Excerpted from
"Supernatural Hypocrisy:
The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology"
Volume 4: The Cosmology of the Dark Side
by
Kelli Jae Baeli
Gnashing of Teeth
“God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That's not free will. It's like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor.” ~William C. Easttom II
Hell. The most successful fear-tactic ever devised.
The most blatantly obvious flaw in the logic here, is that people will be sentenced to life in eternal pain and torment for behaving naturally. God created humans, then punished them for acting according to the natures HE ostensibly gave them.
The punishment of Hell, could not rationally be in place as a deterrent to sin, since an omniscient God would already know who and how many would be sinful and go to Hell. Since this number is in a sense pre-ordained, that number of people would be sentenced to Hell anyway, and thus, cannot act as a deterrent, since a deterrent acts to change something inherently changeable.
According to Christian dogma, those who don’t know God and accept Jesus as their personal savior, are doomed to spend eternity in torment. The obvious flaw here, is that there are many people who will never even have the opportunity to be exposed to the Christian religion. What of that? If a person is not privy to the information, how can they rightfully be condemned to a horrible eternal fate? Christians are quick to say that’s why they have ministries in the far reaches of Earth. This does not, however, address the original incongruity: God has put a system in place that is neither rational, fair, nor loving.
Any reasonably loving and sane person of good mental health, who has children, will tell you that they love their children in spite of the bad things they might do. Mistakes and even egregious errors will not delete the love a parent has for the child.
The main reason for this, skipping the biological details, is that the parent created this child and that’s a bond that endures. And we have so anthropomorphized God in that two-direction expressway of God creating us in His image, that we assume, perhaps without being aware of it, that God would behave toward us, much like we would behave toward our own children. Yet, we dismiss the absurdity and cruelty of this God when he threatens to send us to hell for something as negligible as a lack of faith in Him.
Parents, if your children, in a fit of pique, said they hated you, would you pour gasoline on your child and set him ablaze? Not unless you are one of those mentally deranged people we hear about periodically. So why is God any less deranged and cruel to do that to HIS children? The flaw in the logic here, is obvious.
The usual rebuttal from defending Christians is the “free will” refrain. But how is it free will to choose to love or worship a deity, when he’s holding a god-sized gun to your head? I have already refuted the free will defense, and I won't belabor the point here, other than to say coercion does not inspire trust, love, devotion or respect in me. I can’t speak for anyone else.
But this should, at the very least, make one question the existence of a Hell, or God, as a benevolent being, and even make you question the existence of God altogether.
The First Spark
According to Christianity, eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions
God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, believe or die.
"Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options."
God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, believe or die.
"Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options."
~Bill Hicks
The belief in a terrifying underworld first began with the Egyptians, and their religious tome, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This text delineates the ways in which the underworld is successfully traversed, to include the necessary spells and rituals. There were seven gates a soul had to pass through, before arriving for judgment in front of the King Osiris, which was the mythological equivalent to the Christian God.
By the 6th Century BCE , the concept of Hell was embodied in the religion of Zoroastrianism, springing from the teaching of the prophet, Zoroaster. In this version, the dead were judged by walking across a paper-thin bridge called Shin Vah. The good souls passed over and the condemned ones fell into the fiery pit below.
This new characterization of God began during the Babylonian Exile, when the Israelites crossed paths with followers of the prophet, Zoraoaster, who lived circa 630-550 BCE . Zoraoaster’s adherents believe that time was divided into a current age of darkness and a future age of light, which would end in a final battle between good and evil, wherein the good would receive reward and the evil would be annihilated.
This eschatology soon became part of the Christian dogma, and appeared in apocalyptic writings such as that found in the Book of Daniel, 200 years before Jesus appeared. Though Daniel was said to have been written by the prophet of the same name 400 years preceding, it was instead written by an unknown author who told of disasters happening in his time. So Daniel was not a forecast, but a reporting of current events. This was just another way that Christian dogma borrowed and altered facts to its own devices.[1]
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The Evil Landlord
After Hell was successfully embedded in the human consciousness, the concept evolved. Someone decided that if this underworld existed, it needed a landlord. And the landlord had to be evil.
