As you may have discerned from my previous post, I’m not a big fan of god. I’ve been assured he’s a lovely guy if you get to know him, but I don’t see myself jumping on board anytime soon. This is largely because no one’s ever given me a good reason to think he’s out there, but also because the god of most major religions has always struck me as being a dick. I mean, what kind of insecure maniac would punish a person with eternal hellfire for no other reason than that the poor sucker questioned the maniac’s existence? Isn’t god supposed to be above such petty bullshit? An image just passed through my head of god floating in the clouds, damning nonbelievers to hell with a thunderbolt and an intonation of “Nah nah nah boo boo.” I suppose thoughts like that are why I have trouble taking churchgoers seriously.
My goal here isn’t necessarily to shit on religion. I am perfectly willing to concede that religion may have been beneficial to human civilization in previous millennia, and it may have even facilitated some of our great advancements as a people, but contemporary religion has been perverted beyond all recognition. God and god’s laws were initially tools used to keep hoi polloi in line. Don’t fuck your sister, don’t fuck a sheep, don’t steal shit, don’t murder people, etc. This is all good advice if your goal is a functional society. These days, however, the emphasis seems to be on developing a personal relationship with Christ and converting queers. These values being dominant, the best case scenario is that our civilization will stagnate; the worst case scenario is that our civilization will cease to be civilized. Any reasonable person who’s seen those “God Hates Fags” signs outside of soldiers’ funerals would have to admit we’re headed down the latter path.
It’s not just religion that bugs me, but the whole idea of god. My skin crawls whenever I hear some cretin say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” I suppose what they really mean is, “I don’t go to church, but I believe crystals can cure cancer,” but mostly I think it’s just a nonsense turn of phrase people use because they’re hesitant to write god off entirely. The problem is that belief in god is the default mode, but this setup is preposterous. Belief is active, while a lack of belief is passive, which puts the burden of proof squarely on the believer. No one would think of asking someone to provide evidence showing that toys don’t come to life at night. Because there’s no reason to assume they do, the default is to not possess an active belief in the consciousness and animation of toys. The onus is on the aberrant who believes that toys are people too; this guy has to prove to me the validity of his demented conviction.
I would argue that there’s similarly no reason to believe in the existence of god. You’d be hard-pressed to find any physical evidence of him. Some people would say that the universe itself is evidence enough, but that’s just because some people can’t follow a thought through to its logical conclusion. If the universe came from god, where did god come from? Did he spontaneously come into existence, spawned from nothingness? In that case you can cut god out of the equation entirely, and just say that the first particles in the universe came from nothing. Either way you’re left wondering how nothing becomes something.
The argument that god didn’t spontaneously come into existence, but rather has existed for all of time, isn’t much better. Again, god is an unnecessary complication since the nonbeliever could effectively counter by asserting that the matter involved in the big bang has existed for all of time. Both explanations allow you to opt out of the messy “something from nothing” quandary, but you’re still left to determine the nature of infinite time, which is well out of the realm of human conception.
Everyone is looking for answers, but the questions we’re asking are presently not answerable. If you don’t give it too much thought, god is a good resolution; if you give it a lot of thought, you have to come to the conclusion that god, whether or not you believe in his existence, is not a necessary component of the universe. If the capricious god of organized religion exists, I’m sure he’ll send me straight to hell for saying this, but god is irrelevant. George Carlin was an atheist who believed in the power of Joe Pesci. I’m an atheist who believes in the power of cake.
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