Heaven and The Problem of Evil

[Ryantology]

Perhaps you would rather have been made incapable of loving and/or deciding who you would love?

This is, basically, the false assumption which undermines the entire Christian faith, the idea that love is a choice, that it is something you can simply opt to do, or not to do, as if love were no different than lunch.

Love isn't a choice. It is a reaction we have to external stimuli. Do you choose to love your parents when you're a child? Or, is that your natural reaction to the love and care they show for you? For that matter, do you make the conscious decision to love your children? Can you choose to hate a person completely on your own? Is that actually an option you can tick?

Belief is the same way. You can't turn it off and turn it on. It just doesn't work like that. Did you sit down one day and decide to believe in your god? Or, did you come to belief as the result of many different considerations leaving you thinking that it was the best, or only, way to go? Could you make the honest and conscious decision to stop believing in your god tomorrow? To be fully and completely honestly certain that he is just a fictional character?

Of course not.

I can't love your god because I can't believe in him, and I can't believe in him because there isn't enough to convince me he exists. Your religion insists that I can simply ignore this somehow, that I can, if I really want, make the conscious decision to go against how my brain is wired to operate and make a special and unjustified exception to the very rules by which everything else in reality is expected to operate. Your religion says that if I don't do this, it's because I want not to, and that I will suffer eternal punishment as a result. Your religion insists that it is a choice, because that way, it can blame you for the barbarity of it all.

Why should I worship a god that lacks even basic insight into the thought processes of his own creations? That's insanity.