Hey cowboy,
Facebook is rather holy today. A friend this morning posted:
I love it when distractions that Satan would want to use to hinder our worship are overcome by the Spirit of God! I am thankful for people willing to be obedient and lead us in worship despite their fears, sadness, grief, or any of the other emotions that I know were at work this morning!
Fear, sadness, and grief aren’t terrible emotions and there are appropriate times for all three. I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think it’s healthy to view one’s normal human feelings of sadness and grief as tools used by Satan.
I’m scared half the time — of life, of the world. I have grief. Is this evil at work in me? I have nothing against the person who posted these sentiments — in fact, I consider her a very dear friend — but these ideas are ridiculous and alarming.
I scrolled and saw another posting, this one from a gay man with completely opposite political, religious, and social perspectives as the first friend:
The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing bigots, misogynists, and homophobes that they were patriotic Christians.
The people who wrote these posts are in opposite camps, politically and socially. The first is a minister’s wife and the second is a middle-aged homosexual. While I value them both, I’m a little bugged that both of them used the silly trick of Devil-blaming to reduce and oversimplify the complexities of human nature.
The Devil doesn’t make anyone sad or fearful. The Devil doesn’t convince anyone to be anything. Why isn’t this obvious? Humans do things — good and bad. The Devil is just an old, antiquated, and mildly amusing concept upon which we dump all our guilt, shame, and personal responsibility.
I think the Devil is great. If Lucifer exists, so must his dogmatic counterpart, a being that created a world and people to live in it — who was omniscient enough to foresee Eve’s stunt in the garden of Eden ahead of time and know that we would fall to sin, destined to suffer. Why did he not create some way to prevent her slip-up? Why did he create his beloved creation with the built-in impulse to sin? God is invariably responsible for human sin and therefore must be responsible for evil. To punish us for this trait we have — one he is invariably responsible for — is sadistic and cruel. Why do Christians want to believe in such a being? Why worship one?
None of this is new. The logical fallacy of a benevolent god has been presented by people who can think for literally thousands of years. Since before Christ, in fact. See below.
God cannot be benevolent. If god is omniscient and omnipotent, he sits in Heaven and watches things like the Holocaust and AIDS and permits them — or worse, generates them. If he truly made all things, he cannot be a hands-off observer — that would be abandonment — and be benevolent. By the assumed logic of those who consider themselves blessed (white, middle-class Christians), god elects to give some the comforts of privilege while giving others (starving Black children in Africa dying of AIDS) lives of misery and pain. This is actually a classic conundrum with Biblical precedent. The story of Job and the problem of suffering (sometimes called “the problem of evil”) leads to one logical conclusion: if god exists, he must be evil.
I’ve only written about the Christian god, the god of Abraham, but all this applies to any being that is considered omniscient and omnipotent. If your god is all-knowing and all-powerful — if he or she created the world, started the world, runs the world, sustains the world, or in some way directs natural events — they are invariably responsible for unspeakable cruelty and suffering, so they must be unspeakably cruel.
Compared to such a monstrous being, the Devil should be cheered. If Christian lore is to be believed, god will presumably wage holy war again against the cosmic undergod in the last days. I know which side I’m rooting for.
Everything I’ve written in this post is simple logic, so I’m baffled that a well-educated minister’s wife and well-educated Christian gay man haven’t worked it out. I imagine they choose to accept this cognitive dissonance in order to continue believing in a world run by something good rather than a world run by nothing. If a world run by nothing sounds more appealing to you than worshiping and praying to a cruel cosmic dictator, don’t worry, you’re just sane.
Atheism isn’t the natural state of humans — we are, by default, religious — but for me, it’s the kinder reality than believing all the suffering on earth is permitted or, worse, deigned by something powerful enough to spare us. I’d rather believe in nothing over believing in that.
I’m not trying to recruit anyone into atheism — that’s what this post is for.
Satan, if you’re real, I’m single, baby.
Love, Beastly
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Love, Beastly 
Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
Well stated and articulated. Religious zealots need to start owning up. Period.
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And after reading that, I wonder where you learned all that you learned? I’m sure you’re less than 30 years old. ..? So historically documented events from times way beyond your conception are to be revamped? Well, that’s been done. Scripture Job 38:4 should interest you DEEPLY because you have proven in this article that you are a thinker. But in order to understand it, you’ll have to have a heart. Spoken from a man who struggles and doesn’t judge.
Sincerely
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Job 38:4 is a beautiful verse – one of my favourites actually. But I most confess, I’m unclear about many things you wrote in your comment. I learned all that I learned (I’m not sure what particular branch of my knowledge you’re referring to) from reading, researching, questioning, cross-examining, and a pretty rigorous education. In other words, I learned the same way many people far smarter and far dumber than me have learned what they learned. Yes, I am less than thirty years old. I’m unsure what historically documented events you’re referring to, since the fall of Lucifer (and really everything else in the Bible) actually has little to no historical or archaeological evidence. You can certainly do your own research on this, but considering who you are, you’ll probably look to biased, Christian-based sources for proof of Bible stories, which as an inquiry is a massive begged question. Virtually all theological sites will affirm to you that everything in the Bible is true, while virtually all academic and archeological sites will tell you otherwise. So if the winner is the one with the bigger pile of evidence (or the loudest blowhards) in their camp, there is a chance that we might find ourselves at a tie, although I should remind you that Christ purportedly lived quite a long time ago, and most of the artifacts from that time have been damaged, do not exist, are fake, or are replicas. History swallows up civilizations, so it should understandably be hard to find evidence of the existence of one man, no matter how divine, beyond a few dusty scrolls. I’m not sure what stories you think I’m revamping, since I haven’t altered any Bible narrative — I have merely responded to them. Yes, I am a thinker, but Job 38:4 does not interest me that much. I’m a writer, so I acknowledge how easy it is to write something down and call it truth. If I can do so, so can others, and so have many others done. There’s a giant book of truth-claims written, selected, edited, discarded, and compiled by a congress of thousands of people throughout history, all with their own bias and skewed viewpoints, which you now seem to accept as absolute truth – the Bible. I’m not sure what about that particular verse is difficult to understand – it makes perfect sense to me, and its poetry isn’t lost on me, nor is the poetry in the books of Psalms or of Solomon – but as far as I’m concerned, these books are filled with beautiful, moralistic, empty verse, and are neither evidence that God exists nor guides to my particular life. I tend to seriously doubt the intelligence of anyone who feels the need to add textual emphasis with ALL CAPS, but thanks for commenting sincerely. Yours in honesty if not in faith, Beastly.
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Just seems to me that this creator God, you name and speak of is in a field past all of this, way past right or wrong, beyond good, or bad—a great open hearted silence that looks a lot more like a wish than some equation. It’s a friendly universe and the Good News is that there is no bad news. It’s not the devil, or God, it’s just cancer or a mind blowing fuck—that’s all it is without your story attached to it. God is no monster, neither are you and love is all around. Love is the best thing we do and comes in many forms and contexts.
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