rickholio

If you what believe is false, then you've lost the opportunity to live your life to its fullest and discover its potential without being yolked with the burden of organized religion. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

I find it the height of arrogance to believe that we have some sort of ultimate importance in the universe, that we're "the chosen ones" and special favorites of some guy in the clouds with a long beard and a pisspoor social life. If there is some kind of higher being, and I stress IF, then it's far more likely that he/she/it/they couldn't give a rats ass about us, except as a passing interest... much as we people pass by ants on the street, and occasionally notice one if it crawls across our shoe.

Surely, to an ant, we must be as gods, and I won't discount the possibility of we humans being as ants to another entity or entities. Equally as surely however, our worshipping of it/them would acheive the same amount of effect as an ant colony giving little ant fealty to one of us: Sweet Fuck All. The little bastards are still going to be exterminated where they're inconvenient, and ignored otherwise.

The problem with God really has nothing to do with God itself, or whether it exists or not. The real issue is that the benificent, all-knowing all-powerful God is a very comfortable illusion, considered a panacea to cure all that's unknown and uncertain, the metaphorical 'light in the darkness' to those who think they can turn God's ear and earn His favour by offering sufficient sacrifices both physical and psychological. It's precisely that the illusion is so comfortable that makes religious people so easily exploited and controlled by the power hungry, the unscrupulous, and the zealous... allowing yourself to believe in the illusion is to let faith trump reason and rational thought when the two collide. It's not difficult for a cult of personality, appealling to that same faith-over-reason habit, to retain and bind great swathes of population even in the face of obviously bad things... obvious to anyone who doesn't allow faith to trump reason, that is.

Ultimately, whether or not anyone believes in God is entirely irrelevant to anyone but themselves. It's the actions of those who allow themselves to be manipulated in the name of that same God are the ones who are a plague o'er the land, and are the ones most likely to unleash torments to match their own personal visions of hell.