Two bottles of wine later, God ceases to matter

Greetings, Algolians.

I'm not sure what got me started on the subject- who is when you're a little, ahem, "wankered"?
I'm pretty sure I convinced a table of twelve people on Saturday that God probably didn't exist (or at least wasn't worth worrying about, let alone worshipping).

Oh, this post will offend some folks. Never mind.

How does the logic go? Well - we all agreed that there were two extreme ways to look at the concept of a "God". Oh, and by the way, forgive my use of the masculine pronoun - I'm too lazy to write anything else.

1. The classic, sin forgiving, interfering creator who sits in the big office upstairs pronouncing judgements, including whether you go to heaven or hell. He also has the powers to interfere with or influence the world.
2. Some less interfering force responsible for the creation of the universe, and that's it.

I'll refer to these as God1 and God2 - note that God1, while having the power to interfere, is not implied to be interfering constantly - he merely can.

Now it would be very easy to find some middle ground here, but all the wrangling we went through to reach this point was a little boring, basically - the middle grounds say, God#, are a bit namby pamby. he's in a war with Satan for example, which implies Satan is equally as powerful, or he has too little time etc... I'm gonna avoid these since we didn't talk about them.


So lets look at God1. This is a being powerful enough to

• create an entire universe and then fake its age.
• design an endless supply of animals including millions of species of, say, insects.
• create emotions and beings that feel them
• Directly affect the future of the universe he created
• etc. etc.

In short, this is one powerful being! Now, if you look at the question of whether to worship this god there are a few things you can take into account.

1. Stillbirth - this is one of the things that really sealed my atheism. What sort of God is willing to kill kids before they're born? Did they have evil thoughts in the womb?
2. The question of "faith". Look, if you're responsible for my creation, don't go punishing me when I turn out atheist, the way I was designed. If I end up being wrong and heading down to the big smoke to burn with all the other sinners he's going to get a stern letter from the Algo!
3. Most normal religious folk will start talking about free will at this point as if its some amazing gift we're required to be thankful for. I don't buy it. If this god person wants me to go to hell, he can just send me there - I don't want him to trick me into any of this thinking I have some kind of choice!
4. Abortion - see stillbirth. Does he want all the abortions to himself? Most pregnancies are self aborting anyway really early on - is that God aborting them?
5. Sexual politics - lets not beat about the bush here. If God didn't want us to have sex with our own gender he would abort homosexual people, just like all the unborn babies he kills. Or if he only wants us to have sex in order to procreate, sex would be 100% successful at leading to pregnancy.

I could go on, I'm sure you could think up a few of your own. The last thing I'll say on God1 is that there are lots of bad things happening the world over all the time - every time one of these happen, Mr Omniscient makes a conscious decision to let it happen.

In summary - God1 is a bastard. He ain't getting no worship from me. You'll note (I hope) that I haven't even started on the scientific basis for his non-existence, or the "who created the creator" argument. I merely point out here that this deity needs a slap.



So, hello God2, increasingly popular in these "enlightened" times. A sort of apologists religious concession. "So", they they say, "We don't know what caused the big bang, and we can call this force God". Yeah, but we could also call it "spongebob". The great plan of a lot of these people is to equate the "God" hypothesis with a lot of the scientific explanations. This is to say that "Well, you can't prove any of your ideas either so this is just as good".

Others have argued that point far better than I could so I won't. All I'll say is, that if that's the God you believe in, why the hell worship him? Or have anything to do with him at all? He can't help you, he doesn't care about you, he certainly won't look after you when you die!

So, in summary, God2 is entirely irrelevant. He's mainly a vehicle for people who like to think of themselves as "agnostic". That is to say, atheists who are ashamed to admit it.

So there we go, two bottles of wine later and we reach a consensus that God isn't worth worshipping. Good stuff.

A