God is a Self-Contradictory Notion
 
FOREWORD
 
God means the conscious being who is all-powerful and all-good and with whom a relationship is possible. That seems to make it simple but it is part of a bigger dimension. As God is related to morality you would need to make a list as long as ten arms about how you understand God. For example, is God okay with abortion to save a life? What does he feel about telling a white lie to an ugly bride?
 
Too many believers have never considered the possibility that their religion is based on the notion of a God that is incoherent They are not told by their conniving clergy just how bizarre the doctrine of God is. If they knew there would be less believers and less cash in the coffers of the Church.
 
Assuming God exists or needing him to exist doesn’t prove he should be assumed or that the idea is coherent. It has nothing to do with it.

 

A spirit God is an abstract one.  An abstract God is really an attempt to fake devotion to a personal God so that you can be the boss not God.  It dilutes God into little more than an idea. If that is what you have to do to believe in God then that is another reason for saying that if God is good then you are being inconsistent.

 

A contradiction means you refuting yourself.  If believers in God are self-contradicting then they need to be told what they are: people who do not realise that they do not in fact belief.  Habit often is taken for faith.
 
WHAT DOES THE WORD GOD OR DEITY OR DIVINITY MEAN?

The more "educated" believers think that God is non-physical - that is, he is spirit.
 
God for Christians is a being without parts - that is spirit because nobody made him but he makes all things. God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good. A being who is not all-powerful is not God. It means he is not supreme over all things and there are things he cannot control. A being who is not all-perfect is not God either for he cannot be fully trusted and also he is not fully in control. No being however great can be entitled to worship if he is merely a superhuman entity. If Superman really existed and was the kindest and most powerful person in the universe we would not worship him. We would be demeaning ourselves if we did.
 
The danger with the idea of spirit is that we think of God as a gas that is not made up of atoms or parts. But then this gas would just consist of one part. It is its part. This part does not consist of any other parts. Do you see the implication of all that? A God without parts is no more existing than a square circle. He is a something that is a nothing. The idea that nothing consists of two or more nothings would make more sense than that for something can never be nothing to any degree. Christianity degrades children by playing conjuring tricks with words. The idol worshipper adores a god of wood or stone or so the Christian says. They bemoan how demeaning that is. But how much more is it demeaning to adore nothing and call it God? At least the idol worshipper adores something real. And he adores something that is more understandable than a being that is supposed to be pure spirit. Christianity demeans all whom it gets to adore its God. To the mind of a child, God is just like pretending the naked emperor is wearing clothes as in the children's tale The Emperor's New Clothes. It's pretending that something that cannot be seen or examined or verified by the senses is real. The God concept is disrespectful and therefore an abuse of the mind of a child.
 
People feel they want nothing that is something and omnipotent and looking after them to exist. That is, their belief in spirit is not belief at all but a feeling that they hypocritically disguise as a belief. 

 

DIVINE PERFECTION

 

God has many perfections and no perfection in God is less perfect than any other or less valuable.  That is what God being perfect means.  But it makes no sense.  God being perfect at maths cannot equate to God being perfect at determining right and wrong as moral concepts.  Better a God of pure love than one of both love and justice.  That is the bottom line - the talk about the perfection of God is nonsense and it is not good for our moral perception to say otherwise or worship him.

 

THE QUESTION

 

How is moral perfection possible without omniscience and omnipotence?  You need to know what moral is as in 100%.  The more certain you are that x is right the more moral or decent it is to do it. In that way morality is not black and white.  You can be moral as ever without having the power to act on it.  In this way morality cares more about what you can do than the quality of what you do.  It is narcissist to worry so much about God being the representative of morality or as the same as morality.  How?

 

FRANK SHEED

 

"God’s knowing is not distinct from Himself.

