Letters to the Editor
deluxe
Published Letters: 90 Editor's Choice: 4
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Does your God enjoy cock fights?
[Read the article: The disbeliever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In order to be worthy of the massive belief systems that make up the world's largest monotheistic religions, God has to fulfill three major job requirements. There are numerous other attributes that followers ascribe to God, but if He fails in any of these three then the very foundation of monotheistic religion itself crumbles into irrelevance and logical contradiction. A proper, universe-creating God deserving of human obedience must be All-Powerful, Infallible, and Loving. If He lacks any one of these attributes, one's belief in such a deficient god must be called into question.
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Is your God All-Powerful? That label includes supreme omniscience and unlimited capabilities. In order to create an entire universe and all life within it from nothing, an entity cannot be saddled with anything less. If your God is not absolutely, unequivocally All-Powerful then you are following the wrong god, because I personally can conjure up a Supreme Being that fits this description who will, by definition, trump your lesser god. Monotheism an all-or-nothing game, so don't enter into it with any hesitations.
Exercise #1: Explain why an All-Powerful God cannot defeat Satan or any other harmful influence on humanity, once and for all.
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Is your God Infallible? It's conceivable that an All-Powerful God may nevertheless be fallible (although if you're all-powerful I guess you get to define what's perfect and what's not), but if this were the case, then there's the possibility that religion itself may be a flawed concept. If believers cannot trust their God to be correct in everything, then absolute truth becomes an oxymoron. Relativism gains a lot more currency under such a god. Infallible, like All-Powerful, is an absolute term. There are no shades of infallibility.
Exercise #2: How might an All-Powerful, Infallible God create human beings with a poorly-designed skeleton and jaw structure.
Extra Credit: God supposedly created man in His own image. Did God therefore have a penis? If so, what did he need it for?
Exercise #3: Why would an All-Powerful, Infallible God create dinosaurs, which lived on this planet for 200 MILLION YEARS (not the diminutively brief period that humans have dwelled within), banish them to extinction, and then lead many of His believers to completely deny their past history? Why go through all the trouble?
Exercise #4: Which version of the Ten Commandments are the actual ones dictated by an All-Powerful, Infallible God?
Extra Credit: Why would an All-Powerful, Infallible God create beings that became marred by 'original sin' instead of perfect specimens?
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Is you God Loving? If not, why do you follow him? An All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God would engender peace and kindness in His followers; an unloving god would bring misery and suffering upon his subjects, either through mere neglect or sheer malevolence. An All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God who went through the trouble to create an entire universe and populate it with sentient human beings could, and should, do everything with His power to ensure that the humans are happy and well cared-for.
Exercise #5: Explain how an All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God would allow innocent newborn humans to suffer incurable medical maladies or infant death, through generation after generation after generation of human procreation.
Exercise #6: Why would an All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God allow conflicting monotheistic religions to exist and fight each other to the death when one unambiguous supreme communication to all humans could easily end the conflicts?
Extra Credit: Certain sadistic people, to this day, place dogs or chickens in a pit and watch them kill each other for sport. Explain how this behavior is in any way different than an All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God who allows humans to kill each other over religious beliefs and yet never intervenes.
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People who believe in an All-Powerful, Infallible, Loving God must answer for all of the above, and in doing so avoid the straightforward slice of Occam's Razor. If any one of these three pillars is found deficient, absolute monotheism becomes untenable. The stakes are supremely high - indeed the highest conceivable - and yet religion offers no human-detectable evidence for God whatsoever, but plenty of 'allegories', superstitions, ambiguous texts, and apologists who dance around inconvenient questions about their beliefs. Atheists, on the other hand, avoid this game completely and embrace that stubborn trait known as critical thinking, much to the dismay of those who busy themselves with a God who enjoys cock fights.
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Free Will? That's all there is?
[Read the article: The disbeliever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Charlie, if you're going to dismiss all of my questions with the 'free will' bromide, then you haven't provided a single reason why religion is needed in the first place. "...it is man's duty to defeat [evil] within himself." An atheist could have come up with that one, and with a little more sincerity.
And regarding notable atheists, please do your own web searches next time:
http://www.celebatheists.com/
(and plenty of others)