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When Self-Absorption Becomes Our Religion
“If you’re doubting the love of Jesus, you try to work it out through your circumstances. No, you never read your circumstances and then read the Love of Jesus. You read the Love of Jesus towards your circumstances. If you are doubting his love for you, if you are struggling with his authority in the midst of sadness and confusion, let the cross speak to you again.”
— Chad Scrubbs, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville and father of a nine-year-old daughter, murdered this week by a transgender maniac
It has been a hard week for many Christian families in Nashville. If their experience is like mine was after my own daughter died, they have some hard months still ahead of them. When someone you deeply love is deprived of her life, you at first feel strangely disloyal going on with your own. I suspect this is how returning soldiers feel when, having lost a friend in battle, they come home then have to get on with their own lives.
It would be nice if the mass murder of Christians in Nashville turns out to be a national tipping point for coming to grips with our present madness. I don’t really expect that, but I hope it will jar many Christians at least into an awareness that spiritual warfare is real. That something rather more is going on in the world than what kind of music we sing in church or whether taking the vaccine is really the measure of true Christian love.
What’s happening in our culture is a spiritual conflict that only sometimes takes a political form. But because it is essentially spiritual, it can’t really be explained or combated on materialist terms.
“Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.” — Revelation 12:17
I want to offer an explanatory idea that might connect some dots and perhaps provide a unifying point of view regarding several of the most troublesome and violent pathologies of our time: transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion, and (oddly enough) climate change. The unifying theory boils down to the observation that each of these different pathologies are just varying manifestations of a kind of metastatic self-absorption, one which has reached critical mass within our culture. I describe this self-absorption as “metastatic” because, like a cancer that has metastasized, the essential self-absorption our society has been promoting is spreading and appearing in unexpected places and ways.
I’ll propose how each of these represents a form of self-absorption further down, but at this point, let me suggest a reality-based lens through which to understand our situation.
In the first chapter of the apostle Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome, he offers an intriguing description of how a person, and even a society, descends into mental madness and moral chaos. Before looking at the text itself, perhaps I should say a word about how I conceive of the biblical text.
Many of us, I think, have a tendency to view the biblical text almost entirely as a vehicle for moral prescription. In other words, we view it as a source of moral guidelines for how to live our lives and, importantly, how to regain our moral footing in our relationship with God. Of course, the Bible is not less than a source of moral prescription, but it is also much more than that. One of the key things offered by the biblical text is an explanation and description of the reality in which we live — the circumstances of our very existence. To put it another way, the Bible is not only prescriptive but descriptive as well.
I believe that, among other things, the first chapter of the book of Romans describes some of the ideas and conditions that lead to moral and spiritual chaos. In that particular chapter, it is less about prescribing what to do and more about describing the context for mental and moral unraveling.
So with that background, let’s look at the relevant text:
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
The first thing to notice was that the descent of the people being talked about was characterized by a suppression of the truth. Truth, in this sense, is not merely in regard to some moral obligation but entails suppressing the knowledge of the nature of reality itself. It involves a willful closing of one’s eyes to God’s existence and the downstream implications of his existence for the circumstances of one’s own life. If God is there, then to suppress that truth in service to one’s own wickedness is a characteristic of those on a path of moral and intellectual suicide.
In my own life, I have known (and been friends with) any number of people who presented themselves as intellectually principled atheists. This is to say, they professed that their unbelief in God was for intellectually principled reasons. But invariably, I have found that my friends were less principled than they claimed. At the end of the day, there was always something in their lives they wanted to hang onto which a belief in God would have interfered with. Aldous Huxley was open enough to explain this dynamic of his own atheism in publication:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning — the Christian meaning, they insisted — of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
— Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
Everyone knows that God is real. There can be sincere and temporary myopia about God’s existence, but the more stubborn the resistance to the obvious reality, to what Romans describes as being “plain to them,” the more we ought to question just how principled such resistance really is.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
So what happens next involves a conscious decision not to acknowledge God and his place in the world relative to our own — “they neither glorified him as God….” That refusal is inevitably followed by the neglect of gratitude. If one takes the position that God isn’t real or doesn’t need to be acknowledged, then gratitude is owed to no one.
