Will Of The People - Chapter 4

Religion: Life Philosophies for the Uninquisitive

“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

- Thomas Jefferson


All the world’s religions are, first and foremost, philosophies. A philosophy is a proposed theory of reality, and a logically consistent mode of thinking springing from that reality. The problem with most religions is that the people who follow them, even the experts within them, never seem to question the truthfulness and logic of the philosophical underpinnings of their beliefs. They tend to focus upon the logic of the thoughts that proceed from that point of origin, and in many cases these subsequent thoughts are indeed consistent and logical. But just as with the Socialists, if the philosophical origins of a belief are false, any subsequent thoughts it generates, no matter how logically consistent, are superfluous and irrelevant.

Christians argue among themselves about exactly what Christ meant, but never seem to ask why God would need a son to forgive humanity when he could just do it himself without sacrifice or complication. Moslems, Jews, and Christians argue about exactly which people receive forgiveness from God, but never ask why God would create humanity so defectively as to need forgiveness at all, especially when all his other creations seem to be perfectly made.

Reason is superior to faith[1], because without reason to first intelligently fix the object and meaning of it, faith is nothing but an intellectual wedding to an unconsidered thought. Religion usually lacks the guidance of reason, and is often just an arranged marriage of the mind foisted upon people by the particular culture of their birth, which few ever resist. Fewer still ever annul that which is forced upon them, and with eyes open look outward for that which is proper and true. It is a flawed and poorly matched mental spouse that people try to live with as best as they can and derive as much joy from as possible, because they know not that other choices exist or even that their minds need not wed at all until a time of their own choosing. People will argue with this mental spouse, tolerate it, cooperate with it, obey it, force themselves to believe they adore it, cheat on it, and seek reconciliation with it; but few will ever leave it and most end up dying married to it after forcing it in turn upon their own children. Even in today’s world, divorce of the mind from the culture’s proffered philosophy is still very taboo.

Give me ever a true faith, one that is fixed and commanded by Reason, and that extols Emotion Transcendent as the meaning of life. Precise reason is the true path and the only way to God’s abode; and noble emotion is the only means of understanding the meaning of his holy creation. God is a god of infinite reason and infinite noble emotion, for these things constitute the totality of goodness throughout creation. And whether God is a being or merely the force behind the eternal beating pulse of the universe, in either case I believe that Reason is The How to do things, and Emotion is The Why.

All of this would be easy to ignore if it did not have political implications and a profound effect on world history. If religion was just a private matter without any potential to wield world power, I would never include it in this work. Private matters are not my concern, other than defending them as private. But we all know this is not the case. Religious beliefs are one of the primary forces in history and are still just as dominant a force in geopolitics today as any other considerations.

If we are to discover a new philosophy that clarifies the truth, and construct a government from this philosophy, we must analyze religion just as strenuously as we have done with democracy and socialism. As with my analysis of these other two, this is intended to illuminate the truth, not to simply be controversial or offensive. I am aware that many people will automatically be offended by this assault upon religion and that this chapter may be the hardest to read. I ask the reader to suspend their feelings while they read this, and judge my views on their logical merits. I am neither inexperienced in religious belief nor do I hold any bitterness about my time when these beliefs ruled my life. As the previous chapters illustrate, I am not a common anti-religion liberal spewing conventional rhetoric about the stupidity of belief in God. So I ask you to not automatically disregard my words simply because you think I am an atheist with a heart of stone. I can assure you, I am neither.

Brothers and Sisters, if your beliefs are true and eternal, can they not withstand an assault by logic and reason? Will they not shine all the more brightly when the blazing searchlight of the mind’s curiosity is aimed upon them? Is not the creator of the universe also the highest master of intelligence and reason, and is he not a god who loves those who search for the truth and embrace it when it is found? Who among you truly think that the mind is just an instrument of sin, and cannot be trusted in searching out the wisdom of God? Let us use the gifts we have been given, our sharp minds, our love of truth, and our insatiable curiosity to justify all of our beliefs and thus affirm them conducive to civilization, and fit to live by.



Part 1 – The Cause, Function, and Danger of Religion

Life is very complex, and the perceptive person can notice that there seems to be more things occurring around us than can be fully explained by science. In time, as our scientific knowledge increases, some of these things become clearer to us. But in past ages, the number of unanswered questions was enormous. What is the Sun? Will it fall upon us and burn us someday? What causes the wind? Why do our crops grow as they do? Why do sometimes they grow poorly? Why does the river flood sometimes? Our lack of answers to so many questions combined with the precarious state of our existence created a climate of fear among our ancestors.

People need some kind of order to be able to work and live. They cannot go about their daily business without a basic establishment of reality within their minds. Imagine if you lived in ancient times and had no idea what the sun was or why it moves as it does. You would have no assurance that it wouldn’t move differently today than it moved yesterday, and so it would be a source of concern or even fear for you. It could get closer to you and burn you. It could go away and leave you frozen. You would need to look at it often, just to see if it is doing something different or dangerous. Multiply this concern to include all of the other natural phenomena such as wind, rain, the sea, night, and dangerous animals, and you would be continually afraid of something all the time. With this climate of fear all around you, and affecting all your neighbors as well, how could you go about each day and simply focus on your work? And with everybody fearful and nervous all the time, surely violence and panic would flare up rather often when even trivial events happened.

It is this combination of widespread agitation and lack of productivity that cannot be tolerated by civilization and is the primary reason why religious beliefs became organized, codified, and systematically practiced. Religion provides basic answers to questions that must be settled for people to stop worrying, become pacified, and get to work. This is the reason that early religions focused to a great degree on explanations of natural phenomena and also reinforced the notion of regularity and predictability among them. ‘The sun will do the same normal thing each day because it is following an eternal routine, so you can stop worrying about it changing behaviors’. ‘If, by chance, it does deviate from its normal activity, the religious leaders will determine what this means and tell us what we should do to fix it’. ‘Either way, everything is fine and so you can stop worrying and get back to work’.

Under these primitive conditions, without science to find the actual answers to these questions, religion is an extremely important and good thing. People cannot live peaceably and productively if they are constantly worried that the sun is going to fall on them or that the wind could come and carry their children away. And in the absence of real scientific answers to what are the sun and the wind, it is far better to tell the people tales about Helios and Zephyrs than to tell them nothing and leave them in fear.



A Religion is a Theory of Reality – Not Just a Belief

Notice that the only way for the people to actually stop worrying about the sun and the wind is for them to completely believe that Helios and Zephyrs are strictly real. An imaginative tale alone will not allay their fears. They require answers intended to definitively fix the very state of reality itself. Even if the story told to them contains elements of danger, and can be a source of fear itself, the fear engendered by the story is very different to the people than the fear of not knowing reality. A specific danger contained within an orderly form of reality can be accommodated, avoided, or even overcome. As long as the people know the rules of the game of reality they can take whatever steps they wish to fight and survive. But when the people do not even know the rules of the game, and have no idea of what form reality takes, they are left as powerless victims of random fear and pain. It is the lack of knowing reality that is the most demoralizing condition for people to face, for life itself then seems to be nothing more than a perpetual state of insanity.

So for a religion to be effective, it must provide a plausible theory of reality that creates an overlay of order that people can apply to the world around them, and that endows all the random events around them with a non-random intention or meaning. Such is the aversion that people have to uncertainty and having no view of reality that they will willingly adopt any seemingly plausible theory presented to them without a rigorous evaluation of its merits and truthfulness. Whether it is Zeus, Jehovah, Buddha or Allah; as long as the story presented is clever, endowed with truly beautiful sensibilities and imagery, and provides a comprehensive theory of reality, the people will believe it and be calmed by this belief.

There is only one other requirement for a religion. Because humans are herd animals, especially intellectually, the people are inclined to believe that which many others believe and disbelieve that which only a few believe. Thus, for a religion to be effective and actually attain the status of a delineator or reality, it must be uniformly believed by a majority of the people. In this way, it can become just a background thought that is universally accepted as obvious by the people. And because of the totality of this belief, and the way in which it becomes a part of those things which are never subjected to questioning, like gravity, it establishes itself as immutable reality. Only when the religion achieves this state of thoughtless acceptance and universal compliance does it completely fulfill its purpose: To give the people a theory of reality that gives them answers to frightening and unanswerable questions, so that they can ignore these concerns and get on with living.

When the religion is believed by only a minority of the people, additional things are required for it to become a convincing theory of reality. First of these is that the people who are believers usually congregate together, so that in their neighborhood they become the local majority view. This can sometimes take a more drastic form where the believers separate themselves from the rest of the population and form monasteries, communes, and other such exclusive and isolated communities.

Additionally, minority religious groups make up for lack of numbers by greater efforts and more definitive demonstrations of belief. They seek to prove their reality by showing that if they are so committed to it, and if it is such a pervasive part of their lives, that the only way this could be so is if the beliefs they hold are more obviously and potently true, and therefore harder to relegate to mere perfunctory observance. A minority religious community that does this reinforces the potency of the claims of their view of reality.

In either case, whether by overwhelming numbers or by demonstrations of piety and power, the religion must be believed to be not just a religion, but a thorough explanation of the reality of the universe. And since it explains reality, it becomes truth itself, not just a belief like all the other religions. For those who believe, their religion is not truly a religion. They look upon the people of other religions not as similar believers who only differ on the content of their beliefs. They consider these other people to be the foolish, backwards, and evil who will not believe the truth, but instead follow a half-baked story that has some form of Godliness, but lacks the power thereof – those who willingly accept the counterfeit over the true and holy.

The reason why believers cannot see their similarity with those of other religions is because they see their religion not as a singular choice on the menu of philosophies, but as truth itself. It is as obvious and immutable to them as gravity itself. And because it is so obvious, they have little patience with those who believe differently.



The Positive and Negative Effects of Religion

This shows us both the positive and negative effects of religion. The positive effect of religion is to pacify people and enable them to be disciplined, peaceful, and productive members of civilization. Without religion, chaos and fear would reign among the common people. Religion is therefore a functional necessity for civilization unless a similarly utilitarian philosophy can be believed by the people instead.

But religion has some horrible negative consequences. First of all, for the reasons stated above, religious groups have an inborn propensity to animosity against other religious groups and unbelievers. Though they may also value tolerance and pacifism, by their very claims to describe reality they create the justification for hostility against those who disagree. Indeed, if others will not believe reality, but instead strongly believe unreal things, can believers not say that these other people are either stupid or insane to some degree? And if they are stupid or insane, and yet are powerful and strongly impact the world, are believers not correct to fight against them so that reality will prevail in the minds of mankind?

