Imagine there is no sentient cognisant God. Imagine a God as impersonal as time, space and the multitude of known and unknown properties that we call nature. This is a razor’s edge away from atheism, but the point is this: Imagine God has no voice, does not intrude on your thoughts, does not judge, there is no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no angels, no devils. Just the here and now.
Maybe you find it hard, but put on a space suit and come for a ride, lets go out and sit on one of those voyager probes as they hurtle at vast speed through the emptiness on the outskirts of the solar system. Perhaps there it is easier to imagine a God as nature, as opposed to a God who is insecure, rewards killing, hates women, demands devotion, judges, smites, and does all sorts of weirdness. And that’s just in your mind – in the fella next to you he is imploring you to not eat pork, the guy next to him thinks he is God, the lady next to him thinks God is a lesbian, the bloke next to her is skinning up a joint and knows God is a rastafarian, and so on and on. Imagine, if all those Gods and the implied will and rules and retribution and hatred and war and violence and persecution, are just a misunderstanding.
What if we created a concept of God to appease our instinctive awe and wonder at natural phenomena? Rising through the mists of time, our apish ancestors start flourishing in the cradle of civilisation, which is now being subjected to infanticide by IS, but back then there is no God to tell them to kill. There is hunger, cold, so they work out how to farm, and they are not so hungry nor cold. Death, the seasons, become an abstract concept that they can dedicate brain power to contemplating.
No longer an animal focused on physical survival, this semi-civilised humanity 1.0 can eek out cave drawings, make tools, determine through observation the longest and shortest days of the year, we can harness nature in small ways. We have more idle time. Soon, we flourish into the great Egyptian civilisation, and a vast array of human-animal images are created, Gods are made, men Gods are called Kings or vice versa, and we hurtle toward an era which creates a vast array of extinct Gods. Leftovers of the Gods are excavated and curated in centuries to come, just as they are destroyed by men who are under the sway of the idea of a warlord God.
Imagine, that of all these Gods created and forgotten and those holding sway, imagine if it’s as real as the tooth fairy. Would it not be a sad f!cking joke that millions must die for the tooth fairy? That you knock your own teeth out and those of family and friends so that you can have 89 teeth for eternity instead of your normal mouthfull in this life?
That is religion for me.
It was easy for me to consider the logical fallacy of religion. They ask for belief without proof. The more implausible, the more disbelief that is required, the stronger the faith for those who believe. It’s like jumping of a cliff without a parachute but believing angels will catch you. You need to believe until the last second, but you are either right or wrong.
But are all religions right? It seems implausible unless you buy into a monotheistic via pluralism view, which is just silly. Are all wrong and one right? That is what the religions themselves tell you, which is laughable as much as it is clever.
I digress. What I really wanted to say is: If the God attributed to the religion of peace does not really exist, how tragically absurd do the deeds done in the name of a delusion become? And yet, if he exists, what does that say of the mind of God?
