God Question 1.

I decided I don't know maybe a few weeks ago, to go serious on being an athiest, and that isn't to stop having friends who are religious or spiritual, after all sometimes I will believe something for which I have no evidence for. So really the question is by degrees, and as Dawkins puts it so well 'fact is most of us are athiests for 99% of religions, its just athiests go one religion more'.

Also please forgive me, since I started reading 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' I've been finding Huck's writing style creep in to my writing, which I now am paranoid about. I can't even be sure If that last sentance was something I would say or Huck would say, which is paranoia, a Huck sentance would be more like 'I was afeared it weren't 'posed to be like that.'

Anyway Mark Twain is a fine example, described as Humanist, though without much supporting evidence I would surmise he was an athiest for truth. I've been reading him, and then there's Abe Lincoln who I love through and through and even in most business books I read is still extolled as the finest leader the world has ever produced whilst having something inconvenient to account for his religious standings as this quote 'I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.' or 'In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book.'
I think the heart of the matter for Lincoln is this 'When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.' and the fact that whilst he did certainly plough through the bible and look up to the sky and imagine a god, he didn't go to church, nor believe that matters of spirituality were that of community.
Thomas Jefferson's atheism is as near as possible to undisputable, when one adopts the relatively simple pretext that one wouldn't announce oneself an athiest when it was immensely unfavorable.
What upsets me is that now being a 'believer' is more of a prerequisite than it was 200 years ago if you want political success, and certainly the quality of world leaders has been in decline given recent years not ascention.
But of all I read over, for some reason this quote stuck in my mind from the Chrysalids by John Wyndham, better known author of 'day of the triffids' it is as follows as said by the character Uncle Axle

"Now, as I see it, some way or another you and Rosalind and the others have got a new quality of mind. To pray God to take it away is wrong; it's like asking Him to strike you blind, or make you deaf... You have to come to terms with it. You'll have to face it and decide that, since that's the way things are with you, what is the best use you can make of it and still keep yourselves safe?"

For me, the amount of energy required through the activity called 'faith' perplexes me, I would argue that being an athiest is the most relaxing state of being, except I seem to poor so much energy into talking about it. Uncle Axel highlights a good question of God, one of which I will try to handle each day for a while. For if I have learnt anything in my life it is that questions are far more powerful, far more fruitful and far more valuable than answers. If I were rich I might put a cash prize up for a decent answer but that's the thing, if Uncle Axle's statement is really the question: 'Why would God create something he hates and wants destroyed?' the easy and oft used faith answer is something along the lines of 'God is inscrutible' this is the finding that most makes an athiest of me. If God is inscrutible, he is untrustable, random and unable to offer guidance. His word can never be accepted because it has no basis, his terms deliverable are also inscrutible and thus any contract written by god is also inscrutible and thus cannot be entered upon by one such as I. Therefore God may aswell not exist at all if he is to be so unpredictable and to no account to someone with a vested interest such as I. The belief that god does what he wants, without reason makes him not a god, but a random force of nature, so hard to scrutinise or even see, that I may as well just see benign old nature where most see god, and pretty soon it is easiest just to drop the notion of god at all.
Uncle Axle probably puts it better again:

"What can it have been - this terrible thing that must have happened? And why? I can almost understand that God, made angry, might destroy all living things, or the world itself; but I don't understand this instability, this mess of deviations - it makes no sense."
I did not see his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He liked.I tried to explain this to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head.
"We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that. But whatever happened out there... was not sane at all - not sane at all. It was something vast, yet something beneath the wisdom of God."

