Fear No More

Attention all you people who fear God's wrath, I've got great news for you. You don't need to be afraid any longer. You can safely ignore all those threats of eternal damnation that are keeping you from raping and killing indiscriminately. You can throw away your Bibles and sleep in on Sunday mornings from now on.

What I'm going to tell you is not hard to understand. It's based on the simple principles of logic and reason. It may be hard to accept at first. I understand. Living in constant fear all your life can wear down your critical thinking skills. But trust me, once you are able understand the argument and accept its conclusions, you will experience a revelation that is orders of magnitute greater than any religious experience can offer.

Are you ready? Don't be scared. Open your eyes and free your mind, because

God doesn't care if you believe in God!

Blasphemy you say! It says so right there in the Bible, believe in God or go to Hell. You are certainly the Devil in disguise! Be gone with you evil demon.

Now hold on a second. Stay with me for a moment. This is where that little concept called logic I referred to earlier comes into play. Ok, here it goes:

1. God gave us free will. God does not force us or cause us to do anything. We are completely responsible for our own actions.
2. Because we have free will, we are free to make decisions for ourselves based on our God given abilities intrinsic in free will, such as reason.
3. If reason leads us to conclude that God does not exist, then God should be perfectly fine with this conclusion because he gave us free will in the first place.

That's it, three easy steps. If you're having doubts, if reason tells you that religion is a big fairy tale but you still hang on just in case, well you no longer need to lie to yourself.

But God will punish us if we don't follow his word.

I am constantly hearing about how "God loves us". If God truly loves us, would he be so cruel as to give us the gift of reason and the complete freedom to exercise our intellect and conclude that he doesn't exist but then punishment us for using his gift? If this is the case, then God truly does not love us. Or maybe God made a mistake? Maybe he never thought that free will might lead to disbelief? Maybe he thought the evidence was so overwhelming that we would have no choice but to believe? Maybe he underestimated our sophisticated scientific ability to understand the universe and just assumed that some simple miracles a few thousand years ago would do the trick forever? Well then that is his mistake and to take it out on us is not the act of a loving god. Parents love their children, but they don't hand them a loaded gun and then blame them when they accidentally shoot someone.

It is impossible for us to fully understand the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. Only God truly knows how the two work together. We will never be able to fully understand how God’s sovereignty and man’s free will work together.

Cough ... copout ... cough. This is the last refuge of a religious scoundrel. When you get to this point, you are basically saying "I give up". You run into a logical inconsistency and merely explain it away with God. What you are really saying is that we have free will except when God decides to exercise his sovereignty. This would imply that ultimately God is responsible because even his lack of interference is a conscious decision on his part to allow our free will to prevail. But God can't be responsible if we have free will, so we have a contradiction once again. How you survived this long without your head exploding is beyong me?