This is a correct ethical intention for those who promote a philosophy. I too wish to fight insanity and stupidity so that mankind will more abundantly see and believe the light. But unfortunately, religion does this the wrong way by failing to first verify the truth of their claims. Those who fight for their religion are like members of a prison gang who will protect each other with violence regardless of whether their member started the fight or is otherwise in the wrong.[2] Instead of promoting the right, they promote their faction only. This is because they assume that their faction is always, by definition, right. And they believe this way because, as we have seen, they do not subject their beliefs to any logical review. Their beliefs define the sum total of reality to them and are not open to discussion, review, or verification of any kind.

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

- Richard Dawkins


That the religions do not validate their beliefs by logic is a by product of their own success. Since a religion must become as obvious as gravity to be effective, they likewise sow the seeds of incuriosity about their justification. Who among the sane sees a need to prove that gravity exists? Likewise, the believers see no need to prove that which is both obvious and essential to them.

But there is another reason why the religions don’t logically verify themselves, and it is quite obvious. They won’t survive the analysis.

And so we see that the combination of antipathy towards other groups, an aggressive promotion of their beliefs, and a lack of any rational verification of their beliefs causes religion to be a violent, destructive, and barbaric force in human history. And beyond all the strife and wars that it causes, religion widely broadcasts various versions of philosophical insanity around the globe. I say philosophical insanity because the religions are each a philosophy and each of these contains glaring logical inconsistencies, and the simultaneous belief of opposing thoughts is insanity. So we can see that by opposing curiosity, logic, and the eternal search for True Reality, and by settling for ancient theories of reality that haven’t even been thoroughly tested and proven; religion imprisons the mind of man and stops his progress in the true quest to find and understand God.



The Philosophies of the Uninquisitive

A religion is a philosophy for living that is adopted by people who take little or no effort to verify its truthfulness. This is to be expected of the masses because we have already seen how the people must have some view of reality to go about their daily business, yet they lack the intelligence to evaluate philosophic questions. But even with this situation, it is stunning to me how completely incurious the average person is when they seek to discover and define reality itself.

You Christians out there, there are over a Billion Moslems in the world who disagree with you. Are these people all stupid and evil? What do you know of their beliefs other than the most simple and visible elements? Have you even taken the time to read any part of the Koran just to see what they believe and if it has any merits at all? Have you ever gone to observe their prayers in person, and the beauty of the way they worship? Could you not have taken a moment and went to a bookstore, bought a paperback Koran, and just read it for a few days before you blindly gave your heart to Jesus? Would that have been too much effort to discover the truth, whether it is Moslem or Christian that you ultimately became, before you chose the God you would follow? Would God hate you just for making sure you were right?

You Moslems out there, there are a similar multitude of Christians whose beliefs are even more ancient than yours. Are these people all blind, and rightly not chosen by Allah to become Moslems because they are unworthy of his favor? Are they all barbaric fiends who seek to kill your family and defile the name of your most compassionate and merciful God? What steps have you taken since the day you were born to discover what they believe and how they worship? How can you fear and oppose that which you do not even understand? Who among you has read the Christian Bible, and studied the mysteries of these people? Have you not seen the art and heard all the music that has been created by pious Christians? Can you listen to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and disregard the beauty and nobility of these people out of hand? How do you know that their way is not superior to yours? If you are to proclaim that Allah is great, and Allah is merciful, shall you do so without knowing why this is so, and in comparison to what?

Even though I know that curiosity is the exclusive property of the intelligent, I am still amazed by the completely thoughtless way that people will go about pledging their minds, bodies, and souls to the god proffered to them, without even as much consideration as one might give when choosing a wireless phone company.

“To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.”

- Sophy Burnham



Part 2 – A Logical Evaluation of Religion

I stated before that the religions do not validate their philosophies by a logical review, and that such a review would significantly damage their claims to reality. I shall now proceed to perform just such an analysis. I shall mostly confine my discussion to Christianity, but aspects of these ideas will equally apply to other religions as well. I do this so that you may think. I do this so that you will question. I do not want you to lose God, and become an unfeeling atheist. Rather, it is my hope that your mind may be set free so that you can find God.

Also, I would like you to consider the sheer hopelessness and nihilism intrinsic to the Christian faith. Not so, Christians would say. Hope is the very foundation of our faith. We have a hope in life everlasting, and in our God who has shown His love to us. But let us examine these ideas further, and you will see what I mean.



Christianity is Nihilistic

Christians believe that Man is nothing. Man can never be anything, by his own efforts and devices. Man will never be good. Man will never be wise. Man will never be valuable, unless he is saved from his own weakness by God. To a Christian, Man is utterly without any future or hope without divine help.

This is simply a variation of nihilism. In the Christian mind, Man and his actions are utterly pointless and futile when we consider ourselves only. Only by the inclusion of an external force (God) intruding upon our universe does any meaning come to our existence. And this meaning is only intrinsic to God and his universe, not humanity and ours. That is, humanity has value (when saved by God) only because it is a creation of a God who Himself has value. We are merely objects of creation of a worthy being, but lack any intrinsic worth ourselves.

In this view, no human pursuit of any kind has any value other than obtaining salvation. A scientist may discover vast new fields of knowledge, but all this is pointless since God already knows everything, and the scientist might be all wrong anyway. Humans are not wise, and so we don’t really know if the things we think and discover are actually correct or not. Only God knows such things. Musicians may compose wondrous new music, but this too is pointless if it does not serve to glorify God. Extolling the carnal pleasures of human life or expressing ideas that do not align with the Gospel serve only to distract weak humans away from their sole worthy task: Loving God and obtaining salvation. Even those like myself who strive to create a more noble and just world are wasting our lives. Jesus is the only one who can do this and nothing we can propose or invent will ever work out well. It is pointless to do anything. Nothing that we build is good, works as we want, or lasts.

For a Christian who actually lives and breathes his faith, life consists of only patiently enduring pain while waiting for a merciful release through death, when his reward and real life will come. There is no point in doing anything other than those things that keep his eyes firmly fixed upon God. For in this life, only danger is real. He can be tempted, confused, and confounded by the world and its devices into losing focus and falling away on forbidden roads. And so it is best to not strive to do anything that might lead into unforeseen temptations, even if these temptations could be as innocuous-appearing as new knowledge.

So Christians feel that this life is an unreal life. Nothing we see has any real substance. Only the invisible is real, and only this will be visible and existent in the next life. But as for the here and now, and what we see with our physical senses, all of this is pointless and futile. To them, this is wisdom.

So in Christian Reality, human existence in this universe (not the afterlife which can only be described as a yet-unbuilt next universe) is completely pointless, futile and hopeless. This is the most powerful and pervasive version of nihilism ever found on our planet.

Look at the depths of darkness that this mindset entails. To believe this, I must believe that I am utterly worthless. I am not smart; I can never become so. My love of Reason and daily striving to acquire a greater comprehension of it are meaningless. I am not good; I am evil and I will always be thus no matter how hard I strive to be good. Even my eternal inclination and desire to do good only results in evil, for it is my nature. The quivering of my heart and tears in my eyes from heartfelt Empathy are not true goodness. My feelings are irrelevant and misguided, and signify nothing. And it is nothing but vanity for me to esteem myself smart, wise, or good in the least, for I am nothing greater than dust.

But not only am I so hopelessly deficient, everybody in the world is too. And not only is the whole planet feckless and irrelevant, ALL people from every age have been so as well. Only God can fix this, because we are so utterly without merit that we can not accomplish anything close to this. We are polluted, and are rendered powerless by our pollution. And nothing that we can ever think of or strive to do to improve this situation can ever be effective at all, no matter how earnestly we strive or however much we sacrifice to achieve our goal. We are lost – forever.

What a woeful and despicable way of thinking this is! What an abominable pack of lies to tell the Children of Men! Think of all the despair and guilt and sheer pain this has caused untold millions of people over the centuries. What a vile corruption of humanity this is, teaching us to give up on life itself, all for some supposed crime we have never committed or even contemplated doing. And all for some supposed benefit we can never know the truth about until it is too late to change our minds, or do anything at all. What a manifestly evil virus that has infested our minds for these long centuries.

What creature, great or small, can be so twisted as to believe that they are nothing, and that all of their kind have always been thus also? Does any lion or sparrow spend his days lamenting the irrelevance and corrupt state of his species? How can such a belief echo any natural or neutral state? But here too we see perverseness. Christians believe that our natural state, and even that natural state of the world, is evil. That is, the constant struggle for life between predator and prey is an evil construct that only came into being as a consequence of our Fall. Life for the animals is not supposed to be this way. They are supposed to all live in total felicity. Even the plants upon our world are not as they should be. They were changed to a more harsh and noxious state as a consequence of our sin. And so the very planet and all life upon it are forced to live in an evil mode, all as a consequence of humanity’s evil nature. We are not only dung ourselves, but our guilt is so great that we have even caused the whole planet to suffer under the weight of our transgression. We are hopeless and vile creatures that, by our very presence upon this world, corrupted it forever.

To those of you who have heard the music of Morrissey, you might understand how his lyrics often take self-deprecation and self-loathing to extremes. While I do like his music, at times his elaborate and verbose confessions of his own hideousness are a bit much to bear. He is a bit of a drama queen. But he has nothing on Christianity. Only Christians take self-loathing to such a level as to say that the presence of only two of our kind upon a planet, for a relatively short while, was sufficient to permanently stain the entire globe for all other life for thousands of years to come.

This is not wisdom. This is mental illness, or more properly, irrational philosophy. This is not a logical appraisal of the reality around us. There is no justification for such a negative view of humanity, and I am no Pollyanna when it comes to humanity. I know of our weakness and stupidity. Those who know me well can testify to my perpetual grumbling over the stupidity and idiocy of the human animal. The life of any who would be a philosopher is full of such irritation and anxiety. But we are not hopeless. We can advance if we try to do so, instead of hiding away our lives while waiting for the next one. We can be good. We can be wise. Even though we are not so today, we can become so. We can build a just world, or at least one that is a lot more just than today. We can discover the universe through science. It just takes time and effort. We can revel in our lives and in the pleasures thereof; taking joy in LIFE is not evil. We can feel and believe and dream. We can live.

We must remember that only 100 years ago, most people still got around on foot or by horse. Only 500 years ago, we started to have any idea of how our planet looked, or how it moved through the heavens. Only a few thousand years ago did we begin to become civilized. And not that long ago, we existed entirely as wandering hunter-gatherers. We haven’t been at this whole self-improvement thing really all that long. Of course we have made mistakes and are still quite barbaric. What would you expect? We are a young species. Let us not give up on ourselves before we even reach adolescence. Remember always that Fear and Pain are NEVER a valid foundation for a philosophy. And neither is life-abandonment, in whatever form it takes.

