I’ve long since resigned myself to militant agnosticism and can’t
help a seething contempt for anyone who’d care enough about God to take a stand
on what God is. There are times in my life when I’ve believed in God, fervently,
there were also times when my atheism was utterly complete. At the moment, I’m
not sure I believe in God – but if I do, then I believe She’s a massive bitch.
I am not an atheist, I am an anti-theist. It’s not that I
believe there is no God, it’s that I am against God. God is a bloodthirsty
dictator who takes as much pleasure in killing those who try to obey his word
as those who don’t. He sees all, hears all thoughts, yet She never seems to
intervene except in the heads of His insane prophets, who inevitably tell their
charges that God wants them to ostracize, mutilate, and kill far more often
than to heal and help. I am against the Jewish deity I was raised to believe in
that killed six million who in living memory worshiped within his temples, I
am against a deity of all men who would allow more billions of his humble
servants to be slaughtered millennium by millennium; all by the same war, poverty,
and by other people's mental derangement which She never feels any need to cure. And then there are the lucky few among us, like me, fortunate enough to be born in peacetime. Those of us
lucky enough to die in peacetime of natural causes will mostly do so in slow, painful deaths over a
period of decades.
Yet in spite of all of this, in spite of all evidence to the
contrary that God is a force for totalitarian terror, His name persists through
the eons as the font of all love and mercy. The more people to whom She causes suffering,
the more people love Her. Every time mankind draws closer to an era of
enlightened secularism, God works His avenging angels through His worshippers,
and the greatness of civilization is brought down with an orgiastic holocaust
of blood – the closer to a godless civilization mankind comes, the more bloody its
downfall. For all this, and much more, I curse Him with all my heart, all my
might, and all my soul.
Perhaps the very fact that humanity seems incapable of
evolving past God is the ultimate evidence that She does exist. Man is a
creature of belief, not doubt; he trusts everything from his mother’s breast to
the nurse’s test-tubes. To endure life’s responsibilities, to build a civilization
better for those who come after him, man requires a greater purpose – and there
is no greater purpose than to redeem oneself by serving a Being who hears all thought, sees all action, and judges you accordingly.
Anyone who can still believe that such a being is capable of
mercy is cruel himself, and anyone who would have us believe that another
solution exists to make life less cruel – the worker’s paradise, the magic of
science, the virtues of the free market – is no less cruel than the most
dogmatic bible-thumper. Life has enough terrors in store without having to
endure the misery of realizing that our consolations are false during our most desperate
hours. If God is capable of saving us, then He simply refuses to do it. There is no evidence that God cares one way or another about the salvation of humanity. All that remains to redeem our world is the
capricious and vice-plagued salvation of our peers. There is nothing with which
we can fight our way out of savagery except to rely on other human beings, each
as beastly, grotesque, and horrible as ourselves. Terrible as we are, only we
can to protect those we love (and perhaps those we don’t as well) from as many
miseries as possible. As for those from which we cannot be protected, we must
endure our trials with as much bravery as we have the strength to bear.
And therefore, it is perhaps the cruelest of all life’s
ironies that the best institution in humanity’s possession to protect one
another is religion.
It’s nearly as terrible an irony that the same
totalitarianism of thought which made so many religious people over the millennia
want to kill one another could also encourage generosity and fealty to those with
whom they share characteristics. If you believe existence precedes essence, then
you believe the world to be a random place of chance encounters, nothing more.
It therefore profits a man nothing to act virtuously, merely to act in
self-interest. To put it more simply, those of us who believe that we are put
on earth without purpose are at the ultimate disadvantage: if there is no
dictator who judges our every action and thought, then the continuation and
improvement of our world is no longer an unshakeable duty. We who love the
secular world can pretend that the betterment of mankind is still every bit as
much a duty, but it’s an incredibly stupid lie. If life is no longer a gift from
a creator who will punish us if we do not acknowledge Him, then we can discard
its contents at our pleasure.
Therefore, even if there is only evolution in the hand of
the world’s creation, then religious people are still at a huge evolutionary
advantage from the rest of us. Their world has purpose we lack, they have an
end goal in sight for what their lives must achieve – and they have millions of
peers who share their goal. Most importantly, their desire for a better life
makes them have more children who then can then be taught to covet the same
end.
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