God says he loves us
but he lets children die
And although you may ask him
he’ll never tell you why.
The reason for his silence
may be more than you can bear,
but your life will have more meaning
when you realise he’s not there.
Winston Hamilton
Ladies and gentlemen I give you Winston Hamilton, The Atheist Pig.
Love? Show me it.
I totally pillaged this picture from Atheism Resource’s Facebook page. How could I not?
Oh dear, I can't spot the problem...
The logic seems pretty watertight to me but I’d love to hear from a religionut or two where the problems might lie. The love of god is a beautiful thing right? Right.
Also, I do suggest checking out Atheism Resource, especially the comments on this particular picture. They’re pretty funny.
God Loves People
The image above is a re-creation (it was raining and I didn’t feel like stopping for a photo) of a billboard on the front of a church just up the road from my office. Apparently God loves people. What a happy bunch of God-loved (presumably) people in that picture.
Of course, it’s pretty easy to say that “God loves people” when you’re a middle class citizen of a first world country who, even if everything in your life went to shit would still be taken care of by the government (ironically, scientific studies indicate that this situation also happens to be conducive to atheism, but that’s another post).
The statement that God loves people doesn’t ever come with empirical evidence. As with the sign on the church, it comes with cognitive dissonance, rose-tinted glasses, pictures of smiling middle class people and some desperate hopes and fanciful dreams.
So do Christians have some evidence that God loves people? All I seem to be able to come up with is “The Bible” and this verse in particular (because what could be more precious right?):
3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
That’s pretty flimsy to be honest. As I’ve said in previous posts, you can’t use the Bible as evidence for anything unless you first prove that the God who wrote (inspired, whatever) the Bible actually exists since that’s where it’s authority would come from. But nobody has proven that God (the Christian one in this case) exists so the Bible can’t be used as evidence. Besides for that, there is also the minor problems of the hundreds of contradictions in the Bible and it’s statements contrary to reality (creation, the flood, living in a whale, child killing bears, foxes on fire, talking snakes and donkeys). Those minor issues seriously question the reliability of the book…
However, even if Christians had to be given a break and the Bible could be used as evidence and they attempted to use it as proof that “God loves people” they’re in for some trouble. You see “God loves people” is pretty non specific. It implies God loves all people. You’d want to state it like that, “God loves people”, so you don’t alienate anybody, so that you project inclusiveness. You’re trying to sell how nice God is and how much he wants to have a relationship with you and everybody else after all.
3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Besides for the obvious issue of why God would need to sacrifice a bit of himself to appease himself in a universe which he created himself with all of the rules designed by himself while knowing every occurrence in advance you have to ask yourself: does God, allowing a bit of himself to be killed once, make up for the millions of people he personally murdered before? Steve Wells comes up with a confirmed number of people murdered by God, in the Bible, of 2,476,636. The bible states in countable numbers that God murdered about two and a half million of the people He loves. It doesn’t end there though. If you include all the other people for which there aren’t any given numbers (the flood for example), the estimate is more like 25,000,000. Yea, twenty-five million people (and that’s just in the Bible…). About 20 million drowned babies, woman, children and men. But he loves them…
So, a quick recap:
Colour me impressed. Not with the staggering amount of evidence that “God loves people” but with the ridiculous amount that shows “God freaking hates people”. Or does He lovingly drown babies and children?
But, like I said, the Bible can’t be used as evidence and Christians should be thankful for that.
So, empirical, verifiable, repeatable evidence. What have we got to support “God loves people”. Well, nothing. You see, and Christians will agree, God doesn’t provide proof of His existence so He and His influence in the world is then necessarily undetectable; you just gotta have faith… Ah, some Christians might want to say that they have proof that God loves people (because good things sometimes happen perhaps?) but then they’d have to show me something that Christians have that nobody else has (and not having a freaking blood transfusion isn’t one of those things).
Do we have evidence that God doesn’t love people? Why, yes, a fuckton in fact.
Parent’s love their children right? Know any parent that would, if they were able to prevent it in any way, let their child be raped? Repeatedly raped? Go hungry? Be beaten to death? Tortured? Starve to death? Die of thirst? Forced to live as a slave, having all of the aforementioned done every day until they die?
No, loving parents don’t let that happen to children if they can help it. Because parents (most normal people as it were) love children. God, on the other hand, let’s exactly that happen to children every, single, day. Even little “Christian children” who pray to him to save them from beatings and forced prostitution get diddly squat from the almighty creator of the universe who has the power to save them and allegedly loves people, children especially.
You see, one might, possibly (but hugely unlikely) be able to make a case that adults can be left to suffer because of whatever reason one could contrive but you have to be a pretty cold bastard to even try to make a case that letting any child starve to death while it is sexually abused and assaulted can be justified in any way, for anybody or anything, at any time.
This is what God’s “love” looks like:
These children are people too.
These children are also people.
Another bunch of people.
African children are people too, God.
Only religion can manage to compress two lies into a three word sentence and celebrate it: “God loves people”. You do not let that happen to people you love if you can help it. God, being almighty, presumably can help it, but doesn’t.
God doesn’t love people. There is no God, thankfully.