God and His knowledge are one. God is His knowledge. God’s knowledge is God. Once again, there may be vast difficulties for the mind in actually seeing it so, but there is no great difficulty in seeing that it must be so. For if God’s knowledge were not identical with God Himself, then there would be some distinction between God and His knowledge, something that God has and that His knowledge lacks: but that would mean that His knowledge would not be infinite: which is impossible.  A moment’s reflection will show us that the same line of thought, which leads us to see that God and His knowledge are one, applies to all the other attributes of God—His love, His justice, His mercy, any you please. God’s mercy is not something God has; it is God.  If His mercy or His justice were in any way distinct from Him, it would mean that there  was something in Him that they lacked, and so His mercy or His justice would not be Infinite, and that again is impossible. Thus there is no distinction between God’s attributes and God, and therefore no difference between one of God’s attributes and another. God’s justice is God Himself, and God’s mercy is God Himself. Infinite justice and infinite mercy are not two opposing tendencies in God: they are one same God."

 

"Spirit is the being which has its own nature so firmly in its grasp that it can never become some other thing."

 

Comment: This is utter rubbish.  God having the property of wisdom and God having the property of being able to produce stunning forms of art is nonsense for it would mean that as God is one simple being that wisdom is artistic. Wisdom is an umbrella term not for one thing but for many different forms of wisdom.  Notice how he does not explain how knowing the dog has vomited is the same as making sure John gets a fair reward for what good he has done.  He says God must be his knowledge for it would follow that if he wasn't there would be something he does not know - in other words, it would not be infinite.  But that is like arguing, "John and Bert must be the same person for the evidence says that John pulled the trigger and shot Paul but other evidence just as good says it was Bert."  It is choosing the desired conclusion and working back to it.  Logic bans that for it is worse than a circular argument.  Justice is an umbrella term so in reality there are infinite justices.  It follows that if you think it is fair for God to send a baby to Hell forever just for fun then you have the wrong God even if everything else is fine.  The definition of spirit is interesting.   It follows that if it is true that our spirits are sinful from conception then if baptism takes away that sin then we are not the same person.  If our spirits are good then sin must not touch us at all and have no meaning.  The nonsense about God totally debunks any doctrine that God and morality or justice/love are somehow the same.
 
NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
 
Religion says that God has attributes or qualities but each of them are different aspects of the attribute of divinity.

Believers say the most accurate way to talk of God is to say not what he is but what he is not.
 
He is not hate. He is not visible. He is not unfair. He is not stupid. He is not human. He is not matter. He is not controlled by anything else. He is not fiction. He is not abstract in the way that a number is abstract. He is not limited by time or space. He is not complex. He is not changing.
 
It has been pointed out that you cannot tell the difference between this negative God and a non-existing God. Thus God is also unknowable so to talk about him and worship him is a waste of time. You don’t know what you are worshipping or serving.
 
God is not really God to you even if there is a God for you don't really know what you are talking about. And you are a deceiver for talking and acting as if you do.

DOES LOGIC COME FROM GOD OR RULE GOD?
 
We need logic and cannot avoid using it. When we are being illogical we are still logically trying to be illogical. Logic can be understood in a holistic way as in respecting yourself enough to avoid contradicting yourself.
 
Does God make the rules of logic or does he discover them?
 
If he makes them then he could make it possible for a dog to eat a dinner that consists of non-existent dog food.
 
If he discovers the rules then the rules matter and he does not if there is a choice. He would not be God - God by definition is that which comes first in everything and to be valued totally.
 
The Christians reply that this is a false dilemma and the solution is that logic is an eternal part of God's nature. But logic cannot be part of God's nature for if there were no God or anything 1 and 1 would still be 2. And we can ask, "If logic comes from God's nature, is God's nature what makes logic logic or is logic logic regardless of whether there is God or not? Does God's nature create logic or discover it?" It is not a false dilemma.
 
If God is an incoherent and anti-logical concept then no evidence for his existence is any good. And he is. 

 

GRATITUDE

 

There is a link between gratitude and forgiveness.  You will not forgive x unless there is something about x to be grateful for.  And what about being grateful for the opportunity to move on?  The idea of God being grateful to us is mad but is implied by how we ask him for forgiveness and love.  Religion says he can't be grateful for he gives us all that we have.  And yet without the stirrings of thankfulness how can we learn to love God or forgive or ask his mercy?  Christian love for God is really a disguised love for a humanised version of God.  It is an idol and we are pretending that we don't think we deserve anything from God.  In fact we think God should be about us.  We think God owes us everything.

