According to religion, the whole point of our entire life boils down to whether we held the right beliefs, and whether we did the best we could in allowing those beliefs to guide us in making decisions that were pleasing enough to the almighty "Creator" who presumably made us, that he would, out of mercy for our earnest efforts, have the heart not to throw us into the eternal fires of a blast furnace.
That he created us in such a way that both He and we knew fully well that it was impossible for such flawed beings as ourselves to ever live up to the moral perfection He demands we spend our whole life aspiring to reach, only makes such a quest a fools errand at best, and an act of pure futility at worst. Since we know we can never achieve such a goal, we are left to hope "in fear and trembling" that we are judged to have at least exerted enough effort to win us the mercy of a heavenly father who, so the Bible tells us, created us so flawed to begin with that we are all quite deserving of hell from the moment we are born.
Aside from the fact that God could've made us with any number of improvements, especially after the flood when Humanity 1.0 proved to be such a miserable failure that God chose to reboot all of humanity through an act of global waterboarding, He simply chose to make us in exactly the same way He had the first time, complete with all of the same flaws. I can think of no engineer, scientist, or builder, even one who is as flawed as even the worst of human beings, who would engage in the insanity of continually seeking a better outcome by creating the exact same things that proved so disastrous the first time around.
But this is exactly the kind of God Christians and Muslims the world over, worship as wise beyond human understanding, even though the atheist is not afraid to admit that such a "creator" is either a fool or simply insane. And worse, it is this very "Creator" who seeks a better outcome by building the same broken humanity, an outcome He knows full well from the outset, that will sit in judgement of whether we held the right beliefs, and devoted ourselves to them with enough sincerity and effort to warrant being spared an eternity inside of an oven at Dachau.
All of this, so any priest or true believer will tell you, comes down to having the right "beliefs." And not just the "beliefs" about how to treat each other with love, empathy, compassion, charity, and respect, but beliefs about God and "Jesus" more specifically. Indeed, religion seeks to convince the world that it is only by holding these latter beliefs about God, and these beliefs alone, that could ever succeed in turning the majority of humanity from the Mr. Hyde we were all born to be, into the Dr. Jekyll that Jesus wants us all to become, through our obstinate obsession with him and him alone.
And on the final day of judgment, where we are judged by the very sociopath who refuses to ever practice what he preaches, and who everywhere ignores the morality he demands that everyone else must follow, God will determine our fate on something as ethereal and transient, something as unverifiable and incalculable (at least to us), as simply our "beliefs." This, even though there is no way for anyone to ever actually prove what is in their head, or even necessarily argue for why they "believed" they were acting on those beliefs as best they could, agaisnt a God who had simply decided that we had failed to live up to the standard he demanded.
Indeed, to believe that God will judge us and our "beliefs" justly is to believe that God's Inquisition of our life and the contents of our head and heart, will be more just than the Inquisitions conducted by his Holy Catholic Church. Apparently Christians the world over never consider what they will do or say if that God, like Torquemada, decides we had not only failed to live up to his unobtainable standard to his liking, but that we were not worthy of his forgiveness either.
For the "true believer," it is only at this point that they might seek to question the "beliefs" that they had spent their whole life defending, even if they had failed to do so with enough zeal to please their God enough to avoid being thrown into the fires of hell. But at that point, so their Bible tells them, it will be too late.
Comments
Post a Comment