But what happens, apparently, to people who make such choices is that their thinking becomes futile. Why? Well, I suppose if you deny what is manifestly true about the universe — that God is in it and he is owed something by the rest of us — you have entered the realm of fantasy and delusion.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Now catch the next downstream effect of denying the reality of God — disordered sexual appetites combined with a thoroughgoing materialist life (i.e., “they worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.”) Loving and serving material things alongside misdirected sexual appetites is, according to the apostle Paul, an artifact of refusing to acknowledge God’s existence and what God’s existence implies about our obligations of gratitude. Human beings are worshiping creatures. If we preclude God from our consideration, the only remaining options for us to worship are material things, or ourselves.
So here’s where we find ourselves in the apostle’s argument: he tells us that if someone decides not to acknowledge God’s existence and God’s place, it disrupts that person’s ability to think well (i.e., “their thinking became futile”) and leads eventually to disordered sexual appetites and a love for material things above all else. Again, when you reject a fundamental facet of reality — God’s existence — your psyche and appetites begin to fragment and decay. You have gaslighted yourself and destabilized your own mind.
Humans are value-seeking beings, especially in regard to themselves. We want to know what we’re for and what gives us value. One of the foundational premises of the entire moral code set forth in the Bible is that man’s value is based on the fact that he bears God’s image (e.g., Genesis 9). In other words, human value is derivative but not inherent. We are valuable because, having been created (i.e., not self-originated), we are stamped with the image of our creator.
But from whence does human value come if a person decides that he is uncreated? What happens to someone when he loses this essential insight that his value is not inherent but derived? We are all only valuable by our association with God’s image. It is a marker of our importance and serves as a prohibition against harm. What happens once we cast that knowledge aside?
For generations now, we have indoctrinated American youth with the falsehoods that the material world is all there is, and that each person’s value is intrinsic. We have told children in schools across the land that the only true knowledge is the knowledge acquired through the investigation of material things. We have told them that there is no transcendent purpose or task they are here to undertake. We have indoctrinated generations of children with the idea that they are not for anything in particular. We have told them that the sexes are interchangeable parts and infinitely malleable, socially, but even more recently, physically. We have told children that they are nothing more than a conglomeration of material ingredients. And we have done this using the imprimatur and authority of government and “the science.”
We should not be surprised that many have actually believed this about themselves. We have left generations of children bereft of any knowledge of their actual value or transcendent purpose. That knowledge has been replaced by the superstitious belief that they are gods unto themselves, living in the world for nothing more than their own gratification and pleasure.
For at least a generation, we have possessed the technological means to propagate this unreality on a global scale, and now much of the rest of world is deeply enmired in self-worship and material consumption. And as the apostle Paul described, right on cue, many are descending into madness.
The difficulty, of course, is that it is easy enough to tell ourselves lies, but it is impossible to alter the fundamental nature and essence of our created being.
We can lie to ourselves but the real still abides.
Our modern lies have left human beings with an understanding of the world that is in complete conflict with true human nature. As a culture, we have lost an understanding of the distinctive differences between men and women. We do not understand the transcendent purpose of sexuality. We do not understand family, work, or what constitutes wisdom. How can we, when the very premise for our reasoning is based on lies?
Bereft of any understanding of why we matter, we inevitably conclude that our value and worth is intrinsic to ourselves. Everyone deserves a trophy just for showing up in all their own glorious, but material, uniqueness. One’s own gratification and psychological satisfaction become the measure of all that constitutes the good.
In other words, we make idols of ourselves and of our appetites. All of this, of course, is tarted up with benevolent happy talk about rights, the “marginalized,” and the “misunderstood.” In practice though, what actually emerges from such ferocious self-absorption is sterility and misery and death. The vulnerable, and especially the innocent, as we are even now seeing, inevitably become the prey.
Think about how this worship of self is reflected in homosexuality. Homosexuals, by very definition, have developed a sexual attraction to others like themselves. Their most intimate interests are not in someone different from themselves but in someone like themselves. There is nothing more attractive to them than someone whose form is the same as their own. Thus, they themselves represent the form they desire.
Transgender people believe their powers are so great that they can define their own reality. They are obsessively preoccupied with their bodies and, especially, their own supposed god-like ability to be self-defining. It would be hard to conceive of a more megalomaniacal frame of mind than to conceive of oneself as god over one’s own biology.