Horrible shit happens to good people and the sooner everybody wakes up and realises that the only way it will get better is if we (us, humans) make it better, the better off we’ll all be.
Now, go donate some money to Oxfam (click here). $5 and you’ll be doing a better job than any God ever did.
God is love. Christians love to say that. God is love. Like so many things in Christianity the phrase is uttered along with a disturbing lack of understanding on the part of the utterer (how awesome is that word?).
I’ve been thinking about this subject for the longest time, usually in the context of the massive amount of contradictions in the Bible. The Bible is brim full of contradictions, so disturbingly many you have to wonder how it’s possible for such a large bunch of people to display the cognitive dissonance required to be Christian in the first place.
I recently read a post by Greta Christina discussing a post by William Lane Craig where he essentially defends the horrors of the Old Testament. Greta takes a dim view on the things said by Craig, and rightly so. If I had been afforded the opportunity I would have re-posted her entire post here. It’s brilliant and I’m not sure I can do it justice by discussing it here but I’ll make an attempt anyway. Read Greta’s full post here: http://bit.ly/emnPcU (shortened URL because the actual URL is long…)
The basic premise of what Craig wrote is that the atrocities committed in the Bible (genocide, infanticide, slavery, rape) was OK because God commanded it and whatever God commands is good and anyway, the Canaanites were fine to be murdered because they had gone against this God. For like, a long time!
To quote Greta’s paraphrasing:
When guilty people got killed, they deserved it because they were guilty and bad… and when innocent people got killed, even when innocent babies were killed, they went to Heaven, and it was all hunky dory in the end.
This is some of what Craig had to say:
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged?
Greta goes on to say that Craig isn’t some extremist or “drooling wingnut” but is rather a well-educated, widely published author. Mostly normal then. I agree with that, Craig seems pretty normal (comparatively) and I think he is representative of average Christianity.
The problem with what Craig is saying is that as long as God commands you to kill somebody, it’s entirely OK. Babies, children, women, men, anything, as long as God tells you it’s OK, then it’s OK. Many people, most Christians I would imagine, share his views on this.
In her post, Greta makes two very good points. The first is that the rest of us, the ones not dragged down by the millstone that is the horrors of the Bible can look back at history and rightly say that those things were terrible, we’re not proud of our history but it’s behind us, we accept it was disgusting behaviour and that we’ll go out of our way to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The second point she makes is that the religionuts can’t do that, don’t have that option since their holy book defends and praises these actions. They can’t look back and say it was terrible because in doing so, they have to agree that their deity is an evil bastard. Instead:
They have to either a) cherry-pick the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t; or b) come up with contorted rationalizations for why the most blatant, grotesque, black-and-white evil really isn’t all that bad.
Option A leaves you where most Christians are today, ignoring the horrors in the scripture and believing some made up bullshit fairy tale that ISN’T reflected in their perfect unchanging operating manual, otherwise known as The Holy Bible. Option B is where Craig is, defending the indefensible atrocities ordered by his deity.
Craig spends some time trying to defend this indefensible position, sprouting idiocies like:
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.
Again, the almighty creator of the universe seems more than just a little impotent, unable to fix the situation without commanding the murder of little babies and the rape of virgin woman. I’ve made this point many times before: a being able to conceive of the entire universe, create it and run it somehow can’t fix a couple of insolent people without having to pack every species of animal in a boat and flood the entire planet? The only conceivable way he can correct the evil behaviour of middle eastern city states is to command his ‘chosen people’ to engage in campaigns of genocide that involves bashing little baby heads against rocks. Seriously? And Christians believe this crap?
So here’s the brass tacks: The Christian God thinks genocide is a great way to accomplish things. He feels that bashing babies heads open is an awesome thing to do for them. He feels slavery is an awesome thing to do to heathens (or your own people, less harshly though).
And if you’re a Christian, you have to either agree and defend that or ignore it altogether. If you do either: fuck you. Fuck, you.
Do Christians understand what it is that they are defending? Do they GET the horror of what they worship? Can you conceive of just how fucking awful the things are we are talking about here.
Let’s explore some of that. Christians should study what comes next, their God fucking LOVES this shit. Hundreds of pages in The Holy Bible go on and on about it. Obviously I can’t possibly convey the abject horror and terror and… there aren’t words to describe what it is adequately.
Not strictly part of genocide but good God DID say to murder some babies. Here's one. Clearly fucking dead. Probably not Christian. Definitely not a Jew. God must be so fucking happy.
Some lovely genocide of heathens. Rejoice followers of Yahweh! For they fucking had it coming.
Some Armenian genocide victims! I guess those non-Yahweh lovers had it coming right? Of course they did. Praise god for this particular awesome.
Divine justice if ever you saw it hey Christian soldier?
Divine Yahweh approved justice. Awesome. Three in one justice it seems like. They must not have been virgins. God prefers you keep those for yourself.
I’ll leave out the references to the horror in the Bible so there’s an opening for some pious dick head to say something so I can get another post out of it.
God is love. Tell me another one asshole.
Yea… I think I’ll pass on that love thanks a whole bunch.
Check out the rest of NonStampCollector’s (the third most awesome Aussie) video’s here: http://www.youtube.com/user/NonStampCollector
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