Its that, if God being omnipotent can just do as he pleases then there is no point, its the basic exercise, that circle of control.
Maybe it's worth sidetracking a bit about the circle of control. When I got dumped and was having an unpleasant time of it, my councillor told me to write down all the things I was in control of, and all that I wasn't. At the time I'd gone a bit crazy and was putting all kinds of effort into superstitions like what underwear to wear and which side of the bed to get out of. Superstition is ultimately a lusting for control, the belief that things are connected when they are not, like my choice of underwear somehow effected someone else's decission making process.
The circle of control helped me save a lot of energy if nothing else. Rather than two lists I just put a circle on a piece of paper and as things crossed my mind I would put them inside or out of the circle.
Turns out just about the only things I control are my behaviour, my own conduct.
So by consciously accepting that my underwear had no bearing on someone else's disposition to me, I no longer stressed about which days to wear which underwear, and when to do my washing cycle so as not to be left in a lurch.
Other people may have looked 'kindly' on me and said 'the poor thing is just using his underwear as a coping mechanism to survive some unbearable trauma.' but again, one of the prevelant themes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that Tom and Huck have a complex superstitious belief system, so complex that it is infallible.
For example at one point Tom is concerned because he buried a marble in a place known only to him and it was known that if somebody did such then all their lost marbles would gather around it, but when he digs up his marble and finds that none have returned it causes much grief because something happened which faith in the superstition said couldn't. Then Tom resolves to ask a tick if a witch had interfered with the magic. When the tick doesn't say anything Tom concludes that the tick is scared and therefore it is scared of a witch which in turn proves the superstition true.
Both my underwear dilemma which is arguably tragic, and Tom Sawyer's beliefs which being a child are arguably cute are just as ridiculous as the mass of religions populating the world.
Except when something that faith prescribes like 'good things happening to good people' is controverted it is instead economically brushed off as part of god's inscrutable plans.
Hence my first question as to God's seeming inscrutability is

'why did God create Heathens?'