Abortion’s siren call is “my body, my choice.” It reflects a preoccupation with the self without regard to the effects of one’s choices on anyone else. The act of abortion is the act of someone for whom the desire to be free from any personal disturbance outweighs every other consideration. It makes total sense for anyone who believes that their own satisfaction and comfort is the measure of what is good in the world, and the only thing worth having.
And even something as seemingly unrelated to the self as climate change, is grounded in the idea that even the planetary weather revolves around us. We loom so large in our own imaginations that things that our parents and grandparents took for granted as the natural vagaries of the weather we now interpret as something entirely about ourselves. So much so, that no amount of scientific data can offset the frisson of virtue enjoyed by those who participate in the climate religion. They conceive of themselves as gods who are able to control even the climates of whole planets.
Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher, who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was famous for saying, “Let me write the songs of the nation, I care not who writes its laws.” He was making the obvious point that the arts influence human thought and that laws were downstream from that. The arts have long been on the bandwagon, promoting the view that the world revolves around us.
In 2017, a blockbuster movie biopic about the life of P.T. Barnum was released in American theaters. The musical score of The Greatest Showman yielded more than one hit. But perhaps the lyrics of no tune from that movie are more illustrative of the mindset of people in our time, who have become the center of their own universe, than the anthem of the movie “This Is Me“:
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me
…
and I know that I deserve your love
there’s nothing I’m not worthy of
…
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
No apologies. Worthiness suspended upon nothing more substantial than oneself. A self-drummed drumbeat for one’s own life. There is no transcendent drummer here. No recognition of fallenness, or of a need to be changed. Everything the singer is is already good and worthy. In the context of the movie itself, the song is sung by a sideshow performer and is a song of liberation of sorts. But sung into a culture that worships the self, the lyrics have a rather more expansive effect.
We’re facing a global spiritual crisis and that crisis isn’t confined merely to the fact that millions of people don’t want to live according to a Judeo-Christian moral code. That would be bad enough, but it would not be unprecedented. Our current conundrum is rather different. We’re living in a world in which many appear to really believe the lies: they have come to conceive of themselves as god-like beings, and with nothing less than a self-gratifying imperative. Taken to such extremes, people turn into monsters. We can see many of them going mad before our very eyes. The current alliance between transgender activists and violence is, in this regard, no aberration or mere coincidence.
The precious children who lie murdered in their Christian school in Nashville are the bitter satanic fruit of the church of self-absorption. After all, once you really come to believe the entire world revolves around you, everything is permitted.1
“Justice is driven back; godliness stands far off. Indeed, honesty stumbles in the city square and morality is not even able to enter.” — Isaiah 59:142
From my personal site, prompted by events in Nashville.
Published in General
@caroljoy
I’m afraid this is a little like saying “I keep looking for an art school where the artist who is celebrated is not that obsessed over the fact that I keep pissing on his masterpiece.” That a church recognizes a creator who takes seriously his own intention for his creation should be neither off-putting nor a surprise, I think. There was the wine, to be sure, but there was also the cross. Both have their place, but one looms rather larger than the other.
Sceptical Theism is the term often used to describe this response to the challenge explaining the existence of an imperfect world even while a perfect God (a triple omni God) exists.
There are some responses to skeptical theism. I will just mention one.
Most of us have moral intuitions. For example, if we see someone torturing a dog, we intuitively believe that the dog torturer is committing an immoral act. In response we might attempt to intervene in some say, perhaps directly by yelling at the dog torturer and maybe even attempting to separate the dog torturer from the dog and then placing the dog in an environment where the dog will not be tortured.
But one could take the view that a finite being could not possibly know whether there was some higher purpose for this person torturing the dog. How can we be absolutely certain, given our own cognitive limitations and our own moral imperfections, that by allowing this person to torture this dog, some greater good might result.
One could run this thought experiment again while replacing the word “dog” with the word “baby” and replace the words “torture” with “sexually molesting” and the thought experiment has even more impact.
It does seem that even as we acknowledge our own cognitive limitations and the limitations on our moral knowledge, we still believe that we must make decisions and form beliefs about morality.
Also, when we think about God, we often think that we have some idea about what God would do. We can say, “God works in mysterious ways,” but there is a cost to saying this. If we make God too mysterious, then we might wonder if we know anything about God at all. Clearly, many believers in God do believe that they know some things about God, despite the fact that these believers in God are finite beings attempting to understand an infinite being.
