The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[Whateverist]

But I completely agree with you about picking and choosing.  I mean, why the bible?  Personally though I don't say God is evil even though the entity that goes by that name in the old testament certainly seems to be played that way.  No, for me, the problem with God is the incoherence.  What the hell is a god?

That would take an eternity to answer. So God is a being that is beyond time that created everything for His glory. He has no evil in Him He is holy and created people to be holy and to love him. We failed at that so by his grace and mercy He paid the penalty for our sins on the cross to that we could be put back into right relationship with him and continue to spread the glory of God.

I have been reading a little bit on why some people see God as incoherent or a contradiction but I would like to know why you think this is so.

You hear many qualities attributed to God but without a god to examen it is hard to know where these attributes come from.  The idea of existing outside of time is absurd to me.  What else is there that exists outside of time which makes this possibility seem so plausible to you?  

The whole idea of everything there is requiring a being to bring it into existence just seems ass backwards to me.  Experience teachers that what is more complex is built up from what is less complex.  If God is so super duper special, then He too must have evolved from what is less super duper, not the other way around.  That whose origins cannot be accounted for cannot be the source for that those things we can account for.  Defining a being as such is gratuitous and entirely unconvincing.

Some think the afterlife gatekeeper function is an essential attribute of God.  But again I have to ask, what afterlife?  There is no reason to think such a thing exists.  On top of that, to think that a being of infinite extent in space and time would go out of its way to provide a dimension of unending torment for some and another of eternal bliss for others does again seem absurd.  To think that this being is then monitoring not just our words and deeds but even our thoughts in order to sort us into these afterlife bins seems beyond absurd.  No one but ourselves could possibly think every deed is so precious and important.

But the most absurd aspect of 'gods', to me, is that they are what is called "supernatural".  That is a category I am sure is empty.  Nothing is other than natural.  If your god was truly a part of everything then it too would be natural.  Every supposed miracle would involve not magic but a skill and knowledge we do not possess.  I do not claim that gods do not exist, only that their description is incoherent for these reasons.  What I do claim is that if a god exists it is a natural phenomenon albeit one we do not yet or may never understand.

[Here I ignore all the self contradictory properties of the supposed omni-powers of your God. That and historical evidence I count as low lying fruit unworthy of my time.]