Wednesday, October 28, 2009

God Says: Humanity Sucks

On my way to work this week, I was listening to a preacher on the radio. He said what I have heard many other preachers say many, many times, but every time I hear it, it makes me sick. He was talking about how all of us have sinned, how all of us are incapable of reaching the kind of perfection that god demands of us, and how we all fall short of the glory of god. See Romans 3:23.

It's the typical view that humanity is worthless, vile, immoral, and incapable of goodness with out the grace of god. The view degrades humanity to elevate god. It takes away all of the compassion, knowledge, art, science, etc. that man has cultivated for good over the years and gives the credit to God. It denies the fact that despite setbacks, humanity has clawed its way passed many obsolete notions (in some places) and outdated moral norms and is trying to trend the path towards increased compassion and decreased selfishness. But religion is happy to leave us with our greed, anger, cowardice, and cruelty and deny our better nature by assigning it to God.

God supposedly created us in his image, created us as we are - incapable of being perfect - and then blames us for this. I despise this part of religion probably more than anything else.

God created us, created us prone to "sin", incapable of meeting his standards, and doomed to eternal punishment for it. But he has a way out, if only we believe that setting his son (himself) up as a blood sacrifice - a human sacrifice - as a substitutionary atonement - for our shortcomings. If we pay the ransom, belief in God and Jesus and they whole warped concept of justice that He provides, we get the "prize" of spending eternity with this jerk. Fortunately, He does not exist. He is a creation of Man. It's too bad Man has such low self-esteem that it has to create God's to make us feel even worse.

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