So, this move towards skeptical theism, I think, doesn’t really explain the existence of an imperfect world where a perfect God exists. It just says, “You don’t know why because you have human limitations.” But in a world where God does not exist, the chaos and suffering are not mysterious, at least in the abstract. If there is no triple-omni God, of course a hurricane is going to wipe out people’s homes and loved ones.
I agree that human societies have developed various criminal and civil justice systems. But we tend to think that the best justice systems are interested in deterrence and incapacitation rather than vengeance.
Also, we tend to think that collective punishment is unjust. In other words, if someone’s great-great grandfather commits a crime, we tend to think it would be unjust to punish the descendant. But in the Bible there is lots of verbiage about God punishing the descendant.
As for Jesus’s death on the cross acting as an atonement for the sins of others, this also doesn’t seem like justice, but rather an act of mercy. But it is still an act of mercy with a huge dose of cruelty wrapped into it.
If God wanted to forgive people for their sins, why have someone tortured and killed on a cross in order to allow this to happen? Also, why condition peoples’ forgiveness of their sins on whether or not they believed that some very counter-intuitive event (a man who was killed as a criminal by the Romans rising from the dead and ascending into heaven)?
Think of it this way. From this perspective, God created a world in which human beings observe regularities. They see people die, never to rise and live again.
So, in some sense God has trained human beings to think, “When a person dies, he stays dead. He does not rise from the grave.”
But then, according to a certain theology, God does intervene and violate this regularity. And if a human being in unable to understand that this regularity was violated in this one particular situation 2,000 years ago in a corner of the Roman Empire and not a false rumor or a hoax, this person will not go to heaven but will go to hell. And according to a certain theology, this demonstrates that God is perfectly just.
I think if one steps back and takes a fresh look at this theology, it does seem morally warped.
It would be like punishing someone for not believing that sometime a few thousand years ago, someone dropped a rock into a lake and this rock didn’t sink to the bottom like it always had in the past, but instead it floated. Anyone who doesn’t believe that in this particular circumstance, the rock floated rather than sank, is punished in hell for eternity. It makes no intuitive sense.
I think you are ignoring the knowledge problem that human beings have.
While God is often described as perfectly knowledgeable, human beings are rarely described that way. So, if someone fails to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, it might be simply due to the fact that this person does not know that Jesus is their Lord and Savior, not that this person is unwilling to repent of their sins.
A person might be willing to accept Thor, Zeus, Ben Shem Tov or anyone of thousands of people who have been thought to be divine throughout history in order to get into heaven, if they believed this was what was required.
But human beings lack perfect knowledge about the realities of the world in which they live. They don’t know exactly what happened last week in all corners of the world and they certainly don’t know what happened in a tiny corner of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago to a Jewish preacher. Sure, they can supposedly read about what happened by reading the gospels. But they don’t know whether those who wrote the gospels were accurately recording events that actually happened or if some mixture of fabrication and error was woven into the narrative.
But if one can have ones sins forgiven, then this means no matter how many children a person has raped, no matter how many children one has killed at a school, one can accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, repent of those sins and go to heaven.
Meanwhile, a Buddhist oncologist who spends everyday tending to the needs of children suffering from cancer, who has never raped a child and has never killed a child, who dies at the age of 70, this Buddhist oncologist does not go to heaven because he believed his parents when they raised him to be a Buddhist and was so busy helping children, he never spent any time studying the relative merits of Buddhism and Christianity.
I would argue that this theory of salvation seems like one that is unjust.
Very moving and well written.
@heavywater
I don’t mind debates over theism, but I think they’re off-topic in this thread. Just my opinion. You write very well – I think you should make your own post if you want to respond in that way.
I was motivated to respond to this post because in the middle of this post, the author quoted Romans 1:18-19 (and also verse 20)
Later in his post he wrote that while many atheists he has met appeared to be principled atheists, “my friends were less principled than they claimed” and “there was always something in their lives they wanted to hang onto which a belief in God would have interfered with.”
As someone who was raised in a non-religious household but has often been curious about various religious beliefs, I wanted to provide those who do are not convinced of many of the central doctrines of Christianity a bit of a defense.
