I am about to ask a serious but utterly reprehensible question

[Astonished]

I had been fairly sure that if indoctrination were to be completely halted, theism would die out in a generation, but now I'm not so optimistic. Still, even a 75% success rate would be massively instrumental in saving the world. Or if the shift were to reverse the proportion of believers to nonbelievers as it stands now, which I think is slightly less than that.

While I am no fan of any end-religion movement, I have to admit I'd like to see atheism become the numerical majority just to short circuit the tendency of religious groups to try to make secular society over in their own dated image.

Hey, if the believers become so marginalized we literally never have to hear a word about it, I'm fucking fine with that. I just don't think that's possible even with a major numerical switcheroo.

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Belief is not a choice. And you just said I wouldn't be punished for not believing. But I will, because of the reason I stated. It's an inevitable conclusion.

Anyhow, I could never love something that is ordering me to love it "or else". That is a monster.

Well..... an observation, questions and a hypothetical @ you.

You say there isn't a god.

If you don't believe in God, why do you call Him a monster? Because of what others tell you about God? Or because you know that for a fact?

Do you Love Life? Do you Love your fellow man? Do you consider yourself honest, caring loving person? Would you stop to help someone you know is in trouble, or help them in some way? These are just generalizations.

What "IF" answering [yes] to all of these questions meant you were doing God's will, and in His good graces. Can you accept that as a possibility? And IF not, why?

Well, first, in response to your previous post, you make the wrongheaded assumption that there is any 'good' in the text that the text is absolutely essential for. This is not so and it is provable. Further, you make the wrongheaded assumption that you can simply dismiss the negative in favor of the positive and this is also not so unless you are willing to admit you are being willfully deceitful and/or pretty intellectually lazy. Trying to bald-face it like you're doing comes across as moronic or naive at best. I've said this analogy over and over, but trying to find the good in religion is like taking the harshest, most side-effect ridden medication imaginable to treat whatever it is you're suffering from (though religion is likely what causes you to imagine this condition or others), while the secular humanists are taking the safest, least-risky and better-success-rate medicine, even though you have equal access to both things. That you're choosing the one over the other is saddening in the extreme.

And I'm so glad you decided to phrase your next line of questioning the way you did, makes it nice and simple.

God is a monster because of what is written about him in his biography. What that story does psychologically to any tricked into believing in it. That there is never a finger lifted or a word spoken to correct any of these alleged mistakes or misunderstandings and the fact that every significant advancement in history has been man-made and almost always in opposition to what those books or the popular doctrines at the time have to say. If all we have to go on is divine hiddenness, 'god works in mysterious ways' and people lying about having the word of said god(s), and no gods care to knock this bullshit off, that alone, that unforgivable apathy, THAT makes any and all gods into the image of a fucking monster. THAT I know for a fact.

Do I love life? No. I have never regarded life as a gift so to say I should be grateful to your god for it is to say will likely get a response akin to you and your god should both go and do something sexually abusive to a pig.

Do I love my fellow man? A select few, but in general I could be considered something of a misanthrope and I'm fairly sure you can tell why by now. If the vast majority of the world wasn't actively engaging in psychological self-deception which leads them to behaviors and decisions that harm others and destroy the world just a little bit more each day, maybe I'd feel differently.

Do I consider myself an honest, caring, loving person? Yes to the first two, no to the third. I'm not sure I'm even fully capable of grasping that concept because of all the disparate definitions bandied about. Least of all the love of this deity who drowns babies, loves the smell of burning human flesh and tortures people just to show someone who already knows full well how big his dick is (thank you, late great George Carlin, for that one). And I'm caring up to a point. When you make it impossible to do so by showing how willfully dishonest you are, it's pretty easy to just stop and write you off as hopeless. Already found half a dozen of you on here. You know who you are. That kind of person, yeah, I give it the old college try to help them out of their delusional state, and it just never takes as far as I have tried. If I try to help a person out in a situation that has nothing to do with faith, I get a sense of elation. I've never really felt like I belong anywhere so my guess is that makes me feel important, needed, like I do belong, even if that's only momentary and false. Nothing godly about that.

And finally, even if I had said yes to all of those, what the fuck makes you think any of that has anything to do with any god's will? Do you have anything other than a badly mistranslated copy of a moldy old document written by slave-owning barbarians to pretend is the word of a god? We're more likely to think that someone like the Westboro Baptists are doing the will of god if you really read that fucking book. So of course we can't accept that as even a remote possibility, and we're lucky we have evolved beyond the need for this god and its backward morality. Leave that shit back in the stone age where it belongs and should never again have seen the light of day. Even if you presented absolutely proof that a deity existed, that such a horrific, demonic entity was really out there would be the worst possible scenario for any human being alive, the true believers included. Nobody wins in this scenario. The fact that it's absurd in the highest degree should make us glad, including yourself and other adherents.

So? Got any hard evidence to back up any claims or is it going to be all anecdotal or philosophical word scramble? I've heard it all, and no matter how you think you've got it figured, you really don't. Guaranteed.