HERB’S CORNER | No Gods
Photo by Gabriel Lamza on Unsplash Every deity ever worshipped is the product of ancient superstition invented by people who knew little about the universe and our place in it. They didn’t know our Earth revolves around the Sun or that our planet’s day/night cycle is the result of the Earth spinning on its axis.
Genesis 1:16 says “God (also known as Yahweh) made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser to govern the night. He also made the stars.” The authors didn’t know that our sun is really just an average size star, one of more than 200 hundred billion stars in our galaxy.
And there is another problem. This god allegedly is all-good, all-knowing, and perfect, but then we read in Genesis 6:5-6 that he recognized he had screwed up. “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the Earth and every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And Yahweh was sorry he had made humans on the Earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
What’s a god with a broken heart to do?
God brought a holocaust to all the Earth, except for eight humans (Noah, his three sons, and their four wives) and pairs of all animals on Noah’s Ark. Noah was 600 years old when God drowned everyone else with a flood. Those left alive on the Ark reproduced, but the new humans were no better than the old humans. So, God then killed many more humans.
Reading this story, some immediate questions come to mind: How could this perfect god not know how the humans he created in his image would behave? Wasn’t the wickedness of humans caused by his own design flaw? And why is this god worshipped as a loving and just god?
God allegedly gave humans ten commandments to live by. Americans praise these commandments even though hardly anyone can name all of them. These commandments are problematic. Rather than condemning covetousness and threatening to punish children if their parents didn’t worship in the correct way, why don’t the commandments or other parts of the Bible condemn slavery, racism, misogeny, homophobia, sexual assault, child and spouse abuse, torture, and war?
“We know that innocent human suffering can’t be justified if a perfect being exists who can prevent it.”
War, in particular, has been by far the greatest destroyer of humans, especially as weapons have become more advanced to create increasingly devastating killing machines. For example, how many people know what World War I was fought over? That war lasted four years, with an average of more than 11,000 lives lost every day of the conflict. Human pride (another of god’s design flaws?) got in the way of shortening this useless war. The treaty that ended World War I was brutal, and fueled hatreds that led to World War II, with far greater loss of life. Just for good measure, after World War I, the Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918-1920) killed another 50 million people. This endless list of suffering seems to rule out a good god who has compassion for humanity.
How do theists justify such suffering when they have a god who could have prevented it? Some say suffering serves a greater purpose, or that certain types of suffering are the only way to bring about something of immense value. Some use the excuse that God is inscrutable and works in strange and mysterious ways his wonders to perform. In other words, theists don’t have a clue why their loving, caring, competent, all-powerful deity allows or encourages so many bad things. We don’t need to understand God’s reasons (assuming such a god exists). We know that innocent human suffering can’t be justified if a perfect being exists who can prevent it.
For a believer in an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent personal god, every horrendous act of evil in the world, every natural disaster, every injury, illness, and genetic defect that causes senseless suffering has a mysterious witness—God. For example, after the Sandy Hook School massacre, one pious woman was quoted as saying, “God must have wanted more angels.” What more alarming example of easy acceptance of a terrible act could there be? She was willing to make her god a co-murderer along with the gunman.
When I was in public elementary school, Pennsylvania law required that at least ten verses be read from the Bible at the opening of each school day. The home-room teacher would usually read the passages. One of my teachers asked the students to take turns and read a passage they liked, with nobody allowed to comment on the passage. When it was my turn, I chose to read the begats from Genesis 5, including: “Seth begat Enosh when he was 105 and lived another 807 years. Enosh begat Kenan when he was 90, and lived another 815 years. Methuselah begat Lamech when he was 187, and lived another 782 years.” Of course, the entire class laughed at my begats and the alleged ages of humans, which I also found hilarious and unbelievable. The teacher reminded the students to be quiet during my reading. When I finally finished my begats, the teacher was not allowed to comment, but she gave me quite a look. And from that day on, only the teacher would read aloud passages from the Bible. This practice of required Bible reading in public schools finally ended in 1961 with a US Supreme Court victory brought about by Ellery Schempp.
Many people have abandoned their faith because of the strange things they found in the Bible, including parts like the above. Most of the Bible is ignored by believers, partly because it is boring and tedious. Religious people often haven’t read the Bible, but rely on what their clergy say about it. The clergy never read the ridiculous parts of the Bible that atheists make fun of. Those who put time into reading the Bible must be puzzled that so much of it has little relevance to their piety or their daily lives. Yet, somehow, this ancient book is still touted as the Word of God.
The goal of “Christian apologetics” is to persuade the faithful that belief in God is not damaged by horrendous events that have happened for millennia—and still happen every day. Apologetics is meant to be an intellectual defense of the truth of the Christian religion. But most of their assertions have been thoroughly debunked. Many of their arguments use circular reasoning, like quoting from the Bible, and apologists depend on commitment and faith. There is no such thing as “Science apologetics” because science is based on evidence, not faith.
Some people believe their god is an immaterial, pure spirit who exists outside of time and space, and that he created our universe after which he retired to become deity emeritus. Nobody would worship or care about such an impersonal god. This deistic god concept sounds more reasonable than the theistic one, but I see no reason to suspect that either could possibly exist.
The god in the Christian Bible purportedly maintains a close eye on every human. He keeps track of all our words and thoughts. Yet, somehow, Christianity has splintered into thousands of different, conflicting labels. Many of these brands hate the others and have started religious wars with them. Clergy can’t agree on the alleged “information” about their god because there is no verifiable evidence from their sources. In truth, they have no sources, only products of their imagination, as is the case with thousands of other gods that humans have imagined, worshipped, and adored.
I hope that Yahweh and all the other gods imagined over the centuries will one day be considered relics from the past, not present beliefs. This is happening slowly in the Western world.
Unfortunately, the endless fight over territory in the Middle East shows that ignorance still prevails, as Christians, Muslims, and Jews continue to claim that their god was in the real estate business and gave each religion the exact same portion of the planet to maintain and keep holy.