The idea that someone could conduct a decades long examination of the Bible, church history and the philosophy of religion and end up not believing in many of the central doctrines of Christianity is a more charitable idea than that these people don’t believe because believing in God (and specifically the Christian version of God) would interfere with how they want to live their life.
When people, as a group, are being characterized in this way, I think it is reasonable to come to their defense.
If a Christian won’t come to their defense, then I have no problem doing it myself, even if by offering this defense means that I too will be criticizes as being arrogant or only wanting to turn away from God because I too am too wedded to certain aspects of my life.
https://ricochet.com/1138956/the-terrible-sea-lion/
@bdb, reminds me of the saying, “What a wicked animal. When attacked, it defends itself.”
When atheists are attacked, as in this post, I think offering them a defense is reasonable.
“Attacked.” Were you hurt because somebody said something on the internet?
No.
I think Ricochet should be a place where ideas are discussed and debated. If someone makes a series of claims, as the person that wrote this post did, it is reasonable for people to explain why they think some of those claims are incorrect.
The person who wrote this post wrote, “Everyone knows that God is real.”
There is no reason why we should allow such assertions a “safe space” and leave them uncontested.
You could host such a discussion on a thread that you author. What you are doing is not conversation, and it’s not even debate. This is simply resource denial. Nobody gets to say things that you disagree with if you can help it.
I’ll leave this thread now. Heckler’s veto wins again. But I’ll leave this. It’s not a new problem:
I have been thinking on this topic today and I wonder if self absorption is another way to put ourselves in the God head. It seems to me this is at least aligned.
Great article. Too bad the majority of the word count in the discussion is irrelevant to it.
Here is a question – if the existence of God is obvious, why did God need a chosen people? Why were there not followers of God throughout Africa, Europe, East Asia, America, etc? I think this should be revised to say that transcendent meaning is obvious – something beyond the material exists, but Who it is not obvious. That’s why religion is a human constant.
I also believe everyone will have the chance to be saved through Jesus Christ. Not everyone will be saved, but it will not be for lack of opportunity. I mean, Thomas got a chance to literally touch Jesus before he believed. God respects people enough to let them reject him, however.
I think this gets to the mystery of the “God-fearers.” The Gentiles, for example, being brought into the Abrahamic promise through Christ — a blessing to all nations.
Catholics believe we are bound by the sacraments — which effect what they signify (reception of the Holy Spirit in Baptism, strengthening in the Holy Spirit for evangelization in Confirmation, etc. . .) — but, God isn’t. He can act in people with no knowledge or incomplete knowledge of His Church, which is the ordinary means of salvation. God simply isn’t limited to the ordinary.
I appreciated C.S. Lewis’s version of this in The Last Battle of the Chronicles of Narnia. He puts one of the “enemy” soldiers — a Telmarine, who seem suspiciously like Muslims to me — in Narnia heaven at the end, and Aslan explains to him that, although he thought he was serving the Telmarine god, he was actually serving Aslan. He was a “God-fearer” although he belonged to the enemy nation — he allowed the Spirit to work in him. We have to allow for God to act in mysterious ways.
Also, I think of Jewish chosenness as being about the Christ coming from them. God doesn’t “need” anyone — He created us out of pure gratuitous love. But, He chose the Israelites as the people who would bring about his covenantal promises through Christ.
People, some people, have always, since creation, known of and followed God. Enoch knew God and was taken up to heaven without seeing death. Noah knew and followed God. Job predates the Torah, and yet he followed God.
The Jews were a flashing neon sign saying God IS, God is good, is supreme, and He intervenes in the affairs of men. The sign also pointed to the pivot point in all creation, the coming and sacrifice of God Incarnate to save men in His mercy from the accounting of His justice.
@keithlowery , this is a marvelous post. It is very timely, and I think you well serve the membership and public. When I read it, I agreed with every word in it and with your subsequent comments. And I have nothing to add even if I were to try. Excellent post.
(It’s a shame that it got pointlessly derailed.)
Enter the Atheist Evangelist . He show’s up in every Christian thread . I tend to believe his audience is the weak believer .
At the risk of abetting the threadjacking, let me just say this. I find the whole “I refuse to believe in God because there is suffering and injustice in the world, and if God allows that to happen, he’s just a big meanie” thing simplistic and a bit childish.
