The following is a response to a JW friend who still occasionally tries to save my soul, or at least understand it.
His questions are in italics.
I have not yet sent this email.
========================= What exactly is it that makes you disbelieve there's a God, or makes you unsure he exists? I think a more sensical question is what makes you so sure he does? When debating the existence of something invisible, the burden of proof rests solidly on the shoulders of the believer. What gives you the idea that there is a invisible magic sky being that is watching your every move, listening to you talk to yourself, occasionally mucking around with peoples lives,once in a great while bringing them back from the dead, and all the rest of the time letting them suffer in agony in peace? That he waits thousands of years, and then swoops down and offers a list of 10 things not to do to a roaming nomadic tribe, and a heap of other laws involving the pointless slaughter of innocent animals to appease his apparent demand for shed blood?
The reasoning that such bloodlust was a foreshadowing the day where he
would accept the suicide of his son as payment for the sins of minds
that he designed simply makes the whole thing even more disturbing and
implausible to me. (It does however make perfect sense when you compare
it with the recurring human superstitions throughout time... The Aztecs also atoned for their sins with human blood, as did the tribes surrounding the Israelites) The idea of God that is presented in the Bible strikes me as such a vastly improbable character that a claim of his actual existence and the reality of his interactions with people thousands of years ago would need to be accompanied by REALLY good evidence. I see none. Now if you want you can back off and say that "oddly enough we live in an orderly universe, and that demands an explanation". I agree. I just think that inventing a
god in our own image to explain how we got here doesn't GET us anywhere. Who created God? If we allow that an orderly god could always have existed, then
why can't an orderly universe always have existed? The bottom line is we simply
don't KNOW what was before the big bang, or outside the universe. That information
is inaccessible at the moment, and to attempt to "solve" the greatest mystery of all
time by appealing to ancient bronze age mythology is doing nothing but relabeling
our ignorance. What don't you see in this universe that you would expect to find in a universe with a God? Justice Life is unfair. Life does NOT consistently reward goodness or love or peace. A universe inhabited by
a god that often steps in and answers OTHER people's prayers while letting a child step on a land
mine is not a universe that makes sense. The only way believers can reconcile this is that things
USED to be perfect, or that he will FIX things, make everything better, in some FUTURE life. I see no
evidence for either of those things, so I must conclude that we live in a intrinsically dispassionate
universe, and anything else is most likely wishful thinking. Evidence of the "supernatural" If God and angels live in a "spirit" realm that has, does, and will have any sort of effect on this realm, we should find solid evidence that such "magic" is real. I have never encountered even a single compelling piece of evidence that there is any truth to superstitious belief in angels, or demons, or ghosts, or prophecies, or telekinesis, or anything else that flies in the face of the basic rules of the universe (At least on a macro level. Quantum stuff get pretty weird, but that doesn't seem to cross over into the big world) Therefore, I must conclude that the universe tends to follow it's own rules, and things such as virgin births and walking on water and raising on the dead are to be considered impossible until proven with very compelling evidence. More intelligently designed creation 99% of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct because they failed to make a living in the world. This was all millions of years before humans were around, so you can't exactly blame Adam's sin for screwing everything up. There are fossils of dinosaurs with brain cancer and arthritis. Prehistoric fish brutally tore each other apart in order to survive. I would expect a universe made by a god of love to invent something a little less cruel and gory. Why create a universe so "broken" (full of pain and death), only to "fix" it (turn it into a paradise with straw-eating lions) after spending millions of years watching the pain you intentionally designed? What would God need to do to prove his existence to you?Verifiable evidence.
This would include hundreds of things that supposedly happened ALL THE TIME in Bible
times! Seeing someone walk on water after all method of cheating is ruled out? Hearing a
voice from heaven that a whole group of sane people also hear? One regrown limb? One
unaccountable prophecy?
Without the demand for evidence, what makes us different from the Aztecs spilling blood
so the sun will return? Or faithful Muslims flying a plane into a building because their
religious leaders asked them to? Demanding evidence for belief is the only way to protect
ourselves from our deadly inborn tendency to be misled by the weirdness of the world.
Thousands of people in the past (according to the Bible) were offered just such evidence,
and it didn't violate their free will, or screw up God's plan. Why do we today get nothing
but 17th hand information traced back to a world populated by highly credulous and
superstitious people?
If there is a god, all I am asking for is concrete proof that he cares about the mess he
has made.
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