Tag Archives: God

No Mercy

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I do not struggle with the idea of people having faith in an almighty being. In fact, I will defend anyone’s right to believe in the God of their choosing. We deserve religious freedoms and a choice to worship any deity we choose… or don’t choose as the case may be. Religion can be a powerful force of good in the world. I know a few very religious people, and they use their faith as a cornerstone for their integrity. They are honourable, respectable, good natured friends, neighbours, and citizens to their core.

I also see religious fanaticism as a significant problem in our world. A problem which fosters hate, and forces people into indoctrinated, evil beliefs. Beliefs which permits them to do unspeakable acts that are not only extremely harmful, but also an embarrassment to humanity.

Both of these can coexist simultaneously, across multiple religious beliefs. It’s not necessarily the religions themselves but misguided humans choosing to blindly follow interpretations of doctrine that bring out the worst in faith and humanity. And so the paradox of intolerance comes into play… we need to have intolerance for bad faith actors, while insuring we are remaining tolerant of good people of all faiths, even if especially if they are different than ours.

And this leaves me with two things for which I find myself less and less tolerant:

1. Uninvited preaching

There have been a few very public examples recently of people preaching their gospel on airplanes. They take advantage of a captive audience and without invitation decide that they will evangelize. I have the utmost tolerance and even acceptance of them believing what they want to believe, and I think they have every right to evangelize inside the confines of their church. But I’m intolerant of this idea of evangelizing to a captive audience who did not choose to listen but are stuck doing so.

Solution: Sing a song like ‘Row-Row-Row Your Boat’. Almost everyone knows the lyrics and people who don’t want to listen to preaching can easily join in and drown out the preacher (who is ultimately being rude). I understand that the singing wasn’t invited either, but I truly believe this is a lesser of two evils. The video examples demonstrate that even trying to complain permits these people to continue to evangelize, and then even claim religious persecution… making themselves out to be the victim rather than the social delinquents that they are. You can’t argue with fanatics, so just drown them out so no one can hear them.

2. Proclamations of God’s work

I’m not going to share the sources of the next examples, because like many of the commenters, (who are the reason these came across my feed), I have nothing kind to say about these posts. A reverend shared the image of a lone green house that withstood the horrific floods in Nepal, caused by the breaking up of a large glacier. His caption with the image said, “This house withstood all the flood challenge in Nepal. It’s all about the mercy of God and not necessarily the ingenuity of the Architectural work.”

What an ignorant and hateful thing to say.

Here is another example, this one came with a video showing the devastation all around the same green house, “I believe God decided to save them. It wasn’t because of the engineer who built the structure or because the structure was strong enough to protect them. I believe it was simply God’s intervention that kept them alive.”

So cruelly insensitive.

Thousands of people dead, many with no opportunity to escape the impending floodwaters. So many lives ended, so many more will continue to suffer in the coming months, and you brag about your god being merciful and saving one family, one house? It’s embarrassing that in a tragedy of this scale, this is where you see your god! The insensitivity is at a scale that can best be described as horrific. Imagine a Nepalese neighbour, who survived the flood, but lost family members, reading that post. I shudder to think of how hurtful it would be to see people praising their god for this.

Solution: I’ve already seen this in the comments. Ridicule anyone who praises the ‘God of the gaps’… call out the hypocrisy of thanking god for a shimmer of compassion in a river of devastation. If your all-powerful god is so selective in his mercy, he is vindictive, mean-spirited, and hateful. And if you are going to spew hurtful ignorance, you deserve the backlash that you get.

I struggle to not sound upset and angry when I share these ideas, but that’s the nature of the paradox of intolerance. We cannot extend tolerance to the intolerant, and religious zealots uninvitedly proselytizing or people seeing the hand of god amongst hurt and devastation is cruelty disguised as mercy. This is unacceptable, and we can’t sit by and let it happen. It’s not contributing to our society in any positive way… and it’s not what any kind, loving god would want.

What I wouldn’t do

What would you do if you were a God? That’s a challenging question. An easier question is what wouldn’t you do?

