Quick observation about the nature of god.

In his divine plan, he has condemned mankind to a life of hardship, misery, disease, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately death. But he/Jesus someday plans to ride in to the rescue (on a white horse, pulling a sword out of his throat, wearing a bunch of crowns, with his name written on the inside of his leg in invisible ink, and all the rest of that bad acid trip bullshit in Revelation), and he will make everything better.

Well, if you were watching a kitten suffer with a thorn in its paw, would you pull it out? I would.

But would you consider me a bad person if I waited a while, letting the poor little guy mew and squeal, knowing full well that I could help it at any time, but refusing to? I think, and you would probably agree that the virtuous thing to do would be to put an end to the cat’s suffering. Apparently though, that virtue is not a godly one, and although we generally equate godliness with virtue, this is one instance where the two don’t match up: the godly thing to do is to prolong the suffering of the innocent.

The only retort I can see Christians making, is the whole “god has a plan” cop-out.

What this amounts to is saying “we can not apply the rules of logic to the goings on of the universe, because what god does makes no sense to human minds.”

I would like to point out two problems with this argument. The first is that it directly contradicts one motivation for being faithful, which is that believing in god actually explains something. Creationists simultaneously claim that observing the natural world provides us with incontrovertible evidence of his existence, and that human rationality cannot be applied to the movements of the creator. WTF STFU?

The second problem is that if there’s anything that history has taught us, it’s that humans are impressively adept at figuring out how god’s hand influences the universe. Today we are nailing down the details of quantum mechanics, molecular biology, multi-dimensional calculus etc. In fact, over the ages, god has become progressively feebler, as we have learned that germs cause disease, not evil-spirits or divine punishment. We have learned that the universe as it stands today pretty much takes care of itself, and that we don’t need an invisible scarab to roll the sun across the sky, or a series of animals standing on each others’ backs to carry the earth through the cosmos. It’s painfully obvious that the god of today is impotent compared with the god of old, because the things he was invoked to explain have been sufficiently explained without him. He is vestigial: once useful, but now merely a reminder of how far we’ve come.

Tags: atheism, christianity, God, Jesus, Kittens

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