If, as the Christians claim, God created the Universe and everything in it, then that would include Satan. The immediate question that arose for me was, if God’s answer to the unworthiness and evil of men was met with a giant flood that killed them all, then why didn’t he annihilate the Devil when he rebelled in Heaven?
According to Christian underpinnings of belief, Satan had this little slice of real estate called Hell in which to operate his business of tempting humans into his fold, in opposition to God. The Devil would reportedly take the form of a human female, have sex with unsuspecting men, possibly just for his own entertainment, and then transform again to a human male and have sex with a female, thus implanting the seed of Satan, and interbreeding with humanity. There have been reports of nuns being attacked by Satan—in the form of priests. No great mystery here; it didn’t occur to them until the modern age that maybe they were actually being raped by a priest.
Even so, the overwhelming suggestion was always that women must be careful not to tempt men into the act of forced sexual intercourse, as if this were a possibility. Thus, it was again the woman’s fault when a man misbehaved. Christianity used scapegoating as part of its dogma, whether this is admitted openly or not. I contend that at the very least, Satan, in this regard, was merely a representation of the belief that sex was inherently dirty, and maybe also that men can behave in ways that embody that evil.
Nonetheless, besides the females of our species, Satan is the ultimate scapegoat. Humanity seems to need this being to blame for their own transgressions. Again, this is part and parcel of individuals not taking responsibility for themselves and their actions.
Joseph Conrad said, “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
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The backstory is that God created Satan as good, but Satan rebelled and became evil. There are immediately some issues with the nonsensical nature of the existence of such a being. Why would God—who is supposedly an omni-everything being—create something that had the capacity for becoming evil? Isn’t this a flaw in logic? If God is omniscient, then He knew Satan would turn bad. So, either God intended this to happen, or He didn’t care. This would make his creation process frivolous at least, and contradictory to His own nature at most. If God did NOT know Satan would turn evil, then God is not omniscient. Which renders Him ungodlike.
That aside, God did not destroy Satan when he went to the quintessential Dark Side. Why? Because he thought Satan could serve some greater purpose? And what purpose might that be, when we are talking about an omnipotent god who can make anything happen, without the aid of some rogue angel? It negates the supposed nature of God.
That aside, God did not destroy Satan when he went to the quintessential Dark Side. Why? Because he thought Satan could serve some greater purpose? And what purpose might that be, when we are talking about an omnipotent god who can make anything happen, without the aid of some rogue angel? It negates the supposed nature of God.
As with the biblical story of Job, Christians have been taught that God would not allow Satan to inflict more harm than one of his creations could handle. Logically, this contention would lead to the conclusion that Satan would not ever successfully recruit one of God’s humans. So, then, what’s the point of going through the motions, if God knows the outcome already. To merely inflict suffering on those beings he created? If there is that tired exception of free will, and in it, the possibility that a human will choose the sin over the obedience, then again, this deity will have shown himself manipulative of the very natures he ostensible instilled in humans to begin with.
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The Satan myth infiltrated our literature, most commonly known in a Faustian way. Faust, a closet play[2] by Johann Von Goethe, is often touted as the greatest work in German literature. In it, a devil named Mephistopheles makes a wager with God that he can sway the studious human, Faust, one of God’s favorites, away from his righteous life. Faust then makes a deal with the Devil, apparently exercising that free will I spoke of. There are, of course, striking similarities with this and the Book of Job.
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Lost Inferno Paradise
Throughout the ages, both art and literature has informed the modern beliefs about Hell and the afterlife. Satan was blended with the idea of Lucifer through various similarities in language found in the Bible, other religious texts, and in the works of John Milton and Dante Alighieri—Paradise Lost and Divine Comedy, respectively. It is from these literary works that many Christians derive their concepts of Satan, often without conscious awareness.