Once we understand how utterly without hope Christians feel humanity is without divine help, we can then begin to understand basis for the ‘joy’ these Christians feel when faced with even the smallest of blessings. Christians believe that they deserve to go to hell. That is precisely what would happen to them right now if God did not grant them time in this mortal life to repent and believe. And that is what will happen to all those who fail to do this. And so this life is a probationary period, magnanimously provided by a loving God even though, by rights, we deserve no such stay of our sentence.

Understanding this, we can see then how Christians would feel joy even when calamity strikes them. Their house burned to the ground, and their baby son was killed in the fire; but at least their other children escaped unharmed. Halleluiah. God has blessed them by preserving these other children, who could have perished also. And so they feel a real joy from this.

To those of us who are not Christians, this seems crazy. But think a bit. If you had no expectations that your neutral-luck state would include life, freedom, and family, but you instead considered yourself to be exceedingly lucky to not be deservedly in the pit of hell this very instant, you would certainly feel abundantly lucky just to be able to enjoy ANY surviving children or even any life of your own.

And so by having this undercurrent of hopelessness in their understanding of reality, Christians establish a logical basis for feeling gratitude and joy over the most trivial and mundane of small pleasures. When we see their occasional demonstrations of spiritual ecstasy, this is partly a self-hypnotic state induced so as to belong within their group, and partly the real joy of a guilty criminal who is astonished by his good fortune of having his conviction voided by an overly-compassionate judge.

But make no mistake. This joy we see from Christians is based upon their previously established hopeless view of reality. There would be no reason for them to feel so lucky and grateful unless it was preceded by guilt and despair.




Christianity is a Death Cult. They worship an executed god who had to die to perform his greatest work. Their holy symbol is an execution device, like a noose or guillotine. And they consider all of time prior to their own deaths as a dark time – like death itself. They die when they are born into this world, for then they become sinful. And if they repent and believe, they are born when they die, as they enter their eternal rest. Life is death, and death is life.

Christians may quibble that they are born again as soon as they embrace Christ as their savior, and not when they die. But nothing is permanently decided until they die. Though they may be born again while living, they might subsequently fall away before they die. And so being ‘born again’ doesn’t establish anything until this belief and faith is sealed by their own deaths. So once again, we see how death is the key goal in a Christian life. Embracing the gospel is first. But once this is done, their true lives don’t begin until they have endured in this faith unto their deaths. All of the time spent as being ‘born again’ is simply a celebratory period where they anticipate how their lives are going to be after death. The sing alleluias and raise hosannas not because of today, but because of what God has in store for them when their REAL life begins – after death. And should they show gratitude for today, this is once again just their gratitude for not being deservedly in hell this very moment.

To a Christian, the luckiest thing that could happen to them would be for them to die right now, provided that they are indeed in a state of grace. For this life is of no value other than in embracing the gospel. And once this occurs, only bad things or irrelevant things can follow. They might lose their faith – it has happened to other believers. And so the longer they live, after they have embraced Christ, the greater the danger of them falling away. Since nothing that they do on this earth is of any permanent value, there is no point is lingering here long, facing danger, and doing irrelevant things. And on top of this, life inevitably involves considerable pain, disappointment, and fear. There is simply no better outcome for a Christian than for them to keel over dead right now. As such, we can see that a successful death is the only point of their lives, and that the sooner this occurs, the better.

This focus upon death in the Christian life is a further indication of the intrinsic perverseness of the belief. All beliefs so oriented are blasphemies against life itself. And since there is no logical justification for their belief, as we shall see below, it is also a blasphemy against truth, light, and reason.



Free Will, Accountability, and the Omnipotence of God

A standard belief of Christianity is that God is omnipotent[3], omniscient, and omnipresent. It is also believed that mankind has Free Will, which is defined as the right to chose whether to obey God, or to disobey. It is also believed that mankind is accountable for their actions and will be justly punished for choosing to disobey God. These ideas are not logically consistent, and cannot all be true simultaneously.

First of all, there cannot be Free Will if God is omnipotent. If God is omnipotent, this means that he possesses all the power in the universe. This would indicate that everything that happens is executed by him, or occurs as a logical follow-through of actions he once took. Since power is the only means by which anything can occur, even a thought, it would be impossible for anybody to do or even think anything that God didn’t make them do. Even sinful or disobedient thoughts could not be something created by people, because God alone has the power to do anything at all. If you are thinking sinful thoughts, this would only be because either he made your brain to do so naturally[4], or that he put those thoughts in your head. In either case, you would be powerless to do anything different because that is exactly what you are – powerless.

Free Will, by definition, is a power. It is the power to think independently and the power to choose. One who has Free Will is a god because he possesses a power. It may not be a very mighty or far-reaching power, but it is a power nonetheless. We could have a universe where every human is a weak god, possessing Free Will, and God is the strongest god. But if we say that God is omnipotent, then Free Will cannot also exist.

If people are powerless to think or do anything by their own Free Will, then how can they be accountable in any way for whatever they do? What is the justice in punishing somebody who was powerless to control their actions, and didn’t even think of them independently in the first place? And if they did evil, is it not God himself who made them do this evil?

If Free Will exists, then God cannot possess all power. This would mean that it is possible that other gods exist that we don’t know about since we would know for sure that he does not possess all power. Perhaps, if there are other gods, one of them could be even stronger than the one we call God? How do we not know that this particular God isn’t keeping us in the dark about other choices that we could worship?

Also, since by possessing Free Will we are also gods, we can see that gods are capable of making mistakes and being otherwise imperfect. How do we know for sure that this God is perfect? Perhaps there is another God who is more perfect or better than this one? Indeed, when we look at our world and all the pain thereon, can we really feel confident that this finite god is the best choice to rule over our planet? Maybe he is, but it is possible that he is not.

If we believe that God is indeed perfect, then it is plausible to assume that we could become so ourselves someday. Since he has demonstrated that a god may exist in a perfected state, could we not reasonably believe that we could become thus ourselves someday? If we can all become like him, then why would we wish to forgo this course so as to be servants to him perpetually instead?

If God is omnipotent then mankind neither sins nor is guilty of anything, since we lack the power to do sin or anything else. There would be no other gods and God would be the highest. If Free Will exists then God may not be either perfect or the only god worthy of our worship. If he does not possess all power, then we really wouldn’t know whether he is the right one for us to obey, and the possibility exists that he could even be an evil god seeking to enslave us.

The presence of Free Will, by removing totality from God’s purview, casts doubt upon the ethics of obeying his will alone. Since God would become a finite god in this case, there would be far less of a moral imperative to obey him, and there would be reasonable questions about him assuming the right to judge the souls of men and to mete out punishment. Free Will destroys his right to so completely dominate us, seeing how we are gods just as he is, though less advanced. It could be seen that his superiority gives him the right to rule us somewhat, but certainly not to an infinite extent. The eldest brother of a group of siblings can rightfully rule over the others, but this does not give him the right to control every aspect of his siblings’ lives. It certainly doesn’t justify his punishing them with damnation or other grievous harm. Even if God is our father, a father can rightfully command and punish his children up to only a finite degree. Anything beyond this is just tyranny and abuse.



Omnipotence Revealed in Greater Detail

What if omnipotence means that God has the power to do anything, but allows people to execute their own Free Will and power also? This seems like a possibility that could explain much. But unfortunately, a rigorous evaluation of this premise shows it to be not as logical as it initially seems.

First of all, if we look at human Free Will as a kind of power franchise granted by God to mankind, we must assume by this that God wants people to make their own choice about something of importance. Since we can see that it is impossible for the outcome of this choice to create a condition that is not what God wants or intends[5] (if God is said to be omnipotent as we have described), and since we know that God is omniscient (and therefore knows what we shall choose before we choose it), we can then see that the supposed power of Free Will is not really a power at all, but merely the hollow exercise of a program that God both created and knows the outcome of. Even if it can be said that we can choose to disobey God, since he both knows what we are going to do ahead of time, and intentionally gave us the power to make this choice; it can be rightly said that he not only intended us to ‘disobey’ him, but that he gave us the means to do so. Thus, this ‘disobedience’ is nothing more than another form of obedience to his intention and will. As such, it is exactly the same as if we did not possess Free Will, and is only the illusion of independence.

There cannot be more than one omnipotent being in the universe, and there cannot be any other empowered beings at all even if only one omnipotent god exists. Even if there were no antipathy between two such omnipotent gods, it is not possible for them to both possess the capacity to wield any power at any time in any way.

If you and I both have the keys to the same car parked in our garage, and we are both legal owners of the car, we can see that we both have the right to drive this car. We both have this power. But we cannot use this power in a completely unfettered manner simply because we both cannot drive the same car at the same time. As soon as one of us chooses to use the power to drive this car, that power is immediately temporarily stricken from the other. If we were to ride together, saying that we both wanted to go the same place anyway, nothing is changed. The act of controlling the car and the pleasant experience of driving is a power too. Saying that one of us might prefer to drive and the other always prefers to not drive is not valid either. In this case all we are saying is that one of us prefers to wield this power and the other prefers not to. This still doesn’t mean that we both equally possess and use this power in an unfettered manner. Saying that Zeus doesn’t really like the ocean very much and so lets his brother run aquatic affairs, but still controls the ocean, is false. Poseidon has this power alone, and so Zeus does not have it at all.

If you are omnipotent and I am not, and we both have keys to the same car, my power to control the car would be non-existent. Anytime you wished to drive the car you could do so even if I wanted to drive also. My power would be encumbered by your will. The only way that I could drive the car is if you agreed to let me do so. This would mean that the exercise of my power in driving would be conducted under the auspices of your assent only. This would make my power void, and only the conditional execution of your will, not the unfettered expression of mine. If I drove in a manner you did not like, if I went too fast or exercised my power in any way that was not also in accordance with your power and will, you could stop me from driving instantly. Thus, my power is not really a power at all. It is merely the comprehension of a power without actually possessing it. If we continue this thinking to the full extent of omnipotence, then even my mere comprehension of power would not exist, as the power of comprehension itself would be encumbered by an omnipotent being.

The mere fact that we possess the power of comprehension of anything proves that we do not live in a universe with an omnipotent being. And if we actually don’t comprehend though we think we do, we certainly cannot exercise Free Will which is utterly void without true comprehension.

