Belief in The Devil in 2015

[robvalue]

I would certainly rather live in a world where everyone is happy all the time and could only conceive of and do happy things. I think if any theist was in such a world for a day, they would not want to go back either.

The idea that suffering makes the good things better is entirely a result of how god set things up. According to theists that is. God created the rules, right? That is a sadistic way of running things. Instead of people just being happy and appreciating being happy, they have to suffer first to achieve more happiness. If you just accept whatever crap god does because he is god, you have no way of telling whether he has our best intentions in mind or not.

Theists seem to live in this blur between reality and fantasy. On the one hand they see all the suffering we do, all the problems in the world, people having to eat or else they starve, animals excreting, natural disasters, exactly what you would expect from a world not created or governed by a good supernatural force. But then they see god there too, fighting against this reality, trying to make things right. Fighting against the reality he supposedly created. But in their mind they somehow attribute it to "how things are". This seems to be a major point of dissidence. They see him showing up to do tiny things (globally speaking) like save a child from getting killed when everyone else in the car gets wiped out, instead of ending suffering and death forever entirely. It makes god sound more like an extremely minor helper in a world he had nothing to do with than a being of great power.

And as to all these demons, vampires, UFOS, evil spirits... it seems the trick to keeping these at bay is critical thinking. They never show up to sceptics.