Archive for July, 2009

I’m being stalked by some random guy who has decided to make me his pet project. I stupidly opened the door to this churchy type and had a friendly conversion but I’ve opened Pandora’s box! Every weekend he seems to come knocking to see if I’m home. Luckily I was out last weekend so I missed him. Nevertheless he left me a Church pamphlet under my door with a hand written invitation for me to attend church on Sunday.

I must have been mad when I first chatted with him and had I known I’d be stalked, I would’ve been a little more discerning. I certainly would not have been so friendly. But what’s done is done and now I have to scheme a plan to get rid of him. He piqued my interest if I am to be honest and he seemed friendly enough. But is it a case of looks being deceiving, for all I know he could be a total nut case!

Anyway it makes me curious as to why someone feels compelled to knock on doors espousing a belief and touting it as the one and only truth. Why is it only particular creeds that feel it necessary to harass neighbourhoods with proselytising? Does anyone ever convert because some random knocked on their door?

He gave me a Bible because one of my complaints was that the Bible is so hard to read. I have the King James version and although I’ve read bits and pieces of it, I find it hard going. Due partly to the way it’s written but more truthfully,  because I don’t believe it and so seems pointless to expend time on something disinteresting. So I now have some modern version and it is no better, I still don’t possess an openness to receive the gift of salvation, namely because I think it’s absurd and silly to believe such things.

I was told to start with Mark and I started reading but it holds no appeal to me. It’s just words on paper written in what seems to not be any particular sequence and in somewhat fragmentary pieces. I would like to read the whole thing, one day, but it requires a concerted effort in concentration and focus to complete. A time consuming endeavour and one that isn’t particularly enjoyable. But are any history texts ever really an enjoyable read? Because that is what the Bible represents or so we are led to believe, that it is a document describing the history of Jesus and all the prophets and martyrs before him.

I can understand why religion appeals to people but to claim every word in a piece of text is the absolute truth and that one need only suspend disbelief is not so appealing to someone who wants to just know what the truth just for truths sake, without appealing to extraordinary supernatural phenomena to gain it. Is it reasonable to believe that the laws of physics can be arbitrarily suspended just for the sake of stirring devotion? Do religious people truly believe every nuance and miracle recorded in the pages of the Bible? Or is religious belief just a way to commune with one’s fellow human beings? Is it just a social club or does one truly have to believe literary that a Man rose from dead, or that a man built an ark to house millions of species? Or that Jesus walked on water, made the blind see and lame walk? Or that a man lived in a whales mouth for three days? 2000 years ago these things were perhaps believable but in the 21st century is it still possible to believe such things as the literal truth? And if they aren’t meant to be taken literally then what are we to make of it?

So having someone proselytise by door knocking may seem quaint but is it anything more than them expressing a desire to have their own existence validated in some way? I think the real reason why I naively opened myself up to this experience was because I was feeling lonely at the time and it was kind of nice having someone show a level of concern even if it was based on a deception. I’m not going to convert and he is unlikely to offer friendship without conversion. I could be wrong but the randomness of meeting is not some divine intervention but rather two egotistical entities colliding for a moment. There are two agendas that are not compatible. On the face of it, the need for belonging is a basic human desire so perhaps on rare occasions, when someone is vulnerable and alone there is a possibility that such clashes of ego be mutually beneficial but this random event is probably not one of them.

Still it’ll be a curious how this little synchronicity pans out and how long my stalker will stalk before he realises that it’s a lost cause. I somehow doubt he’ll ever see things in the exact same way as I see them nor will I be likely to adopt his point of view. But stranger things happen and we both may walk away with something interesting anyway.

Have you ever thought how strange the Christian faith is? If we start with the fall of Lucifer, the Morning Star, Satan or any other name he cares to go by, we are immediately confronted with this odd circumstance. Although I’m no biblical scholar nor do I have any particular reverence to the so called word of god as is espoused in the bible, I can say as a layman, born and raised in western culture and having a general overview indoctrinated into me by simply living within a Judaeo-Christian society, that I have some questions about the faith that is so often expected of me, to which I have trouble in accepting. Perhaps because it seems so nonsensical and odd.

We’re often told how heaven is a perfect place, free from sin and wholly good. In other words nothing bad is permitted within its confines. But if that were true then how is that Satan got it into his head to challenge the authority of God in the first place? My ignorance is probably influencing my assumption that all these angels, spirits, God and what not were all living together in heaven, but it may be that I have it totally wrong and there was no heaven way back then. For all I know, all these spirits were off doing their own thing wherever they existed before God created the universe and time and all that stuff.