It is this logical sham that allows people to simultaneously believe in the omnipotence of God, the Free Will of man, and the justification of God’s punishment upon those who ‘disobey’ him. An omnipotent God cannot exist in a universe where anybody else has either independent actions or thoughts. He would be the loneliest being in the universe. He would exist as a child with an infinite supply of provisions and toys, but without parents, siblings, friends, or anybody else to talk to. Thus, the whole universe itself would be nothing more than an enormous lonely Hell that he intentionally created for himself, and he would be all alone within in.



Hell Cannot Exist Unless God is a Sadist

If God is omnipotent, then he rules unopposed and unchallenged. This means that everything that happens he wants to occur. There is no struggle of good versus evil if God is omnipotent. If he is all powerful, he has won that struggle itself, for there is no one else to struggle with.

Whence cometh Satan then? Satan would be nothing but an unthinking and powerless pawn of God, possessing neither independent thoughts of rebellion nor a desire to harm humanity. Everything he did to people would be done on God’s orders and because God wanted it to happen. Every act of torture, every rape of a screaming child, every terror in the eyes of a mother watching her children being killed; all would be done because God wanted it to happen and specifically made it occur. If he is omnipotent, not only did he allow these things to happen, since there is nobody else who can have independent thoughts – He did it Himself.

If we assume that the omnipotence of God means that he can do anything, but that he allows other powers to exist also, such as a powerful Satan; this really does nothing to change the situation. Just as with the ‘power franchise’ granted to humanity to exercise Free Will, if God let Satan have power and the ability to rebel and do evil, it would still be just a part of the plan for the universe that he knew about from the beginning and intentionally created. Because he knew what would happen and set the universe in motion anyway, none of the ‘power’ of Satan would be valid. Satan would only be following a script that God knew about from the beginning, and in this way, Satan could be seen as completely obeying God.

Whichever way we choose to define omnipotence, whether it means possessing all the power of the universe or just possessing the capacity to wield any power, though not solely controlling these powers; in either case we get the same logical situation. As long as God is said to be omniscient and said to have created the universe, either form of omnipotence creates the exact same logical condition. Power is not valid unless it is unencumbered by other powers. Unless Satan has the power to do things that are surprising to God, and are potentially destructive to him, he has no real power at all. Free Will is only a power if it means that your thoughts and choices can surprise God and can create a condition which God must adapt to. Without these conditions, power is void. Encumbered power is nothing more than puppetry.

Since God is completely unopposed, there would be no need for a struggle for the souls of mankind, and salvation could be given to everybody. If he did not choose to save everybody, why would he not then quickly and painlessly dispose of the rest of the people without subjecting them to ‘punishment’ for their ‘sins’, which they were powerless to influence anyway? Where is the justice of Hell, and eternal and infinite punishment, if those who suffer it had no power in the first place? Even if we believe that mankind does possess Free Will, how can it be just to punish people for finite transgressions of the law with an infinite punishment?[6] Can any human being do anything so heinous as to merit eternal agony? And is it not nobler to simply obliterate their consciousness completely rather than put them in a dungeon for all eternity? What purpose does it serve The Good to have The Bad continue to exist forever in a state of screaming agony? Does it truly make The Good feel better to watch the evil squirm and moan in their dungeon? Can any who is truly Good long endure being witness to such torture, or to even know that it is occurring outside of their view?

The concept of Hell cannot be logically endorsed by anyone but a sadist. But there is another sadistic element of it that bespeaks badly of God, if it were to truly exist. We are told that Hell is a place of imprisonment and of torture. It is a place where the flesh is perpetually ripped from your body, you are burned alive, and where your mind is subjected to every form of fear and horror imaginable; and all of this to an infinite degree and in an unending fashion. It is a place of torture, and the various means of torture had to be invented and built by somebody. Since nobody else has the power to do so, it must have been invented and built by God.[7] This would mean that God designed and built the most infinitely sadistic place and torture devices in the universe. If Hell exists, God is the most perverted sadist in the universe.

Now some say that Hell is just a ‘separation from God’, and that the pains one feels are only a result of being outside of his presence. It is said that the unclean and the clean cannot dwell together, and that the sin and guilt of the sinner would make it impossible for him to abide being in God’s presence. This view is flawed also. First of all, here on the earth, are we in the presence of God now? Does he live here? If he does, then why don’t the sinful feel such terror as has been stated? If he does not live here, and is not here, then aren’t we already in a condition of ‘separation from God’ normally?

An even stronger argument is this next one. If we need to be in God’s presence to avoid being in hellish agony, and we are in his presence here on the earth, isn’t him removing his presence just the exact same functional thing as casting us into the pit if it similarly puts us into agony? If I have a puppy who I know will go literally insane with grief if leave him alone in my apartment, will I be so cruel as to go out alone for a walk if he pees on the carpet? Isn’t my ‘removing my presence’ nothing more than a euphemism for thrusting him down to hell? If I was God, and I wanted to go out for a walk, couldn’t I at least make the puppy think that I was still there in the apartment?

Another aspect of this ‘separation from God’ claim is that it is impossible to be the one who caused this separation unless one possesses the power to do anything. If God is omnipotent, this would not be possible. If a separation occurred, it would be God doing it to us in response to actions we were powerless to avoid. The puppy has no power to open the door and go out for a walk alone without my consent. I alone have this power.

And the last argument against the ‘separation from God’ claim is that it is an oxymoron if we believe that God is omnipresent. One cannot be separated from that which is omnipresent.

Taking this to a further argument against Hell, if God is omnipresent then he must also be in Hell. We are told that only the evil go to Hell. Either God is evil, is not omnipresent, or there is no hell.



The Morality of Punishment

Why do you punish your children? What is the purpose of inflicting harm on those who you love? Do you do this just to release your anger, and to cause them fear? Of course not. Just like you, an infinitely loving, infinitely patient father would punish his children for only one reason: To teach them the right way of being so as to see that their future behavior improves.

When we consider this, we can see that punishment is only proper when there is an anticipation that the punishment will not last forever and that there will be an opportunity for the one being punished to demonstrate that their behavior is improved. But Hell, by being an eternal punishment without any chance for redemption, violates these moral principles and does not serve any purpose that is consistent with love. It also doesn’t accomplish any remediation of the sinful or their sins. The sinner and his sins continue to exist in the same flawed state for all eternity. Seeing how God created everything, and is perfect; we must assume that this is the outcome that he wanted from the beginning. Is this attitude at all consistent with one belonging to a loving parent – the desire and plan for your child to fail in life and then to pay for their ‘crimes’? Also, this would mean that God intentionally created sin, making him a sinner.

Another reason for punishment is that it can be necessary for the safety of The Good to remove The Bad from their presence. This is the basic motive of our prison system – a kind of moral quarantine system. This system can make sense here on earth because we neither created the criminal mind nor have any effective means of rehabilitating it. But for an omnipotent being this is not similarly reasonable.

It has been said that if people will be so evil as to repeatedly use their Free Will to disobey God, that there is nothing that God can rightly do to force them to be good and behave. If we are presuming the reality of Free Will, this can be a confusing issue. But if we think more deeply on the matter, we can see that God created each person with a specific set of strengths and weaknesses. It is thought that it is up to us to restrain our weaknesses and to purposefully strive to increase our strengths. Those who can do this sufficiently are The Good, and those who fail in these efforts are The Bad. Thus, our own propensity to improve ourselves, whether by faith or other means, is the deciding factor in our salvation.

But unfortunately, this belief is false and is just another example of puppetry. Since God created the universe and the rules that it follows, and God created you with your specific collection of attributes, and since God knows the exact future and the strengths of each temptation you will ever encounter; he would know ahead of time whether your striving to be good would be successfully executed or not. All the various events that try your faith are created by him, not by you, because if your will were to influence external events you would be a co-creator of the universe. God knows all the moral bullets you will have to dodge in your life because he is the only one who could have fired the gun. And so if you fail to meet standards he has set, it is not an indication that you are evil. Rather, it is just an indication that he didn’t build you sufficiently strong to accomplish the goals he set for you. If I build a Go Kart, I can hardly complain and seek to ‘punish’ it when it fails to successfully climb a 15,000 foot mountain that I wish to cross. I’m the one who built the thing according to my own specifications. If those specifications aren’t good enough for it to behave how I would like, whose fault is that other than mine?

A fine example of humanity’s striving to understand life and obtain salvation is if we can think of ourselves as computer programs, written to solve a complex problem. An intelligent program[8] will try to solve a problem by looking at all the examples of success and failure it is shown and then trying to draw inferences from these examples. It seeks to find the way to proceed that will cause success. As it does this, it will learn and become stronger and stronger by its own internal efforts. This is what God supposedly wants us to do. But in the end, if we cannot successfully figure out the right answer, this can hardly be considered the fault of us programs. It is the programmer who is to blame if he did not make us sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently stable, or sufficiently complete to correctly solve the problem he has given us. Even if we are built strong enough to figure out the right answer, the only reason we could have failed then is that the programmer gave us bogus or indistinct data for us to draw our inferences from.

As creations, just like programs, we will do exactly what we have been designed to do. And if the creator has a complaint about our performance, that complaint should rightly be aimed at himself only, for he is the one who made us as we are. Shall the elephant be ashamed that it is not as fast as the cheetah? Shall the cheetah be ashamed that it cannot fly?

Now none of this is a justification for murder or other heinous acts. You and I, certainly, have the right to be angry with the murderer and to punish him. We cannot tolerate people who are so dangerously defective living in our midst. But God has no similar moral basis to be angry with the murderer. God has no right to punish him or to even speak a word against him. This is so because God created him this way, or created the sequence of events in his life that hurt and damaged him so severely that he lost his way and became this murderer. Either God created a being so manifestly deficient as this murderer and then threw him in our midst, or he took a good person and by repeated painful events and tragedies in this world utterly destroyed his humanity. In either case, God is even more to blame for all of this than the murderer himself. He could have simply chosen never to create this murderer at all, and thus spared both him and us all of this pain.

And so we can see that if God truly created us, and if he is perfect, then he has no moral right whatsoever to punish us. Did he make a mistake when he created us? If he is perfect this cannot be. This would also mean that we are perfectly created to do exactly what he intends us to do; otherwise he has made an error. Therefore, we can only do those things that are exactly within the bounds of our design expectations. Therefore, we cannot do anything wrong in the eyes of God.

Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man change none of this. This story is just a clever bit of mental pretzel baking that is used to get past the clear logic I presented above. It is said that God created mankind perfectly, but that our own disobedience caused our fall from grace and for us to be changed into a mortal and imperfect state. As I have just said, it is logically impossible for us to disobey an omnipotent God because everything we do is a possibility he specifically built into us and because he knows the future and exactly what we are going to do anyway. If he didn’t want us to ‘fall’, he should have made us smarter or wiser from the beginning. If he didn’t want us to ‘fall’ he should have created the universe in a different form so that we wouldn’t face this situation in the first place. Is there only one form that the universe can take? If this is so, can God really be called omnipotent when he is a slave to the universe itself? The only thing that makes sense here is that God both knew we were going to fall and wanted it to happen. How in the name of justice can we be responsible for this then? And what is the justice of permanently punishing every human for the momentary error of just two of us?

The fact remains that this story, along with the notion of an omnipotent God granting us Free Will, are just shallow logical shams that are employed to create a justification of guilt within humanity that has no true logical basis. If God is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and created everything; humanity has no logical basis for guilt or shame of any kind, and God would have no moral right to punish anybody for anything.

If God is neither perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, nor created everything, what moral right does he have to punish us? None, without being a tyrant. Therefore, it is impossible for God to punish anybody in any way and not be evil. While it can be moral for humans to punish each other for grievous behavior, or for parents to do so to raise their children; God has no moral right to punish anybody.

Therefore, there can be no Hell, nor is there any sin. There can be evil acts, but these cannot be sin because it is impossible to take any action against the will of an omnipotent, perfect God. You cannot think nor do anything he didn’t intend for you. If evil is done he intended it, so it cannot be a transgression of his law; it cannot be sin.

Because there is no Hell or sin, salvation is unnecessary and mankind is not in any kind of spiritual danger. No atonement, redemption, or savior is required because we are not spiritually guilty of anything. Though we may do evil deeds on this earth, none of this has anything to do with God. Since we are behaving exactly how he created us to behave, he has no cause to accuse us of anything. Human law may punish us for evil, but God cannot.



A Perfect Being Would Not Desire Worship

Look at your children for a moment. You want them to grow up to be good people. You want them to learn the rules of life, so that they will be successful and happy as adults. To accomplish this, you want them to listen to you and obey you so that you can control them. You seek to control them, not to feed you vanity, but so that by controlling them you can both protect them and teach them. As they grow, you will loosen your control over them because they will need to learn how to handle their autonomy. The ultimate aim of all this work is for them to be trained to be civilized people, for them to be successful and happy, and for them to supercede you one day. If this is accomplished successfully, you are truly to be honored by all of us, for noble parenting is a dying art of incalculable value to humanity.

This is the goal of the loving parent, and I truly hope that you will someday bask in the glowing pride of seeing your work made manifest in the lives of your adult children. But what shall we say of the parent who cannot let go of their children, and who seeks to control every aspect of their lives long into adulthood? What can we say about a parent who demands to be adored and fawned over by their grown children? Are these not the perverse and fearful acts of a parent who is not fit to rule over their children? Can you rightly imagine yourself demanding adoration and worship of your children perpetually?

Of course you would not. You would be right to expect respect from them always, and you would likewise hope to be loved by them always, but you would never seek to command them all the days of your life. Indeed, the prospect of doing so would likely seem tiresome and pointless to you.

If we are to imagine God as our father, and as a loving parent trying to show us the way in life, can we find any rational cause for him to seek to be worshipped by all of us forever? Respected and loved we can understand, but is his desire for exclusive adoration and worship a feeling that is logically consistent with a perfect being? Shall he seek to completely rule the hearts and minds of his children, causing them to sacrifice their own autonomy and amputate aspects of their lives inconsistent with serving him? Of course this is not so.

If we think of God as being as high above us as we are above the ants, the situation is no different. If I have an Ant Farm in my house, shall I expect these busy insects to bow down to me and make tiny cathedrals in the sand to my honor? Shall I rightly become angry with them, and flood their little world when they fail to do so?[9]

A perfect being cares nothing for the worship of his children or for the worship of lesser creatures. Worship is only a tool used by the insecure to establish a tenuous state of dominance over those around him who are nearly equals. A King seeks to be worshiped by the other nobles in his court because it is a demonstration to all that he is the highest among this group of equals. It is a ritual employed to secure the power of an individual who possesses no intrinsically definitive moral claim to it. There is no other function for worship, and a perfect being would neither benefit by it nor desire it.

As such, the worship of a God is either unnecessary, or it simply proves that the God who requires it is not worthy of that worship.



Finding the True Faith – An Unreasonable Expectation

If we are to presume that God approves of only one religion on this planet, and that we must find and believe the correct one to be saved, we are faced with an impossible task. Those who are born in the Middle East have about a 95% chance of becoming Moslem. Those born in America, if they become religious, have a similarly high chance of becoming some type of Christian. People have massive pressure from their society to join the religion that the majority follows, and many nations (including even America) have laws that either explicitly or implicitly follow the philosophy of the majority religion. And even though I have complained about those who did not investigate many religions before they joined one, I must acknowledge it is almost impossible for most people to find out anything about minority religions if they are illiterate or have no exposure to the wider world. My complaints are aimed at those of you who had access to other faiths, but simply took no effort to learn about them.

Given these conditions, it would seem logical that if it were vital for people to find the one true faith that God would have to make it far more obvious to the world exactly which one that is. But this is not the case. Instead of any religion existing in a singularly unique and shining mode, they all seem to exhibit roughly the same degree of moral value and moral confusion. If we are to say that Islam is the true way, then we have to be more specific and figure out exactly which version of Islam is correct, for there are many. Looking at Christianity, the problem is even more severe. There are literally dozens of different Christian faiths! And to make matters worse, they often disagree with each other to such an extent that they fight themselves in wars.

If God expects us to find the right holy needle in the religious haystack, he ought to set up one church with a more definitive light. It ought to not splinter into factions. And more than this, it ought to progressively prevail against the other faiths, both in warfare and in membership. But this is not so.

The Crusades were an opportunity to find out whether God fights for Christians or for Moslems. But the results of these wars and of the Moorish wars in North Africa and Iberia can rightly be called a draw. The wars of the Reformation were an opportunity to see whether God loves Catholics or Protestants best. The results of these wars were also mostly draws. If God fights on the side of his believers, as is told of times in ancient Judea, why did we not see any miraculous demonstrations of his support for anybody?

On top of this, we might expect the false churches to dwindle in power as more and more people find and embrace the obvious light of the true church. This has not happened. Catholics, Mormons, Protestants, and Moslems are all gaining in members and in political power each day. If we believe in an apocalyptic future, where evil grows stronger and stronger, we still fail to see any definitive concentrations of power anywhere. So whether we are using a barometer of good or a barometer of evil, we have absolutely no definitive indications from God about the weather at all. And if it is said that a storm is coming and we should find the right spiritual shelter, he certainly has done nothing to help us do so.

This is an utterly illogical condition if it is also imperative that we join the right faith and forsake all the others. As such, it casts serious doubts upon both the need to find the right religion and the likelihood that any of the world’s religions are actually approved by God.



God is not an Interactive God - Prayer

A common idea of almost every religion is that you can pray to God and by doing so God will look favorably upon you and sometimes fulfill your petition of him. Moslems, Christians, Jews, and many others all have stories about God answering their prayers and performing mighty deeds in response to pious human supplication. Individual members of each faith are taught to pray, and are taught to expect positive results from prayer. And for the majority of believers, this has been seemingly confirmed as true in their own lives and minds. Indeed, this is a primary reason why people continue to follow their faith. If it were not so, many would lose interest and discontinue the practices of their faith.

Now we can clearly see that this cannot be possible, that God would positively respond to prayers of all faiths. If this were so, then God wouldn’t care about the differences between the faiths, which would mean that the faiths themselves are irrelevant. And since the intentions of the believers of different faiths are often directly opposed, it is not possible for God to positively answer everybody’s prayers.

A simple example of a similar situation can be seen at the Super Bowl. Before this championship game, religious-minded players from both teams will spend time in prayer, asking God for strength and for victory in their upcoming match. Under nearly all conditions, it can rightly be said that each player deserves to be helped by God and that their team has performed in a manner worthy of divine help. They have struggled against great adversity, and yet prevailed. Or, they have demonstrated such mastery and prowess over the course of the season as to have clearly earned the right to be endorsed by God in this final game. On an individual level, many of these pious players have struggled mightily since they were teenage boys to achieve this success, often demonstrating great individual courage and commitment. Surely, at this ultimate moment in their professional lives, they have earned the right to be approved by God and assisted in their quest to be champions.

And yet these conditions exist more or less equally on both teams. We can see that each side has a similar moral right to be assisted by God. But notwithstanding this, the outcome is always the same. Half of these men will have their prayers answered and half will not. Similar things have happened to soldiers, businessmen, and competitive people of all kinds since these religions started. And the same can be said for the prayers of women and children for safety in their homes. Sometimes their prayer is answered, sometimes it is not. And there is no clear-cut process where we can see that those whose prayers were not answered were more evil or less pious than the others who pray and succeed.

There are many bogus excuses used to explain this lack of clear efficacy of prayer. And to a great extent, human psychology tricks the mind into skewing the results of prayer into an improperly positive light. When a battle is won, the general who prayed for victory will claim to his troops “With God’s help, we have won our fight!” while the losing general almost never says “God has let us down and chosen instead to help our enemy”. When people’s prayers go unfulfilled, the answer that the faiths give to the believers is usually one of the following:

- You didn’t pray for something that is truly good

- You didn’t pray for something that is in accordance with God’s will

- God will answer your prayer in a way that is not obviously visible to you

- You need to purify yourself more if God is to grant you this prayer

- God is testing your faith, so as to reward you more greatly later


Let us analyze each of these ideas.

The failure of a prayer because it did not seek a truly good outcome is a very spurious argument. When the women of the past fell to their knees and prayed “O God, let not the Huns come and overthrow our town. And let them not kill my husband, rape me, and carry my children into slavery” exactly which aspect of this prayer could be seen as an unrighteous or evil request? I tend to doubt that many serious prayers that are unfulfilled intend something that could clearly be called not good. In our world, we all know that harm does come to good people, including the good people who pray for good things.

The claim that a prayer is not in accordance with God’s will is logically void. If God will not do anything you ask without it already being something on his agenda, what is the point of praying at all? Since he is going to do his will whether you ask for it or not, and since he won’t vary from that plan no matter who asks so, there is no point to pray at all.

This brings up one of the best arguments against prayer. If God only follows his will, and ignores any prayer that does not agree with that will, there is no point to prayer because it is of no logical effect. But on the other hand, if we say that prayer is effective, then it must be that your prayer makes God do something that he otherwise wasn’t going to do. If you can make God do something outside of his will, this creates a situation where you are re-writing God’s plan for the universe. This would mean that God’s plan is constantly being re-written and modified by the millions of prayers he is answering each day. Of course, we can see that this would mean that God would not be able to make or follow any kind of plan for the universe at all, and that no such permanent plan could exist.

