God, a lot of it is stuff that is in ourselves that we think is in them too. Now we project things unto others for it is too painful if we see them in ourselves. Or we fear they might become painful. Now if we do that it can grow into a habit. We have seen people who don't feel very bad about say their cheating on their partner who concentrate on the adultery and infidelity of others. Projecting involves a lie so lies lead to lies so none of that is surprising.
Psychological projection is very real. If we need to impose our values on nature or God, then let us stop lying that we love God and respect his freedom. He is just a notice board for us to tack our issues and feelings and ideals on. It is easier to use God that way than a person for the person will respond and tell us what we are doing. God is an easy target for it says nothing.
There is the projection I do. I can be part of a group. The group can collectively project too. Religion is a collection of people trying to project onto the supernatural.
We talk about others when we mean ourselves and that to an extent can be done to nature too. We let people down and we resent the car for not starting or the apple tree for failing. We treat the computer and the smartphone as an extension of ourselves. We see ourselves in our pets and imagine they love us profoundly. We develop a placebo as others suffer and tell ourselves that we are trusting in God's care for them. To posit a God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves and who is everywhere means that we will project onto God rapidly and more easily that we will to anything else. Projecting makes you ready to impose upon. There is a pride in managing to make anything that is not about you about you. Even if there is a real God, the real God is really yourself. You are using God to hide how it is yourself you value rather than him. And you are so arrogant that you think you can play at being a devotee of the divine. Only a God can try to fool a God. So that is what you show you think you are even if you deny it.
Religion looks at nature and says its laws are divine sign-language. Divine promises. So because the sun is rising we believe it will continue to rise and it is like God is saying that through the laws. This is very ad hoc. If there is health it says God promises health. Then it waits until after the plague comes to say that God's promise was only temporary. So now he is promising support in our efforts to overcome it. That does not mean we will. So now it is about the trying. It is hard to see how, "I have to try to help people but if God's plan is that the plague must say then he is right. He knows best" could help. The good is the enemy of the best. If some people in the name of God do outstanding good is that good exaggerated by others? Is it really the best good? Could they have done better without this divine plan and God's will rubbish being in the way?
Anyway religion's God expresses promises through how nature works. We look at nature and read promises into it.
If many babies in a famine zone are dying then we may say God has promised they will die. That is why you can say he does not promise that tea will cure a headache but promises that aspirin will. It is a metaphor for how he acts in nature.
Rationalising something after the event is a form of manipulation. So why does religion or faith get a free pass to degrade say the suffering of babies?
A child burns to death in a horrific tragedy. You will say this is terrible but will you complain? Complaining would be you condemning God even though you don’t realise it.
A compassion without the complaining is defective. So be like an atheist and complain that God or not, this should not happen. If you could shoot God, hypothetically, you would. You would do it for the child. Anger is needed too. Honour the child with it.
A significant number of religionists expect God to intervene and stop evil. Perhaps he may do some hidden action to change things. Others think he works through nature so that will not happen but at the same time he will get the evil eradicated. All admit then that this God of theirs let the moral atrocity happen in the first place and should act for its his responsibility.
Now being content with something changing eventually is dangerous. What about all the people and babies who die and suffer in the meantime?
Religion clearly uses God as some kind of tool. So if we are abusing God then we need to be corrected firmly. Abusing anything or thinking you do soon leads to abuse against people. Why though do we not become a threat to others through thinking an angel guards us or Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Why do you not want to persecute the person who steals your rabbit's foot charm? The answer is that in thinking something loves you infinitely and knows all things and has all power, only God is like that, inherently makes you selfish. You might in theory be selfish just that way. The other entities are not as involved and so not as useful to you. If you become atheist, the bad trait put in you by God belief may remain or you may believe in God or programmed by ideas about him more than you realise. Some atheists persecute believers and that could be down to them seeing, or learning from experience - perhaps their own as a former believer - that there is something about belief in God that is obnoxious and a threat.
Those who wage war no matter how viciously want us to believe that they really do think the end goals are all that matter. They want you to think it too. Let us translate that, "The warring and suffering in the path are nothing compared to the goals." Even the most unimaginably horrendous life is nothing when a good and happy eternity follows. Isn't that what everybody causing the trouble tells themselves? Isn't that the damn problem? And now we want to bring divine guidance and divine providence into it as if this abhorrent stance deserves reinforcing? Bringing God into it also advertises it for people want to feel God is close and involved. It would be insane to call you reprehensible for caring only about the goals but not when you introduce God into it. Worse, those who are not inflicting suffering in the war have the same outlook as those who are. That is also terrible.
Human nature knows it will get things wrong so it is desperate to be seen as having good intentions underneath it all no matter how much devastation happens. Persons reason that God is with you to guide you and to slowly work to get you returned to the straight and right path even as you unjustly kill the enemy. So God works around your evil intention so that it becomes the same as a good intention when all the results are in! God is used as a prop for trying to feel we mean well even when we don't.
The right path may not be chosen because
it is right though it may claim to be. That means that good results are no
proof of having had a good intention. Yet nearly always, people play along
with it if you think they can stand as proof. You use the good that
follows as evidence that your intention, you, brought all that wonderful
greatness about.
Those who do evil work on it to turn it into a should. It is always made to look good or like a necessary evil. It can even be presented as a sacrifice! And in a sense it always is! The person devoted only too money ends up sick and lonely. Christians boast of having no doubt of God’s love. That is a boast and its arrogant for surely everybody has doubts. It is uncanny how religion can have the nerve to tell us these things and yet deny that it is using God and faith to cover for evil. To condone evil as part of a divine plan or to pretend God is showing caring concern when he clearly is not is evil. It makes no sense to say that human nature has a strong evil side and then to ask us to trust those who preach religion and form it!
Religion promises freedom. The only thing that nobody can take from you is how you can respond to what is happening. Whether your attitude is anger or acceptance, nobody but you can do a thing about it. So it is about you not religion. Religion and god are made to matter more than they should. To change the message from, "Nobody can respond in any way to x but that person", to, "Everybody's response is a gift from God and an act of God," is clearly denigrating us for faith. That is not freedom.
Sarte said that you cannot have freedom if there is a God. His critics said you need God to give it to you. Imagine the critics are right. Then it is a simple truth like 1 +1 = 2. In that light it is stupid to say that God does not give us too much evidence that he exists for he does not want to force belief in us. How can God worry about that when it is proven that we need him to create our freedom? Everything else is minor compared to that.
The argument that God is not responsible for evil but merely responsible for using good to turn evil around and neutralise it or make it good is an odd one. God cannot be anything but responsible when he has that much power over evil! You have to be "inside" evil, involved in it to tweak it. The broken computer is not fixed from the outside without going inside. Our responsibility is not worth talking about in comparison to God's so why are we judged?
Whatever problems we have with validating morality God is no answer, and should be discarded. There is enough hindrance.