For me the reasonable thing to have happened was that when the Persians came across the Greeks they would have been all like 'well both of us can't be right, and all things being equal, probably neither of us are' for example, if a god, anyone is omnipotent and created everything why oh why, did he choose such a small sample of the entire population he created to vest his religion in?
The answer in the Persian, and Mongol times was probably simpler and more sophisticated than anything any fucking religion has come up with since. They simply made a character based judgement on God that wasn't God is insance or inscrutable, but that God was racist. That is 'the chosen people arguement' the true world players, like Xerxes and Ghenghis even would humour other religious beliefs in a case of good diplomacy that being the religions of the Babylonians and Catholics respectively.
But what does this then imply? here is where questions are really powerful, first resting assumption is A) that god made a mistake with all the other types of people and picked his favorite to reveal himself to. This assumption formed an easily testable hypothesis in the early days. God's favorites where the dominant races. Therefore, if one is the most powerful in the world, their religious beliefs are invariably the right ones.
This works kind of like getting millions of people into a square and getting them all to flip a coin, and the one who flips the most heads in a million times obviously has the correct religious beliefs.
More accurately, with respect to the passage of time, it is like giving godhead to whoever has the longest streak of heads at any given time. Because whilst the Persians were the first truly 'world empire' and Ghenghis still holds the record for conquering most of the known world, Mongolia and Persia ain't shit in terms of world power these days.
Thus the superiority of the 'chosen peoples' religious beliefs seems to flit around a bit, and have all the longevity of most reigns of power, which is less than a couple of generations at most.
So the question stands, 'why did god create heathans?' the second resting point of the best chosen people arguement would be that there seems to be B) A god per people.
Thus this was more paganistic in belief, there was the god of the greeks and then the god of the persians.
But most beliefs stumble down in the whole opt-in, opt-out part. There is but one religion and such. Infact the ones best at surviving seem to be the ones least tolerant of other belief systems, or multiple belief systems.
With exceptions to the later religious families such as the Judeo religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Since people can only poke at where Judaism came about, it becomes the likely contender as being enduring, which the 'chosen people' arguement doesn't seem to be. Although in my experience there isn't a chosen people more proud of the fact than the underacheiving members of the Jewish people.
Apart from maybe southern baptists.
But then if there is this inconvenient fact that God was selective in who he chose to reveal himself to, why then did he pick some people, way way back when they also believed the world was flat (eventually accepted by the simple observation that the top of ship masts were visable before the main body, which wouldn't happen if the world was flat, which was more effective than the movements of astral bodies) decidedly ignorant people, and reveal this truth to them. Because there seemed to be Jews before the events of Exodus, meaning before then, the bible consisted of the book of Genisis, and that's that. So despite existing for time immemorial, Judaism seems to, before Moses came along and led what was essentially a civil movement, it was just a creationist belief with a few customs attached but nothing more, and this creation belief told through written or spoken word has proved far less reliable way of god revealing the creation story than through what science can read from the earth and stars themselves.
But those are other questions, why did God pick so isolated a people in the middle of a continent, to reveal his true self too, and leave the vast majority of the worlds population, largely ignorant of his specific existence.
This please note is still true today, where Communism beat god in China, North Korea and a lot of the Soviet, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam compete in India, the south east asian peninsula is a bit of a mix, despite the relative low income of these nations Christianity is still strongest in Africa and SOuth America, the poorest countries in the world.
Whilst the material benifits of religious belief are slim, we all know that's not what spirituality is about, it is about getting into a club so good all material needs are taken care of. It is not concerned with the material needs of this life, but the material needs of eternity.
Pascal's wager explains this crux of religion quite succinctly. John's wager probably explains away the fallacies of this.
But its an interesting point, if strict adherance to God's will is required for entry into paradise, why did he deny the majority of the world the opportunity to even enter? what a cruel act, that some kid in Asia would never hear the truth of the most important thing in the world and thus be damned to hell and brimstone forever.
Unless because they never had prior opportunity to do right, they automatically gain entry to paradise? In which case, one is better off never to have knowledge of the rules than to have knowledge of the rules and be tested in adherance to them for the rest of their lives. One requires no effort and living as you please the other finds the constant energy of facing down temptation.
So not believing god's rules and teachings to be cruel and unnecessary and the fact that the majority of the world doesn't adhere to them, meaning that God doesn't gain much by their observance, I would opt for the favorable explanation that God simply hates the heathen's and without giving them a chance, sends them right to hell.
This isn't the choice option, because God by not revealing himself on a universal level, and thus creating heathens by omission, never gave them a choice to believe in God. He created parents that whilst he knew in his omnipotence would ultimately burn in hell, would teach their children the very same damnation.
But the question is why? why? does I presume that God only has a specific quota of faith that he needs only a certain number of people to adhere to? then qhy create any more, is the object of religion to create sinners not the saved? is that what is valued more?
What of missionary work then? what about religions where the compulsion is to pursue and convert the heathen masses. Or in some cases ethnically cleanse them. These pose other uncomfortable questions, such as 'did god make a mistake?' or did God in his omnipotence pick a poor means of communication.
Maybe its best to reflect on the definition of communication 'a shared understanding of meaning' that follows that successful communication must be measured in terms of the recipient. In this case, if God did indeed send Gabriel to talk to Mohammed in a cave, or Jesus as his son down from heaven and sacrificed him for my sins and such, then God would have to be rated as the single worst communicator in history.
Why for example would he reveal himself to one messenger, rather than every single person? can we quantify the energy of god? does god have such limitations. If god has to get some poor illieterate to spread his message, or some son of a carpenter.
Such questions were posed by Judas in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical 'Jesus Christ Superstar' in the lyrics 'if you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation, instead you chose a time with no mass communication'
So then, if the necessity of missionary work is the answer to why God created heathens, then why was God so lazy? is god lazy?
Do you see why I have such a hard time believing that your god is likely? Becuase the existence of heathens. Or at base, an existence in truth as to what religion offers you, poses these questions, that fall out of it like dangerous coconuts. Is god cruel? is god lazy? is god racist? the only thing that could possibly stand in the way of calling God's character into question (which mustn't happen because then we would have to evaluate whether we like such character or not, and what example the omnipotent being sets for us, seems to me a god can't have character flaws if he is to be the teacher of morality) if reeligion is to be the source of morality, God's character must be set as the ultimate example.
The only way around this is to say that God need not be internally consistent with the truth he taught us, that he is inscrutible and thus, insane.
By the definition of insanity, if God expects universal belief in him through the efforts he has used thus far, he must be insane.
There is of course a simple alternative answer to 'why did god create heathens?' see if you can think of it.