If we say that God knew what everybody was going to pray for since the dawn of time, and structured his plan so that the final outcome of everything, including all the adjustments made by fulfilling every prayer would end up doing exactly what he intended; we are left with another situation of puppetry, where the ‘prayers’ of each person were not an exercise of any kind of power to any effect, but the irrelevant speaking of words that he both put into your mouth, and requires you to say so that the universe will turn out as he intended.

From this we can see that either prayer is never effective because God was going to do what you asked for anyway, or he will reject your appeal if it doesn’t fit in his plan; or that for prayer to actually be effective it would mean that God is a servant of humanity, constantly doing tasks for people, and has no power to either plan the future or know its outcome.

When it is said that God will answer your prayer in another, hidden way, this is just a disingenuous answer. By this, if anything good happens to you subsequent to your unanswered prayer, it can be said “See! God has answered your earlier prayer by giving you this blessing instead” which can clearly be seen as illogical. If I am starving and ask for food, and God sends rain instead, shall I declare “The Lord has blessed me with drink, which I guess I was going to need anyway if my well ran dry. And he has blessed me with food come next harvest time, now that our crops are watered”? Looking for the silver linings in life is a good thing, but it can be taken to an insane extent. If I ask for something, but God gives me something else that I supposedly need more, what is the point of the asking? Was God going to withhold my urgently needed blessing of water until the time I asked for immediate food? What kind of crazy vending machine gives you Doritos when you purchase a Snickers bar?

Saying that God did not answer your prayer because you are not pure enough is just the application of guilt to cover the underlying illogic of the faith. When things don’t work out like the religion says things should, the standard answer throughout the ages is that the believer himself is at fault. Because good people usually want to do good and are capable of disciplining themselves to that end, they are susceptible to manipulation by guilt. And so when the religion tells the believer that they should try a little harder for God to approve of them, most will comply no matter what efforts have already been expended to that end. This is naked evil.

To say that God is testing your faith so as to reward you more abundantly later is complete nonsense. Since God already knows you better than you know yourself, and since he knows whether ultimately you will pass this trial and thus deserve his blessing, what is the point of putting you through a test for which he already knows the outcome? This thinking can be applied in a broader way to more than just prayer.

Some say that the reason that God makes you go through all this adversity, even though he knows beforehand whether you will pass or fail, is that by going through the experience itself, you become changed and refined in a way impossible to simulate. This idea, initially, seems like a reasonable explanation for all the pain and suffering that is found upon the earth. Some will say that this life is a training ground and a test, to prepare us for the next world. But I must ask, since heaven is said to be a place of complete peace where nobody faces challenges of any kind, what is the purpose of this training upon our earthly crucible if it builds strength and steadfastness that will be completely unneeded and useless in a comfortable heaven for all eternity? The only possibly reasonable purpose for all this training would be if we were to become gods ourselves, wielding great powers. Under such conditions, it would be necessary for God to make sure that we are worthy to possess such power before it is granted to us. And it might be said that we would need to be transformed by all this process of pain on earth before we could actually be mature and complete. This is the Mormon view.

Unfortunately, this thinking also has serious deficiencies. First of all, in my own experience and looking at history, I have found that the experience of pain does more to damage the character of good people rather than to build it up. Pain is much more likely to degrade a person, making them uncharacteristically more morally deficient than they would otherwise be. And it seems that the process is cumulative. As a good person goes through life, and experiences one pain followed by another and another, this person will begin to lose the spark of goodness within them. This is because it is the possession of this spark of goodness that actually makes the experience of pain hurtful. Those insensitive people out there experience pain far less poignantly than good people do, because their insensitivity acts as a kind of volume control in their hearts. Insensitivity simply means that they have the volume in their heart turned way down, so that it hears little and says little. And so they can go through life far more easily because they are afflicted much less by their own pain and the pain of others around them.

In this way, we can see that the natural and logical response to being in a world of pain is to turn down the volume of your heart and become insensitive. Doing so will make your life more pleasant, and you will also tend to prosper more. And even though I have struggled all my life to avoid doing this, and I hold this struggle to be the most important indicator of character in a person; I am not so harsh or total in this view as to say that all such people who have turned down their heart’s volume are evil or even cowards. I am quite aware of the infinite forms of pain that people can suffer, and I am nowhere near certain that I could endure any such pain and still retain my heart. So I can see that it is not only possible, but that it is likely that many noble souls, far superior to me, have been destroyed by an onslaught of pain that was impossible to withstand.

Because of this, I say that while pain can be part of a creative process that builds up a person, it is much more likely and common that pain does nothing but destroy. And since it tends to harm the good more profoundly than it harms the insensitive, it has a reverse filtering effect that is the opposite of what the religions proclaim. The crucible of pain on this earth erodes the good far more quickly and completely than it erodes the mediocre. And so we can conclude:

- Pain is not the path to perfection

- Pain is not the path to joy

- Pain does not strip away the evil and leave only the good – it does the opposite

- Pain is only productive when blended with noble emotions, and then only in minority proportions

- Pain is never useful unless it is accompanied by Reason


And so, just as it is incorrect to say that God wants you to endure all this pain today so that he can more richly reward you tomorrow, since the process of pain does not tend towards godliness; it is incorrect to tell a believer that God did not answer their prayer as a test just so he can reward them more later.

The outcome of all of this is clear. Prayer is not, and cannot be, either an efficacious means of obtaining assistance from God or a behavior required of people. God is not interactive, and so he neither requires prayer nor responds to it.



God is not Interactive – The Scriptures

Just as it is true that God does not listen to our prayers, he likewise doesn’t tell us things either through holy texts or prophets. God does not interact with people.

The first evidence of this is that an omnipotent God would have no reason to communicate his laws or wishes to anybody since it would be impossible for anybody to behave in a way that violates his will. If God is omnipotent, he has no need for us to listen and obey.

Secondly, the only reason for God to make any pronouncements to people is that he wants us all to understand something important and to pay attention to his ideas and instructions. This would necessarily be a message to all of humanity, not just one tribe. Indeed, if he wanted to leave the rest of the people in the dark about his intentions, why did he create them? This is true especially if his message is said to contain information so vital as to be required understanding for admission into heaven.

Because of this, it would be essential that if humanity were to have an equally fair chance of hearing and believing the message around the globe that the message would need to be extremely clear to all people of all cultures. It could not have the idiomatic tendencies of any one culture that would impair others from embracing and understanding it. And yet we know this is not true. The Torah, Bible, and Koran all use metaphors and idioms that are very distinctly clear to one culture, but much more obscure to others.

In addition, as we have seen that no one faith has received any divine favor over the others, there is likewise no reason to believe that any one holy text is truly from God. While the texts themselves are great works of literature, and may also recount historical events; there is no evidence that any of their ideas are actually the word of God or distinctly promoted versus other scriptures. This would be required of any real communication from God.

Next, there is no logically credible reason to believe that either the Bible or the Koran (and also other texts) are the original, genuine messages that they claim to be. The Bible, as it exists today, was not even compiled until centuries after the death of Jesus. The exact list of books included in it was decided by a council of Bishops who mostly held with one faction of Christianity, even though other factions also existed. In addition, Roman politics played an enormous role in selecting a canon of books that fit in with the philosophical needs of the Roman Empire. Certain books were approved and others were suppressed and even destroyed. And for more than 50 years following the First Council of Nicea, convened by the Emperor Constantine, the dominant faction in Christianity changed several times back and forth, causing many of the books considered for inclusion to alternately be considered both as heresy and official doctrine. Even Constantine changed his mind (and official Empire sanction) as to which faction should be doctrine. The final outcome of this epic power struggle within the early church was the establishment of one faction by the Roman Empire, outlawing all the rest, and the creation of the Bible by including only those texts that supported that one official bias.

In addition to this, some manuscripts show modifications or ‘alternate translations’ by the monks who copied these texts in subsequent centuries. This may have been done to ‘clarify’ passages that otherwise might be interpreted as disagreeing with Catholic doctrine. The same intention is visible in all the various modern versions of the bible used by the protestant world. There are several widely-used ‘translations’, and the ‘Living Bible’ even goes so far as to paraphrase the original text into a specific doctrinally-biased form. Without being quite as obvious, the other modern versions such as the NIV and NKJV bias the text simply by their word choices.

The Koran was never written down by Mohammed. It is said that he was given a dream/vision of the entire text while meditating in a cave. He remembered this entire several-hundred-page text word-for-word due to divine assistance. He then gave public speeches where he recalled parts of these words to the people. These occurred over a long period of time, until he finally had spoken the entire text in public at least once.

As he gave these speeches, different Caliphs were said to write down the words of the Koran as Mohammed spoke them. In a day where ball-point pens and shorthand were non-existent, it is hard to see how this could have been done quickly enough to keep up with the live speech that Mohammed was giving. Mohammed never recounted the text specifically for transcription, only as part of a sermon made to a live audience.

On top of all this, some of these original texts are missing. The modern Koran is said to be copies of these original texts, made before the originals disappeared. So we have no verification that Mohammed was even telling the same words to each audience he faced. Nor do we have any reliable means of knowing exactly what he was saying in the first place.

The Bible and the Koran have such a flimsy chain of custody that it would be impossible in a court of law to definitively determine their authorship or authenticity. Evidence that is this suspect would never be accepted in even a petty theft trial, yet billions of people feel no problem with using it to define reality itself. Christians and Moslems both feel that this is somehow fitting. They think that by the very nebulous nature of the origins of their text, that this somehow indicates the likelihood of it to be divine. As we can clearly see, this is illogical. If God wants a message to be broadcast to the world he would logically want it to be as clear as possible, and obviously seen as being his word. If this were not true, how could he be truly good?

From these facts we can see that God has no logical reason to communicate with people, and even if he did, it would be a lot clearer that any such supposed communication available thus far in history.



The Trinity: 1 ≠ 3

Christians believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These are said to be one God. This is an oxymoron. One does not equal three.

I am now faced with the unusual situation of needing to prove these simple words with a more thorough analysis. I say it is unusual because it should be self-apparent to all that one does not equal three, and yet this is not so. Millions of Christians ignore this inescapable contradiction with hardly a second thought or concern.

