My God is an awesome God a whiny little bitch

Aaaand we get email! Yesterday, we heard from a fellow who objects to our objections to Christianity, because, as he goes on to explain, all other Christians are “ridiculous” because they’ve read the Bible all wrong, and he’s the first one ever who’s got God all figured out. Thing is, I don’t see his version as being much of an improvement on the concept…

My replies, as written in my email back, appear within.

(And PS: The first person in the comments who makes the usual “Oh, I just can’t believe anyone could be this stupid, this guy must be a Poe” remark gets to wear the Pointy Hat in the corner for 24 hours, and doesn’t get any pudding after supper either.)

I’m a Christian.

Your anti-biblical arguments are strawmen, and your anti-theistic arguments are typically childish, because you are arguing against mainstream definitions of God, which themselves are ridiculous definitions. Shame on those of you who claim to be “former Christians” because you, like the rest of Christians, never attempted to define the biblical God in any kind of logically consistent manner.

So you’re off to the races with a “no true Scotsman” fallacy right out of the gate? Look, we won’t stop you from claiming that you are the only Christian out there who isn’t working from a definition of God that is “ridiculous,” but honestly, isn’t that a matter for you to take up with your fellow Christians and not us? Shouldn’t all of you come to some kind of consensus as to what this being is you worship, and want us to worship, whose supposed edicts you want enacted as laws that will affect all the rest of us? I really don’t see how you can blame us for critiquing the concepts of God as they are presented to us by the vast majority of believers who contact us, even when you agree with us that these are “ridiculous” concepts. Really, where’s your beef with us?

The only way to resolve the problem of evil, or to make sense of the biblical accounts, is to define God as a being subject to certain needs, weaknesses, and limitations. For example, the biblical God obviously lacks foreknowledge, because a loving God would not create Lucifer, Adam, and Eve knowing in advance that they would freely choose to fall. The most loving thing to do would be to create only those persons foreknown to freely chose righteousness.

WHY did God give Lucifer, Adam, and Eve enough freedom to hang themsleves? The only solution is to define God as a being who has an emotional need for voluntary fellowship. Had I the space, I would explain precisely WHY God has emotional needs.

Well, I suppose one can imagine a weak, stupid and insecure god just as easily as one can imagine an almighty, powerful, omniscient and omnipotent one. I think you’re going to have a harder sell where your fellow Christians are concerned, though. Why worship someone with weaknesses and limitations? What believers want in a God is a being just like them, except idealized and perfect. Otherwise where is the appeal? I don’t see too many religions thriving whose sales pitch is, “God! Just as pitiful as you!”

Next question. On what basis would the biblical God indict the whole world for the sin of Adam and Eve? The solution is quite simple. A soul defined as an immaterial substance is a logical absurdity beccause it leads to the insoluble mind-body problem, as the church father Tertullian pointed out in 200 AD. Therefore the soul must be defined as a tangible substance.

Lovely. Then it ought to appear on a CAT scan, an MRI, an X-ray or somewhere in the human genome. Let me know when you find it.

Let’s assume for the moment that God created only one tangible soul named Adam. After Adam sinned, God extracted most of Adam’s soul from his body and held it in suspended animation. At every human conception He mates a portion of this soul to the embryo. In other words, YOU are Adam. You were born guilty of sin because YOU are part of the Adam that originally sinned even though you don’t remember living in the garden.

I see no reason to assume any of these things, but I do think you probably have a fantastic career ahead of you writing for Marvel Comics. Seriously, there’s a plot here worthy of an entire series.

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