"So compelling is the character of Satan in Paradise Lost,” Neil Forsyth contends. “that generations of English speakers, knowing their Milton better than their Bible, have assumed that Christianity teaches an elaborate story about the fall of the angels after a war in heaven, and have been surprised to find no mention of Satan in the Book of GEN ."[3]
G.B. Caird echoes the sentiment: "The Bible knows nothing of the fall of Satan familiar to readers of Paradise Lost."[4]
In Paradise Lost, Milton Milton Milton
I’ve heard some Christians explain the problem of evil in the world by saying that God is both: good and evil, and we are representations or manifestations of this in human form. With this line of reasoning, since Satan represents evil in Christendom, then God is Satan. This is a concept, while shocking to Christians, is nonetheless in alignment with the behaviors of the vengeful, petty, petulant and volatile deity found in the Bible. The god of the Bible kills, tortures and maims while the Devil stands aside, representing nothing as ominous as the god who represents his antithesis. It is perhaps one of the greater ironies that the Christian god is less worthy of worship than the being assigned as the ultimate dark force. So, perhaps this explanation that God is both evil and good, is represented in these two beings: Satan and God. Though, one could argue that if God represents the good, he certainly didn’t take any pains to embody the part.
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The people of ancient times could not be profoundly more ignorant than modern people, yet a certain amount if ignorance was at play. Information and education was hard to come by, and there was no instant access to it via the Internet and mass media that we enjoy today. It is easy to understand how a certain amount of ignorance gave rise to superstition and mythology. However, there are still those among us who display their atavistic ignorance with jejune pride.
Here's an example of just how ignorant modern humans can be. If the spelling and misuse of terminology is not an indication, consider the shallow, regurgitated argument he offers:
(posted by malchus5)
"Its no game
"Its no game
Heres a perspective, if the Supreme Being was playing with us ,so what are you going do about it ? If a Supreme Being created you He did it for His purpose.His purpose.God is Holy that means He can not tolerate any rebellion.Jesus said if you think it its rebellion.BUT He created a lupole. Someone to satify that holy reconpense.///////satan free will made him turn rebellious.(detail)God is good ,being all knowing their is a purpose/////////// I am sure this does not help you." [1]
Why no, malchus5, it doesn’t help me, because helping me would require the use of a brain. Where does he get the definition of “holy” as being a state where no rebellion is allowed?
Interestingly, Malchus was the name of a slave in biblical days, whose ear was lopped off by St. Peter. So you probably can’t hear me when I say: educate yourself!
Never mind the fact that a Saint goes around cutting off the ears of slave people. Maybe Malchus was reincarnated as Vincent Van Gogh.
But I digress.
The dictionary defines “holy” as:
1. specially recognized as or declared sacred by religious use or authority.
2. dedicated or devoted to the service of God, the church, or religion: a holy man.
3. saintly; godly; pious; devout.
4. having a spiritually pure quality: a holy love.
5. entitled to worship or veneration as or as if sacred: a holy relic.
6. religious.
7. inspiring fear, awe, or grave distress.
In definition number one, this would mean that God is holy only because he declared himself holy. In definition number two, this would mean that God was devoted to the service of himself. In number three, God would be compared to himself. In number four, we run into still another contradiction: God is of course, godly. So again,t he comparison can only be made to the thing being compared with. A logical fallacy of the worst order. In definition number five, we see the first chance for a sensical relationship between God and the word, Holy; God being worthy of worship or veneration because he is holy. In number six, we lose it again, because one cannot assign the god to the condition of being religious, since a religious person worships another being, and that would mean God would worship another being, more Holy, and more godlike, than himself. Or that he would worship himself. Which leads us to definition seven: inspiring fear, awe, or grave distress. Certainly, a case could be made for God being holy by the fact that he inspires all these things.
So, the only definition that makes any sense, is that God is only holy because he inspires fear, awe or grave distress. And this is the god that Christians choose to worship. And they seem absurdly proud of this choice. 
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