Our souls are sent to this world to learn. Learning about suffering and injustice is part of that learning. A world devoid of these things would not allow our souls to develop an understanding of justice and a sense of empathy. A world that was made nice and easy for us would be like a video game that was designed with bosses that could be one-shotted with a single light attack. Nice and easy, but never allowing us to develop skill.
That’s putting it nicely.
Perhaps chaos and suffering are not mysterious in a world where God does not exist, but love, dignity, laughter, joy, artistic inspiration, irony, self-sacrifice, among other things, sure are.
Thanks Keith for a very insightful post. I have read Romans many times and never thought through it that way. I will need to re-read Romans…
So, insteadof the evidential problem of evil, we consider the evidential problem of good.
This brings back memories of when I watched philosopher Dr. Stephen Law’s video on The Evil God Challenge. This perfectly Evil God allows some love, dignity, laughter, joy, artistic inspiration, irony and self-sacrifice only so that greater evil will result.
Dr. Law mentions that he doesn’t think this evil God is at least as plausible as the good God. Here is the video.
To tell you the truth, as interesting as these things are to contemplate, I don’t worry too much about them. If the God of Christianity exists, I’m in no position to judge Him. I don’t really have the capacity to understand Him, let alone analyze whether he’s good or evil. If it’s possible He’s good, I’ll take it on faith that He’s good. There’s no point in doing otherwise, is there? He created me, or else set my creation in motion. Same with everything and everyone I know or could possibly know. There’s no other team to be on.
My thinking is similar to yours.
If God is good, this good God would understand the confusing situation human beings find themselves in regarding God. Human beings are presented with a multitude of differing religious claims. This person over here claims to be God’s prophet. This person over there claims to be God’s prophet and warns not to listen to false prophets, including some of those other prophets. That person claims to be God himself and then he dies, with some people claiming they saw him alive after he died while others think this is a hoax. And then there are endless accusations of heresy within religious groups.
The good God knows of the human’s cognitive (and moral) limitations even more than humans themselves and therefore welcomes all human beings into heaven, regardless of whether they believed in Buddhism, Jainism, Mormonism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Judaism, Pentecostalism and so on and so forth.
If an evil God exists, human beings are in a terrible bind. God would actually have done what God is said to have done in 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12; He sent people a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false.
This trickster God, deceives people into believing false things and then condemns people for believing false things by allowing them to be tortured for eternity. This trickster God could very well have had Jesus lead people into believing that by accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, they would receive eternal life in heaven when, in reality, they would be punished with eternal torture in hell. The human being with his cognitive limitations never stood a chance in the face of this evil, trickster God.
If no God exists, then it makes sense that there would be a multitude of religions with differing and sometimes conflicting claims about issues large and small.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/04/thought-for-the-day-the-lefts-imperative-to-attack-faith.php
@heavywater
Sincere question: Why is it so important for you to persuade others to join you in your atheism? Why would a sincerely convinced atheist care whether someone shared their own skepticism? I’m just reacting to the rather massive investment of time you’ve made engaging with this post, and other posts for that matter. If you really believe there is no God, what incentive could there be to make sure others share in such a nihilistic worldview?
I confess the words of Shakespeare (paraphrased) have crossed my mind more than once while reading your comments: “The atheist dost protest too much, methinks.”
BTW – If you’re offended by God raining judgment down on those who hate the truth (i.e. see that pesky verse 10 you conveniently left out of your biblical citation. Pop quiz: there’s someone else in the bible famous for hating the truth. Who might that be?) you’ll really want to avoid 2 Chronicles 18, where God sends a lying spirit to King Ahab as a vehicle for facilitating Ahab’s actual death. The consistent message of the biblical text is that things go poorly for God’s enemies.
Here’s some sincere advice, you really ought to knock off the atheistic proselytizing. If God is real, he’s going to take a dim view of what you’re doing. A very dim view. It won’t go well for you. At all.
If, you really do believe God doesn’t exist, there can be no point in doing what you’re doing.
If you are truly an atheist, there is no point to anything. It’s all nihilism, all the way.
I’ve been known to lay down the rules on my posts as follows: This post presupposes the existence of God. That presupposition isn’t up for debate here. Take it somewhere else.
As the author, you’re allowed to enforce some rules (at least you used to be allowed; I haven’t read the new version of the CoC).
There’s always narcissistic solipsism.