So the story has it that Satan became jealous and envious of God and wanted to overthrow him and take his place. The question remains, how is it that such resentment could exist in perfection? Obviously Satan wasn’t happy and began his dissent (sic) by questioning the hierarchy for some reason unbeknownst to us mere mortals. Well we are told Satan was proud and arrogant which corrupted him into believing he was cheated by something or other. But why do these supernatural spirits have such trivial qualities that mimic human emotions to begin with? It just seems rather disconcerting that the picture of perfection heaven is painted as, seems to possess behaviour that resembles any human gathering you care to imagine. Anyway, maybe it’s beside the point since we are created in his image, perhaps it is to be expected that angels will bicker and feud much like we do because we are like them and they like us. Somewhat perturbing but anything is possible I guess.

So Satan conspired a military coup to overthrow God from his throne, was found out and consequently turrfed out of heaven. And so we have two sides at war, each riling the other for leadership. Well so much for diplomacy and it certainly doesn’t give us much hope in ever working out our own conflicts if the super powers in heaven couldn’t come to an agreement. The most intelligent and powerful forces in the universe or outside of it couldn’t take a diplomatic route, so one side was forced into exile because of it. Why didn’t God just hand over the reigns for a while and go on a vacation? Did he really have to control every little nuance of existence? Control issues maybe? It sort of puts our conflicts into a disturbing perspective when our creator couldn’t work a solution in his Kingdom. Ah well, perhaps problems really can’t be sorted with adequate communication and we are justified in using force to get our way.

Ok so now the forces of good and evil exist and they are at odds with each other and the feud has been carrying on for billions of years with no hope of ever being resolved. God being bored one day devises a new way to resolve the issue he has with the Morning Star, who’s stewing down in hell, plotting his revenge or something. So his new plan involves a new creation so he invents Adam and Eve and puts them in the garden of Eden. God tells our ancestral parents not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of  Good and Evil. God gave them free will so that they can choose to obey or disobey. So Satan gets wind of this discussion and convinces Eve to eat the fruit. God is then disappointed and perhaps even a little enraged that his new creation just wouldn’t listen to his instructions. We all know the rest of the story, we now know the difference between right and wrong and for that piece of enlightenment we have been punished with magnitudes of sorrow and pain.  From eating forbidden fruit, it’s snowballed to murder, lust, greed, envy, jealousy etc etc. Not too dissimilar to the time eons ago. Yet before Eve ate the fruit she was innocent and didn’t know the difference between good and evil. Did she intentionally disobey God then? After eating the fruit she then had knowledge of good and evil and then purposefully deceived Adam into eating the fruit. Did Adam intentionally disobey God? If before they knew what was right and wrong how can it be conceived as some devastating sin? Perhaps if God laid out all the facts truthfully rather than just saying something as meaningless as they’d surely die, they may have reconsidered eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If he’d have outlined the exact nature of what would happen if they did eat that fruit then perhaps they could have made a real choice before condemning the rest of humanity for eternity. But its impossible to issue any warning because Adam and Eve wouldn’t of understood anyway considering they had no knowledge of good and evil prior to eating that knowledge.

Their total naivety, not knowing what was what seems to suggest an epic fail from the beginning. It certainly leaves one to wonder when Jesus was nailed to the cross and asking why he had been forsaken that what he was really asking was why Adam had been forsaken. In that moment one can imagine he came to realise the absolute horror that Adam and Eve felt when they knew they’d been betrayed or deceived by their creator. We blame Satan for deceiving them but it seems to be the other way round. God planting the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden and telling Adam and Eve not to eat it was akin to asking a toddler whose very nature is curiosity to not do something which they’ll go right ahead and do just to see what happens. Heck even Adults do this. It just seems absurd that the whole of humanity is painted as a disgraced sinner because some naive couple listened to a speaking serpent or snake.

The Adam and Eve paradox – they were supposed to be aware of doing wrong when the fruit that gave them that knowledge had yet to be consumed. It is a disingenuous proposition and is  somehow a little callous on the part of its mastermind. The allegorical original sin is disobeying God because of naivety or innocence. So if we are to believe that God is Omni benevolent  we essentially have to disregard the Adam and Eve paradox and accept that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit just as he knew they would. We’re told as non-believers that Adam and Eve had free will and they could of followed God’s instructions and thus stayed in paradise but what sort of free will is it when only half the information is present to begin with? It just doesn’t work like that. So we are left with the premise that God wished it to be. Which is fair enough because free will is about choice and in a moral sense there is no choice without knowing the difference between good and evil. However, even though we fell in the eyes of God, we are glad that Adam and Eve did eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because our humanity was brought into consciousness on that day.