Noble Readers, words exist to communicate ideas. Some of these ideas, especially the ones that pertain to logical operations or mathematics, are absolute and distinct. The word ‘NOT’ refers to a logical condition that accepts any other option other than the one specified. By saying ‘NOT BLUE’ this expresses the idea of acceptance of any condition other than BLUE. There is no possibility of variance in this idea. ‘NOT’ cannot become ‘CONDITIONALLY NOT’ or ‘MAYBE NOT’ without the addition of these modifiers. Indeed, these other conditions are meaningless unless the concept of ‘NOT’ is immutable and perfectly distinct. Logic must have an absolutely solid starting point or else it is just an exercise in futility.

Another such logical operation is ‘AND’. This means the inclusion of one item or set of items, plus the additional inclusion of a separate item or set of items. Both of the terms specified (This AND That) must exist as separate things or the usage of ‘AND’ is improper. ‘This’ cannot be the same thing as ‘That’ if we are to make any sense by combining them. Orange AND Orange, Loud AND Loud, and Strong AND Strong are meaningless statements and are logically void. Therefore, when Christians say they believe in The Father AND The Son AND The Holy Spirit, this cannot be a logically valid statement unless each of these things is a separate thing. If each of these is a separate thing, they cannot be one. If they are all the same thing, the statement itself is illogical and void.

It is said that the Son is ‘begotten of the Father’. If the Father and the Son are the same individual, or composed of the same substance, how did he beget himself? This is another oxymoron. No matter which verb you wish to use, you cannot cause the existence of yourself. You would need to exist already to do so; in which case, this would be proof that you did not cause your own existence. God #1 can cause the existence of God #2, but you cannot then say that they are both God #1 even if they are clones.

Additionally, since both the Father and Son are said to have existed forever, how could the Son have been ‘begotten’? The only way this could be so is if the Father had existed before the Son did, which would mean that the Son has NOT existed forever. If the Father existed before the Son, how could they both be the same individual or the same substance?

If the Father and the Son both have existed forever, how do these words we use to name them make any sense? A ‘Son’ cannot exist as early as his ‘Father’ or he is not a ‘Son’! Words actually mean something, and we cannot use them in a way that denies their own meanings or they cease to be words at all.

These types of philosophical controversies raged throughout early Christendom for hundreds of years, with many of the issues I have raised being strongly voiced by the theologian Arius (c. AD 250-336) among others. Arianism (not Aryanism) was an alternate Christian view of God and Christ that for decades was actually official Church Doctrine. Arianism declared that God the Father (‘the unbegotten’) is eternal and separate from the lesser Jesus Christ (‘the only begotten’), who was born before the start of time and who created the universe. The Father, through the actions of the Son, created the Holy Spirit, who is said to be subservient to the Son just as the Son is to the Father. Thus, the Father is seen as the only true God, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are said to be of different substance (‘anomoios’) but similar due to their relationship (‘homoios’).

This issue of the substance of God was a matter of major significance to the early Church founders. The Trinitarian view says that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all of the exact same substance (‘homoousios’). Now this is not the same thing as saying that they are composed of different specific ‘spiritual atoms’ of the same ‘spiritual element’[10], which was believed by some (‘homoiousios’). Rather, Trinitarianism believes that they all are composed of the exact same specific spiritual atoms themselves. Yet this is somehow contrasted with the Sabellian doctrine, which claims that the Father and the Son are identical, but is also considered heretical within Trinitarian views. How the Father and the Son can be comprised of the exact same spiritual atoms, and yet not be identical, is indeed a deep mystery which only a protein-deficient diet and daily regimen of self-flagellation could reveal. Tiny differences such as these, differences which may not actually be differences, were important enough in antiquity to be matters of life and death. It could be said of Diocletian that he was merely opposing widespread insanity.

The Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea in 325 to ease the headaches of minutia that this Hydra-headed Christianity had become, and to determine which of the many Christian philosophies should prevail throughout the Roman Empire. From this council we get the Nicene Creed, with its nebulous and illogical Trinitarian declarations that eventually triumphed as Church Doctrine. Following the close of this council, Arianism was discredited, Arius was banished as a heretic, and his book Thalia which elaborated his views was ordered to be burned.

The Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, who dissented in the banishment of Arius, subsequently appealed to Constantine and convinced him that the Nicene declaration of God as homoousios was merely a variation of Sabellianism, and as such was heresy. Constantine then opposed the findings of his own council, and at the First Synod of Tyre in 335 allowed Eusebius and other friends of Arius to bring charges against Athanasius[11], who was the chief opponent of Arius. This resulted in the banishment of Athanasius, the return of Arius from exile, and the establishment of Arianism as the accepted mode of Christian Philosophy. Indeed, when Constantine accepted baptism shortly before his death, it was Eusebius who performed the rite and it was in accordance with the precepts of Arianism that this First Christian Roman Emperor became thus.

With the death of Constantine in 337 his sons Constans and Constantius assumed control of the Western and Eastern halves of the empire, respectively. With their assumption of power, the struggle between Trinitarianism and Arianism escalated, as Constans was a Trinitarian and Constantius was an Arian. At the Dedication Council of Antioch, Athanasius was excommunicated and a new creed was drafted without homoousios language. In time, the consensus view of most Arians that the Father and Son were homoios, or ‘similar’, controlled Christian doctrine in the East. This went on while the Western Empire under Constans favored Trinitarianism.

Constans died in 350 causing the entire empire to fall to Constantius’ control, and in 359 he mandated Empire-wide conformity to the Arian view of the Father and Son as homoios. When Constantius subsequently died in 361, Trinitarian forces once again grew in strength and reaffirmed the Nicene Creed at the Synod of Alexandria in 362. This was allowed to happen because the emperor Julian, Constantius’ successor, was a pagan and had allowed all the many banished bishops of every Christian sect to return in an environment of equal tolerance. But this was once again changed when in 364 the emperor Valens came to power. Valens banished Trinitarian bishops once again. With the passing of Valens in 378, Trinitarian forces struck across the empire. The Western Emperor Gratian passed laws in 379 and 380 which prohibited Arianism, and the new Eastern Emperor Theodosius I completely reinstated the Nicene Creed and its adherents at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

This was not the end of Arianism. During the reign of Constantius, the Gothic convert Ulfilas was sent across the Danube as a missionary to the Gothic barbarians. He was so successful with these efforts that Arianism was not completely extinguished from these lands until the 8th century. And following the fall of Rome, both Arian and Nicene branches of Christianity existed side-by-side with separate hierarchies and clergy in barbarian lands.

I have recounted this history to illuminate certain topics. First of all, I have oftentimes heard Christians speaking about ‘Historical Mainstream Christianity’, and how this orthodoxy supports their present Trinitarian doctrine. But as we can see, there is no such thing! There is no single historical orthodoxy visible since the beginnings of the faith. Even the Trinitarian beliefs that outlasted the rest spent a considerable amount of time considered as heresy, and many contending variations of Christianity persisted for centuries. This assertion of historical orthodoxy is made all the more spurious as the majority of those who speak thus are Protestants who are self-admittedly not following the doctrines of the ‘original’ Christian church.

Next, we need to observe that we really have no idea at all which version of Christianity was practiced and believed by those living at the time of Christ. The variety of opinion about the nature of God, and many other philosophical questions caused a myriad of different versions of Christianity to appear and flourish in the 250-300 years following the death of the Apostles. This is partly due to the fact that the Apostles themselves had obvious doctrinal differences. Anybody who reads the writing of James, one of the primary 3 Apostles, can clearly see that his views about faith and works are quite different from Paul, who never walked with Jesus but whose writings have a far greater impact on church doctrine. It has always struck me as odd that the personal witnesses of the Transfiguration of Christ, those chosen by him as the leaders of the church and who have supposedly had a glimpse of heaven, have a far lesser impact on modern Christian philosophy than the ideas of a man who never even met Jesus. Clearly, some variants of Christianity (probably including those espoused by Peter, James, and John) have been suppressed or modified while other views have been promoted.

We can also see from the historical record that the supremacy of one Christian faction over the others has not been brought about by the Church, but by the meddling and mandates of the Roman Empire. At the exact moment when the Church sought to first establish an orthodoxy and consistency of belief, the Roman Empire intervened and directed the outcome of this process. Thus, Christian doctrine was not determined by the hand of God, guiding the bishops and patriarchs of antiquity into the right form that heaven required. Instead, church doctrine was established by the forces of politics, and was directed by Roman Emperors whose understanding of Christianity was tainted by their pagan origins or by their lack of intellectual rigor.

It is therefore perhaps fitting that the most illogical and dubious of all the philosophies about the nature of God finally won the day. Trinitarianism, of all the various choices available at the time, is the most inconsistent and logically void philosophy possible to adopt. Consider the ‘clarification’ given to us by Hilary of Poitiers of how the three persons of the Trinity

‘…reciprocally contain one another, so that one permanently envelops and is permanently enveloped by, the other whom he yet envelopes’ (Concerning the Trinity 3:1)

Nonsense. I use the word literally. The condition thus described is a logical and topological impossibility. The usage of the words ‘reciprocal’ and ‘envelop’ in expressing this idea are not even consistent with the true meanings of the words themselves. This is the supposed justification of how Trinitarians in the past, and Christians today, claim that the 3 persons of God are all the exact same substance, or homoousios.

Those of you who are familiar with Venn Diagrams will appreciate the following depiction of the Trinity:

This is the ‘Shield of the Trinity’ or ‘Scutum Fidei’, which is a graphic depiction of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As you can clearly see, this is very similar to a Venn Diagram such as is used in mathematics and logic. But as you look closely at the diagram you can see that what we have here can be explained in only one way. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each exist as an independent set, distinct from each other, who partially intersect into a mutual union in a region called God. This would mean that ‘God’ exists only as a portion of these 3 individuals, and is not their totality; and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are different things consisting of different materials, neither enveloping nor enveloped by each other – merely intersecting. The diagram clearly contradicts Trinitarian views when analyzed accurately, and yet this diagram supposedly embodies these exact beliefs.

When we attempt to reconcile this image with one of three gods ‘reciprocally enveloping each other and likewise being enveloped’ we can clearly see that nothing consistent is present.

It would seem that the reason for the adoption of such a confusing and illogical doctrine is that the church founders wished to reconcile three irreconcilable concepts: Monotheism and the worship of Jehovah (so as to co-opt the respectability, gravitas, and believers of a far older religion, Judaism), and the simultaneous acceptance of Jesus as an equivalent God without voiding the other two intentions. But you cannot worship 3 gods, no matter what you call them or how you parse their form of distinctiveness, and still call yourselves monotheists. And if you are not monotheists, you cannot call yourselves worshipers of Jehovah. The only way that you can worship the Old Testament Father and the New Testament Son and Holy Spirit is if you acknowledge that they are 3 distinct gods. They could be unified in purpose and perfection, but not possibly in substance. But Christians are loathe to accept such thinking.