 

God does not have feelings or passions for feelings and passions are what happen to you so you are passive in a real sense. But God as creator, maker of all from nothing, is self-sufficient and is always active. Nothing can happen to him but only because of him.  Would you thank a robot that has no feelings even if it simulates them or pretends it has them?  You would be damaged or crazy if you did.  The idea of thanking a being who has no feelings and who cannot understand or experience feelings shows that believers are not thanking him at all but an idol version of God in their heads.

 

To sum up: there cannot be a God who is relevant to us. Such a God is not truly a God to us.

 
THE METAPHYSICS OF GOD'S GOODNESS
 
Goodness would exist whether God existed or not. So would 2+2=4. These things are not dependent on a God to make them. They are necessary truths. God knows that goodness exists and that the 2+2=4 is true so he is the knowledge of these. He is goodness and he is 2+2=4 for these are part of his existence. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for they would have to be separate from him and are not things but concepts. To say that God is not a spirit or a substance but just abstract truth, in other words just to call things like goodness and truth and mercy and maths God, is to be an atheist. This shows us how many thought they were not atheists and they were!

Goodness would have to exist for God to exist. If God is goodness then it has nothing to do with him that he is good but it is just the way he is. He is good by nature. The Christians won’t be keen on that for it ruins the freedom defence argument. The freedom defence argument says that because we cannot be good unless we can sin God has to give us free will for he wants us to be good. It blames sin and suffering and death on human evil or the misuse of the freedom thus getting God off the hook.
 
Goodness then makes God and this is absurd for it denies that God is the Supreme Being or sovereign and goodness is not a thing or power.

 How do God and goodness connect? Three solutions have been proposed.

* Descartes’ view is that God is sovereign and nothing controls him or limits him. God is the Supreme Being. So he gives himself his properties instead of the properties being independent of him and controlling him and him conforming to them. They don’t make him the way he is. This is bizarre for God is outside time and cannot change. We are told that God invents the properties and conforms to them. So God could have been evil if he had wanted to be only we would have to call it good then.
 
* Others say that there is no such property as mercy or knowledge so God is the way he is and is sovereign and supreme because there are no properties. But of course there are properties. If blue does not exist the property of blue can still exist.

* Aquinas solved the problem by saying that God has a nature and in him his essence and his attributes are one and the same. It means that God is not a personal being but an abstract like goodness. It is nothing like the personal God of the Bible.

Those who have tried to solve the problem of God say that God has a nature which is made up of properties but God and his nature are not one indivisible thing. It is like my property of white skin and me are not the same thing. I am consciousness and whiteness is not a part of that. This denies the doctrine of simplicity but replaces it with a God that is made of two spiritual forces.

The notion of a personal God is silly in this day and age. Some say that since we accept one another as persons or minds and not machines without proof we should do the same for God (page 88, Doing Away with God?). But God is different for we cannot see or hear or know him like we do other people. It is more rational to regard them as minds than God for we can sense them with our five senses. It is more rational to regard a stone as a mind than God for we are surer the stone is there than that he is.

Aquinas held that God’s existence is his essence (chapter 21, Summa, Book One). Existence is not a quality. For example, if nothing existed goodness would still exist but the thing called existence does not exist for it is not a power but a concept. Aquinas did not realise it but he was really saying that God was existence which is lunacy for existence is independent of God – for example, if there were no God there would be the existence of nothing so existence would still be there - and if God is an abstract thing that is not even a power like existence then God is not a being or anything but just an idea. He exists only in the imagination. Aquinas turned the Church towards confused and garbled atheism. 

Religion says that God is aware of us and all things. He sees and hears all. Take an eye. An eye is a material thing. It is very unscientific to hold that a stone cannot see the sun rising and to hold that something that is non-physical can. How can it when it has no eyes? It makes more sense to say that a stone can see.

Much of the research has been gained from The Concept of God. See its chapter 7 called Simplicity.