Argument from Conscience

[Kingpin]

I understand your points here Rob and value your concern for my well being.    I actually converted from Atheism to Christianity when I was 18 coming from a horrific childhood.  You may say that I am invoking this idea of a loving God purely out of a need for emotional comfort stemming from a horrific past, and while it does indeed give me immense comfort that is not why I continue to hold it, I hold because I personally find it to be true.  I cannot logically look at this world and universe and not deduce something far greater than ourselves.  Naturalism offers no value, no meaning, just depression and despair.  I look at an intelligible world and have to logically deduce intelligence behind it.  I cannot fathom that this immensely complex universe is pure blind luck, it goes against reason.  It's like someone showing me a dictionary with all of the words in correct order with all of their definitions and then saying it came to be out of an explosion in a printing press by pure luck and chance and that it is precisely what we expect to happen based on the properties we see of this printing press.  To me that is illogical.

You may say, "I don't know" but when facing tough questions in life, the answers that a naturalistic framework offer are bleak.  Maybe you think I'm not happy with those answers so I need to believe in something else to make those answers more re-assuring.  That's fine if you want to believe that.  

See, this is where I would tend to disagree. I was religious for most of my life, and I was in no way shielded from despair by my faith; quite the contrary, in fact. The older I got and the more I learned of the Bible, the more it seemed to me that the world is the way it is because God made it that way, and that in the grand scheme of things he gives absolutely no shits about our suffering and no shits how unfair his creation actually is. Looking at the book that was supposed to be his word, the God I had been raised to believe in was clearly a monster simply and only for creating such a horrible place for us to live, an even more horrible place for most of us to go to, not to mention all the other atrocious shit he does to whole races of people throughout scripture.


Atheism actually freed me from that despair. I used to be at least partially suicidal because of how bleak and unfair existence under God was, but when I realized that the world wasn't consciously created by someone who knew full well how fucked up it would get, I actually felt much better. I also realized how precious this life is, since it's evidently over once our brains turn off. Not only that, but when I looked at the actual stats and realized that humanity is getting both more moral and more secular by the decade, I was further uplifted into believing that maybe humanity had a better chance at being ok than I'd previously thought. I even reconsidered my stance on having children because I no longer have to worry about their going to hell if I can't convince them to follow the ideology I was raised with or not to love people who are the wrong gender.


Naturalism is full of hope and potential because it means the system isn't hopelessly rigged against the majority of humanity. We don't have to fight the will of some all-powerful being to make things better, and we don't have to bend to its arbitrarily cruel and bloody whims, either. All we have to do is act, learn, and act again. Without higher powers to fuck with us and get in our way, there's more hope for humanity, not less. Probably the greatest (if not only) "blessing" God ever gave me was to finally offend my critical thinking to the extent that I realized he could not exist, especially not as written in the Bible.

(emphasis mine)

If you don't mind I'd like to address just a few things you mention here.  You say that God made this horrible place and that he does not care about human suffering.  Would you prefer he made a world where evil was not possible and that all there is was love?  Do you find it logical for me to say that evil is really just a violation or purpose?  If God created a place where there was no evil (no violation of purpose) would that not be mindless automatons just doing what they are told (or programmed) to do?  Why do people have children in this world that have the free will to defy their rules?

God is NOT distant from human suffering.  People often ask me why Jesus came when he did and not earlier in history.  I thought about that as well.  Think of the manner of his death.  “Crucifixion was invented by the barbarians at the edge of the known world and taken over by the Greeks and Romans.  It is probably the cruelest method of execution ever practiced.  Delayed death is intensified until maximum torture had been inflicted.  Roman citizens were exempted except in extreme cases of treason.  Cicero writing about it says this, ‘To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination; to kill him is almost an act of murder, to crucify him is what?!’”  To bind him is cruel, to flog him is cruel and to crucify him defies language!  No wonder Trypho writing to Justin Martyr said, “I am still incredulous over this whole crucifixion issue.”(From Dialogue with Trypho).  The word excruciating comes from the Latin, excruciatus which literally means, “out of the cross”.  The very word for extreme agony is borrowed from the metaphor of the cross, which was not a metaphor but a reality.