Humanity is born and prospers with its new found knowledge. There is sin and evil and good. Everything is hunky dory, yet God is still unhappy? Ostensibly angered by our independence he decides to meddle in our affairs and force adherence to his wishes, so he tells Noah to build an Ark. He wants to kill off the decrepit and wretched offspring of Adam and Eve. So Noah builds an Ark, the size of the Earth, to hold all those millions of species. Why does an all powerful God need an Ark in first instance when he could of just snapped his fingers and zapped all creatures into a temporary world while he performs genocide? Or why not create a virus to wipe out the undesirables? Why wait such a long time observing all the suffering and gazing at the depravity for millennia when he knew what would happen? Indeed why not just wipe out all Adam and Eves until the desired outcome prevailed in  the first place? So much for omniscience. Or is it sinful to question authority? No wonder Satan was exiled from heaven, too many questions and too few answers.

Anyways, starting from scratch did absolutely nothing. Millions died to achieve the exact same thing. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. To try a new tact God then decides to send his Son to do his bidding. This is one of most disturbing parts in Christian doctrine. If it wasn’t bad enough that an almighty God had trouble convincing an angel who challenged his authority of the error of his ways, he then sends his only son to die a horrible death, solely for purpose that we inconsequential insects could be forgiven. Although we gasp in horror when Islamists are pleased by sending their sons to martyrdom via an arsenal strapped to their bodies, we do a 180 degree flip when God martyrs His son to die an agonising death nailed upon a cross. We are encouraged to rejoice this seemingly tragic episode in human depravity so that we may be forgiven for all the sins we commit to each other and to redeem the sins of Adam and Eve.

Perhaps on the surface it makes some sort of sense for having the son of God suffer a barbaric and cruel death and even a tortured life, so that God can then be assured of how it feels to be Human and the suffering we endure within our lives. It seems bizarre that God would need to illustrate His empathy in such an exaggerated manner but perhaps humanity requires extreme graphic imagery to stir our compassion from the crevices and masks where it all too often resides. But are we to seriously consider this as anything other than a caricature of human depravity? Is it reasonable to believe that a man who wandered the desert preaching that we all need to love one another is then sentenced to death after committing no crime? In those times maybe declaring yourself to be God was punishable by death but in modernity it seems absurd. However at the core, is the idea that a sacrifice of one’s own flesh and blood equates to some great merciful act . It seems a very odd way of going about it. Maybe because it seems so preposterous that it becomes more believable.

Then having gone through all the brutality, Jesus rises from the dead and drifts off to heaven, leaving us with a perturbing story to console us in our darkest moments. We’re left wondering whether a God can really experience the human condition after all? And if God can, then how can our plight be reconciled with Jesus hanging on the cross to forgive us, when suffering is just as prevalent as it was 2000 years ago? If the whole purpose to Jesus’ life was to forgive us of our sins and provide us all with salvation, then how can it be seen as some divine gift  when in an optimistic estimate of the world’s population who profess to being Christian is equal to 1/3 or 2 billion and are entitled to everlasting life because of their belief while the rest are then destined  to perish because of unbelief? How long before 6 billion are redeemed through Christian belief? How many more millennia of suffering will it take before humanity can be re-established in God’s loving embrace? And is it reasonable to believe that a good portion will never be converted considering apostasy is crime punishable by death in many nations? Moreover, is it then conceivable that because of one’s birthplace and where they were raised that the likelihood of them converting to Christian belief is such a small percentage that it can be deemed negligible? Who then because of geographic and cultural differences will suffer the fate of being discarded as trash to burn in the pits of Hell for eternity because they were raised with a different faith and born in the wrong place at the wrong time? It is absolutely absurd. Unless of course Christianity really  isn’t the only path to salvation which would then be contradictory to Jesus’ own words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” – John 14:6. And if it is true then more people will be destined to be omitted from the book of life because of some oversight in the contract.

Perhaps the whole notion of there being reward and punishment is what brings me to scepticism and mistrust of the whole concept. If even one us, even the most vile and wretched of us have a punishment which is eternal and downright evil in its torturous malice, it is then far too a higher price to pay for belief. If we are God’s children is it reasonable for any Father let alone God to punish his children in everlasting torment because of a wrong or wrongs committed? Is the real crime then not the trivialities of human existence but the arrogance of not submitting to authority? Of daring to think and question, to ask the very questions that stirred the beast from its cave and slumber in the beginning. Is that why we must believe the unbelievable because if one dares to question and seek the truth it undermines authority? Are we to believe in a deity whose very essence appears to be that of vanity and control? From the outset any entity who disobeyed and questioned the status quo has been destined to unfathomable ill will. Is that the loving super being we are to worship?

Or is the whole story just make believe, concocted in the imaginations of men?

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