Never been one to let the carrier drop

It’s so odd to me that I managed to get hurt so much by people who had such good intentions. I guess I talked about that in a previous post. I tried to explain to a friend of mine the other day what parts of Christianity not to teach his kids. I wonder if he listened, and if so, if he thought about what I said.

For those of you who are curious.. don’t teach your children that they are so flawed that someone had to die for their failings. Because A: you don’t know that and B: it’s a very damaging message.

There’s so much about Christianity that makes me roll my eyes at this point. One of the most impressive bits of stupidity is the idea that God can’t arrange to incarnate any time *e wants. Only if we have a impressively incompetent God. The bible claims God’s voice would deafen us – while at the same time claiming God is omnipotent. Look, omnipotence includes a gain control, last I looked. The glaring silence, and competing religions all claiming to be right, makes the most likely hypothesis seem like there isn’t anything you’d call God – like we’re doing this bottom-up, not top-down.

For that matter, it’s hard to even fathom how a creator who can’t even figure out advanced error correction could be called perfect. (Cancer happens because DNA uses a simple checksum instead of something more advanced like CRC-32) You’re in a awkward place if you’re defending that your diety is a intelligent designer, but they don’t have I.T. as good as we have on Earth. And very little in the bible makes me think it was written by anyone who had seen as far as we have. If you look really hard on the horizon over there, where computers and humans dance together, you can see something I might call heaven. We can get to a really awesome world from here. A place where no one is hungry, where everyone can have any experience they want (although experiences hurting other people in ways no one wants to volunteer to be hurt are going to have to be simulated rather than live)

If you’d wanted to impress me with God’s all seeing ways, the book would not have contained the line “don’t improve me”. That just impressed me with how much it was not the work of a higher power.

Actually, the old testament did a great job of that, too. God has such a fragile ego that he has to talk about himself as the LORD in all caps? Oh, yes, he wants your money, too. That the priests are the ones writing the book has nothing to do with that at all.

And he was such a loathsome creature. Stone someone because they like to have sex with the same gender? How can we read that and not just go, this is bullshit, and throw the book out? Why would ANYONE expose their children to this mess?

It does at times make me wonder, could I write a better religion? But I refuse to be Joe Smith, or even L. Ron Hubbard. I do sometimes think I need to write a better one just to load into myself.

Why do I write anti-christian articles? well, at this point, because I think it’s healthy for me to do so. It’s helping me unload the religion to point out how badly written it is, and how it’s not something anyone should expose their children to. Among other things, children have huge numbers of unallocated neurons. Do you really want them using some of them to imagine a creature who specializes in evil? (It’s a sign of my impressive disdain for the religion that I’m not sure when I say this whether I’m talking about God or Satan)

I would rather, if I’m going to believe in a God, believe in a God that is better than I can possibly imagine.. and I can already imagine a God that is better than anything in that book and still fit it with the experiences I’ve had so far on Earth. Assuming certain postulates are true, such as this place is deliberately bad so we can come here when lotus-eating in amazing-land pales, or when we want to take on a challenge.

Christians in general believe in a incompetent God. For example, why would a competent deity ever connect a soul to a body *e knew wasn’t going to ever walk on the earth? When I told my mom this she asserted that “It doesn’t work that way” – to which my response is, and you know this *how*? Because a book that advocates keeping slaves and murdering people told you? Let’s have a little talk about virtualization and some educated guesses we can make about what a intelligent, capable deity would do..

Now, I admit it, I’m angry. I would love for all the abrahamic religions to be studied as curiosities, rather than read as anything anyone would want to believe in. I would love for them to meet my old friend the low level format tool, for that matter. The Unitarians, I can get behind. Short source code. Hard to screw up. But I’m not a universalist.. I don’t buy that religion is a universal thing, or something we need, or even want, for a lot of definitions of the word religion. The idea that a belief can get wedged into our neural net so thoroughly that we hold onto it even if it fails reality testing, even if it fails common sense, I find far more scary than desirable.

And the idea that God would torture me for all eternity because I couldn’t pick from a plethora of religions that all looked highly questionable? I find that one just plain absurd. It’s certainly not even remotely compatible with the idea of God being a loving entity as I understand love.

Then again, who would I torture eternally? No one. Not even Hitler.

I do have second thoughts about my file permission based universe from time to time. It’s definitely not something I’d sign up to be locked in forever. My fear is that ultimately we would all end up completely isolated from each other. But it’s a appealing idea, nonetheless. The thing is, I haven’t met anyone that I’d actually lock out of my world yet, although I’ve met people I would like to maintain a fair amount of distance from. Two of them, so far.

But I’m not sure what i *would* sign up to be locked in forever. It would have to be one hell of a system. More degrees of freedom than I could imagine or understand. Really good online help.

It’s kind of moot, since at the moment my life rates as ‘acceptable’ occasionally bordering on ‘good’ and I’m still working like hell to try to get it to ‘great’. Despite all my anger and frustration at the world, the truth is most of the problems are internal. I think a lot of them were *caused* by my experiences in the world, but I don’t think the world is hurting me any more, for the most part. And I’m learning to react to people in the world hurting me by changing my trust level of those people, which leaves them less openings to hurt me in the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2016 at 9:02 am and is filed under Spiritual/Religious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.