Dave Allen on religion

Curmudgeonly

Impotent God

Believers claim that God is omnipotent, the creator of heaven and earth. Occasionally in the Bible we see evidence of his powers – raining down plagues and destruction on people he didn’t approve of, making fire suddenly appear from nowhere, whisking a few favoured individuals up into heaven, turning a woman into a pillar of salt and other useful antics. Through Jesus, God supposedly raised people from the dead, fed hundreds with a few meagre supplies and, just to show he was no party-pooper, turned water into wine.

But what’s he been up to since then? Seems to me he’s been a tad shy and retiring for the last couple of thousand years. Although there have been plenty of opportunities for him to show his mighty power, thrill the faithful and confound the doubters, God seems to be resolutely sticking to the small stuff. These days he might help someone to find their car keys or pass an exam. Sometimes he does something a little more impressive, like helping someone to recover from a serious illness or injury when they weren’t expected to (although in most cases, people just die). But surely there’s so much more an all-powerful being could be doing?

God has been quite happy to allow rape, plunder, enslavement, torture, destruction and murder on a grand scale throughout the years. Did he stop the Inquisition in its tracks with a few nasty plagues? No. Did he swallow up the Nazis in the depths of the sea or the bowels of the earth before they had chance to fill the death camps? No. Did he step in to halt the genocide in Rwanda? No. Has he put an end to killer diseases such as malaria, typhoid or cancer? No. Did he put forth his mighty hand to stop the Asian tsunami, or protect millions from the effects of the Ethiopian famine? Did he divert Hurricane Katrina from her course to avoid death and destruction? Again, no.

In fact, what the hell has God been doing all this time? Has he lost his powers, or simply lost interest in us?

Just one more reason to believe that God is about as substantial as a puff of smoke and as likely to exist as pigs are to sprout wings and take to the sky.

Isla

A personal relationship with Jesus?

Are you sure that you want one?!

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.spike.com posted with vodpod

Although this is humourous, I think it raises some valid issues.

Curmudgeonly

Tunnel vision

I’ve recently finished reading the first couple of chapters of Bart Ehrman’s new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer, and I wanted to relate something that it caused me to think about. But first, watch the following short video and make sure you count the number of passes that the team in white makes:

Reading the second chapter of Ehrman’s book made me see how unaware I was of what the Old Testament really said about God outside of my attention. In the same way, when I first watched this video I didn’t see the moonwalking bear, though I correctly counted the number of passes that the team in white made. Because my attention was focused elsewhere, I missed an important part of the overall picture. It truly is easy to miss something that you’re not looking for.

The Old Testament prophets, who Ehrman quotes in order to show how they viewed suffering and how it related to God, were familiar to me as a Mormon, but somehow I had missed the implication of what was really being said. The moonwalking bear was there, but I couldn’t see it. Because of my subsequent loss of faith and accompanying scepticism and with the benefit of hindsight I can now say that it was the paradigm through which I viewed God that blinded me to the unpleasant aspects of his character. It’s quite amazing how obvious his monstrous side is.

As I read through the second chapter I was continually shocked at God’s brutality and even more so with myself that I once believed in this monster. It wasn’t anything that Ehrman said, as the prophets he quoted spoke loudly and clearly enough. Suffice it to say, as I read through the chapter, I experienced a fair few WTF! moments and often berated myself for falling for such an immensely tall yarn.

Let me share some examples of what I consider to be God’s disgusting behaviour. On a people who he considers to be his favourites and who he claims to love greatly, he sends famine, drought, blight, pestilence and destruction (see Amos 4:6-12) in order to force them to return to him and his ways. Graphically, Hosea explains that God will become like a fierce animal that will tear disobedient Israel to pieces:

Yet I have been the Lord your God
ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me,
and besides me there is no saviour.
It was I who fed you in the wilderness,
in the land of drought.
When I fed them, they were satisfied;
they were satisfied, and their heart was proud;
therefore they forgot me.
So I will become like a lion to them,
like a leopard I will lurk beside the way.
I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs,
and will tear open the covering of their heart;
there I will devour them like a lion,
as a wild animal would mangle them.

I will destroy you, O Israel;
who can help you? (Hosea 13:4-9)

And there’s a yet more disturbing image of God:

Samaria shall bear her guilt,
because she has rebelled against her God;
they shall fall by the sword,
their little ones shall be dashed in pieces,
and their pregnant women ripped open. (Hosea 13:16)

Shocking and repugnant, don’t you think? We find in Jeremiah 3 that God is likened to a husband whose wife (Israel) has committed adultery. But I find it very difficult to imagine any loving husband who would threaten his wife in the way that God has threatened Israel in the above verses, even taking into account the wife’s infidelity. I think that God must be a pretty shitty husband and certainly couldn’t ever be considered a good role model for husbands to aspire to. How anyone could justify the acts above is completely beyond me. It’s emotional terrorism at it’s worst.

There’s a lot more that I could say about this, especially as it’s something that I feel very strongly about. But I’m writing this blog entry to simply express my surprise and horror that I hadn’t noticed this side of God as a faithful Mormon, at least not for what it truly is – tyrannical, forceful, controlling and merciless. It’s astonishing that you can miss that which is in plain sight when you’re concentrating on something else.

Curmudgeonly Yours