Here is what I wouldn’t do:

  • I wouldn’t wait thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to present myself to my ‘subjects’. (Or I would wait longer so that my message could spread more easily, and in high definition.)
  • I wouldn’t root my religion in superstitions about the natural world.
  • I wouldn’t write my holy book with references to social norms and practices that will date themselves and become embarrassingly outdated.
  • I wouldn’t introduce my religion to only one geographical location and leave many others clueless to my existence. (If I did pick just one geographical location, I’d choose one where my subjects were the most literate and able to share my words more consistently and precisely.)
  • I wouldn’t punish my subjects for being unbelievers, I would let their good or bad actions be the measure of their right to eternal life after death.
  • I wouldn’t expect obedience, I could have created slaves rather than self-conscious beings if obedience was really important to me.
  • I wouldn’t want anyone to fight expansionist wars in my name. Why pit my subjects against each other? This seems a bit egotistical for a god!

I’m not wise enough to list all the things I would do, without contradicting myself or being in some way myopic, selfish, or egotistical… that said, I could probably get together with a team of thoughtful people and improve on any and all holy texts. It would take equal or less effort compared to the apologists who defend and justify the contradictions in these texts, rather than admitting that a wise and benevolent God would never had allowed such poorly written scriptures to be written either by Him or in His name.

I have not yet seen a scripture or text written to this day that I believe a benevolent and loving God would have written. But there are many holy texts that such a kind and worthy-of-worship God would never have written.

Door to door religion

When it comes to organized religion, I struggle with the concepts of an afterlife. I have yet to hear a description that makes me think, “That’s how I want to spend an eternity.”

I have a great way to quickly end the conversation when a Jehovah Witness knocks at my door. My usual response to them is, “I’m comfortable with my relationship to God.” If they say anything else to me I repeat that statement. Only once did the conversation continue and in that case I simply asked, “Are you comfortable with your relationship with God?” And with a ‘Yes’ response, I said “Me too.”

Works every time. Conversation over. They leave happy, I’m happy they left.

The summer before the pandemic I had a Jehovah Witness couple come to my door. I did something dangerous, I played along. This is dangerous because once you engage in a conversation, you are likely to get callbacks. More visits because you show promise. But when I was done, I was very doubtful of another visit.

I talked about millions of years of dinosaurs, and how insignificant human life has been in geological time… and how much less significance the earth has in the universe. I spoke of the injustice of a God who didn’t share his views equitably around the world, allowing false Gods to reign in different parts of the world, condemning people who never heard of Him to hell.

And then they brought up the afterlife. At this point I clarified, “Is it correct that you believe heaven will be here on earth?” And after their response was ‘Yes’ I said, “And you’ll all be naked.”

They looked at each other puzzled, and I continued with this line of thinking: When the rapture happens, and heaven happens on earth, you’ll have the clothing you own and nothing else. There will not be anyone in sweatshops making T-shirts and running shoes. Unless God is in the manufacturing business, clothes will wear out, unless you think heaven is some sort of magical cartoon land, and so eventually you’ll all be naked. Don’t worry, there won’t be any jealousy or vanity, it is heaven after all, but you will be naked for eternity.

The conversation ended soon after. They were pleasant and ended with “God bless you.” My response to this was “By all means, may God bless you, I’m fairly certain after our conversation, your God won’t be blessing me.” A meek smile was the only response.

I don’t know what got over me that day, but I’ll go back to my usual response from now on. Still it was fun to mess with their minds a little. Some might think it mean, but I didn’t go knocking on their door trying to indoctrinate them with my views, they came to my door to do so to me.

I guess I can’t be saved.

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Related: Coffee after class

Good thoughts, good words, good deeds

For over a dozen years now my email signature has included the Zoroastrian mantra, “Think good thoughts, say good words, do good deeds.”

This 3,500+ year old religion is one of the oldest monotheistic religions (believing in just one supreme God) and likely had significant influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Islamic beliefs about a messiah, heaven, and hell.

As we head into the 20th year of this relatively new century, I wonder if the followers of some of these newer religions couldn’t take some time to pay respectful attention to the earlier beliefs in Yahweh… the supreme host, (God).

What if we started each day with good, kind thoughts?

What if we chose good, kind words before we spoke?

What if we chose good, kind deeds to do daily?

What if we were to nurture the good in any faith we have, be it a faith in God, a faith in humanity, or faith in ourselves to be loving, thoughtful, and kind. We are put on this earth for a relatively short time, how can we maximize the good that we do while we are here?

The winter solstice has past us, here in the northern hemisphere. As the days get longer and brighter, let us think of ways that we can shed our light on others.

Happy holidays!