The Trinity has never been explained to mankind in any logically valid manner. Indeed, it is an article of faith among Christians that this ‘mystery of God’ somehow makes sense to him, even if there is no way to explain it to us. But if we are to believe such things, we are opening our minds to believing any such contradictory and irreconcilable concepts. This would mean that the path to finding God requires us to accept and embrace insanity. And if we are willing to say that we humans cannot possibly understand all the ways of God, and so we must make this leap of faith, we are abandoning reason as a guiding force in our lives. When we do this, shall we then blindly have faith in every other absurd notion of every other religion around the world? How can we know which beliefs to take on faith and which to reject if we have abandoned reason as our guide?

It is our duty to reject all such notions, for God would never bestow logic and intelligence upon us, and make this the crowning glory of our species, if we were required to forsake all of this to find him. Shall God say to the Cheetah “If you wish to find me, you must not run fast” or say to the Elephant “Be not strong at all, if you would enter into heaven”? Such an intention cannot be the wishes of a noble being, but instead those of a trickster and player of cruel sadistic jokes. Indeed, if we believe that God is intelligent and values human intelligence, how could he require us to believe a doctrine that our very intelligence resists? When dullards can enter heaven more readily than geniuses simply because they are too stupid to recognize the lunacy of the required beliefs, we know we are looking at a false doctrine, and not the wishes of a noble God.



Conclusions

By this appeal to logic and reason, we can clearly see that the primary doctrines of the Christian faith are self-contradictory. Similar things can be seen of other faiths. My analysis here is just a small part of all the reasoned objections I could make about these religions. But I see no need to spend more time on this subject when the open-minded among you already have plenty to think about. The rest of you will not be convinced no matter what further points I go on to prove, and so there is no reason to continue my analysis and thus become tedious.

It is important to understand that I am not simply saying that these beliefs are unproven and so we shouldn’t believe them. I am not nit picking at specific doctrines by appealing to scriptural references or by doubting the authenticity of events. I am not rehashing the usual objections to Christianity such as ‘The Disciples Stole the Body’ or other such common theories. Instead, I have shown with logical certainty that Christian doctrine cannot be true, even if we believe the Bible to be mostly correct in its historical descriptions and even if Jesus indeed did rise from the dead. I say this because it is impossible for 2 + 2 to ever equal 5. It cannot, no matter how much we may want it to do so, or even if we have the written testimony of people who said that they saw it happen. This is in no way a gloomy or faithless opinion, nor am I being negative or skeptical when I say these things. Coming to a definite logical conclusion about a question of philosophy is an inherently positive and optimistic thing – now the confusion is swept away! This is an entirely different thing than the annoying quibbles of a skeptic who merely doubts everything he has not yet seen with his own eyes.

Logic cannot be ignored, and this is neither skeptical nor faithless. 2 + 2 cannot equal 5 precisely because of the exact meaning of the concepts of Two, Plus, and Five. And for similar reasons, the doctrines of an Omnipotent God, Free Will, and the Justice of Punishment cannot exist together in the same equation and all be true.

If we persist in these beliefs and say that it is ok to believe illogical and impossible things, and that one must have faith in these things above reason; how can we condemn the Moslems or Jews for their beliefs? Christians comparing their faith to these others usually point out various reasons why these other faiths don’t make good sense, and how Christianity is more reasonable or likely to be true. But if they point out how the Moslems are wrong for believing that 3 + 3 = 5 then how can they do this and still also believe in their own particular false equation as well? You cannot ridicule the clearly illogical faith of another if your faith shows the exact same problem, though manifested in a different way. And since you have said that blind faith is superior to reason, is it not proper for the Moslems and Jews to also have blind faith and believe just as you do?

Under these conditions, where different people are having equally blind faith in different religious beliefs, can we not say that all these people are exhibiting roughly the same spiritual merit in their actions? And since we have removed reason from our philosophical rulership, and made faith master instead, what tools do we retain to find out which of these faiths is superior? None! Without reason, we have no means at all of finding out which faith is actually true. Under these conditions, how can you be sure that your faith is the right one, when you claim it proper for others to put faith above all and thus they believe in their own religion?

If you tell me your gospel and you cannot strictly prove every fact in your story, I may still believe in your faith as long as the ideas you tell me do not contradict each other. But when your ideas contradict each other, how am I to possibly believe your story is true? I do not care that you cannot prove the miracles that Jesus did. I can believe in his miracles and even in his resurrection. I can believe many things that my eyes have never seen. I can have faith in anything you say as long as it does not violate the obvious rules of reality. The real issue here is the flipside of this coin: How can you believe in things which contradict themselves and which are obviously unreal? How can it be morally right to do so?

Brothers and Sisters, I implore you to think. This is what we were made to do. The Cheetah was made to run fast, the Hawk to soar upon the wind, and the Beaver to build its dams. All these creatures have joy and fulfill the measure of their creation by doing as they were meant to do. We, in similar fashion, are born to think! We express our hearts and souls most fully when we behave according to our natural design.

If God can see our world, I believe I know what gives him joy to view. He sees the Cheetah, racing across the parched plains of Africa, on the heels of a speedy Gazelle. He sees the swirling wind, and a gliding Hawk with wings outstretched sailing silently upon it. He sees the Beaver, busily turning his corner of the woods into an ordered marvel of timber and mud. All of these sights give him joy, for all of these things are good. And in the same way, he feels joy when he sees us consider and think. When we entertain the possible and push our minds to expand the borders of the infinite. When we strive for meaning, and feed the fires of our curiosity. When we push forward the Light of Perception into the unknown darkness, banishing fear into further obscurity, he feels joy from us. This is well so, for these things are inherently good for a human to do. By doing so, we fulfill the measure of our creation.

I believe in God. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it is a difficult question to be certain about. Despite all the religions we have, and also because of them, we have very little real information about God. I do know that God is not omnipotent and is not interactive with humans, or likely with any other beings. I believe that God created creation, the Big Bang if you prefer, and that all subsequent creations have occurred due to the interaction of that original creation and the Free Will of those sentient beings whose creation it spawned. The creation of the universe can be thought of as God giving birth to the universe, and so it is possible that God is more properly considered to be female. Perhaps God encompasses both male and female attributes. I freely admit that I could be wrong about these beliefs[12], but until more becomes visible to me this is my best guess.

But we will never discover the truth of all this unless we remain dedicated to Reason above all else. The Cheetah finds God when it is running, the Hawk when it is flying, and the Beaver when it is building. We will find God only when we think. When we stop thinking and become contented with illogical beliefs, it is as if we are giving up hope. Just like a Cheetah who has no hope of catching the Gazelle, and so stops running; when we fall into sloppy thinking we are giving up hope in ever finding God.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to find God. I will not be content with illogical falsehoods, nor will I give up my hope. I know that the journey is long and I probably won’t live to see it concluded. But that is all right. If I can take but one step closer to finding God, and share that step with others who go on to additional steps; my life has meaning and my joy is full. And as I said before at the beginning of this chapter; experiencing noble Emotion is the purpose of life, and Reason is the means of achieving it. Brothers and Sisters, let us all have joy by embracing Reason, and let us never give up our hope.



ENDNOTES

[1] Faith is not only an emotional activity; it is also an intellectual activity. Faith is a decision to steadfastly follow a line of thinking and action, after reviewing all available evidence, even when one is not 100% sure of the truth of the proposed conclusions. It is a best guess held in place upon the mind by feelings of hope. Those who say that faith is only emotional are simply people completely devoid of reason and so seek to demean it by claiming that it is an enemy of faith. Reason and faith work together. Reason evaluates the question at hand, and faith provides the encouragement and constancy to persist in that conclusion until subsequent events indicate that a reevaluation by reason is required.
[2] This is because, to both groups, there actually is no other possibility in their heads. Good = Us is the only possible moral equation they can follow, because if they start to question this equation, their structure, power, and safety will evaporate.
[3] Omnipotence means either the state of possessing 100% of all power everywhere so that no other power exists or is used elsewhere, or it means the capacity to avail oneself of any power without the exclusive ownership of such. As I shall describe later, the second option is not logically possible and is ultimately the same condition as the first.
[4] If God made you this way naturally, what right does he have to punish you for behaving exactly in the manner you were constructed? How could he logically expect you to behave in a manner inconsistent with your design?
[5] The only other possibility here is that people can and do, by exercising their free will; repeatedly make decisions that are not what he wanted to have happen at that moment. But this too is false since God knows the future, and still chose to create the universe (knowing that we would disobey). We still come back to the place where everything that happens is in accordance with what he expected to happen and where he took the initial steps to set this universe and time line into motion. Thus, our free will is a sham because we are only acting in the exact manner he knew would happen from the dawn of time, and by his decision to create the universe anyway (notwithstanding our disobedience) he gives his assent to and even causes our ‘disobedience’.
[6] Since we are presuming that Free Will is real in this instance, that means that God is not omnipotent. Because of this, how do we know that his law is truly moral since he is only a finite god? Perhaps there is a higher law we should obey written by a superior, but yet undiscovered god? So how can our disobedience to God’s law be automatically presumed to be evil?
[7] Even if we say that Satan created Hell, this changes nothing. God created Satan and the universe and he knew all of the outcomes of those creations. Therefore, God created Hell, even if it is by proxy.
[8] In computers, this is artificial intelligence. For living beings, this is natural intelligence. Both operate similarly.
[9] The story of Noah is inconsistent with a god who is not vain, insecure, and unrighteously violent. Also, how could all of this have happened if God was perfect? Did he intentionally create an evil world just so that he could have the pleasure of killing it? If this was meant as a benignly intended object lesson for future generations, could he not have made his point without murdering nearly every person and animal on earth? Is this the single best, most humane course of action that could have been chosen to show his power and get our attention? It is preposterous to believe so.
[10] These terms ‘spiritual atoms’ and ‘spiritual elements’ are my terms, and not of Christian origin as far as I know. However, it seems that these are useful is describing the minute distinctions between the factions that viewed God in either ‘Homoousios’, ‘Homoiousios’, ‘Homoios’, or ‘Anomoios’ terms.
[11] Athanasius of Alexandria was the first to create the list of books which were included or excluded from the Bible. As we can clearly see, those books which had any passages seen to be supporting Arianism were excluded from the canon and often destroyed, and those seen to be supporting the Nicene faction were included. The Bible is a highly biased document, not reflecting the true diversity of Christian thought present at the time of its composition.
[12] I am quite certain about God’s lack of omnipotence and interactivity, but the other attributes of God I express are just my present feelings and best guesses about things.