NEEDING GOD IS DANGEROUS and BELIEVERS KNOW IT
Religion urges us to fall in love with God. But it cannot be proved that a God
worthy of this lives. There is no greater cruelty than encouraging people to
love a being that may be a fantasy.
The Christian version of God states that God is all-good and therefore
all-attractive. Thus we must need him and nothing fulfils us unless we find him.
God deserves all the love there is. Thus the Church and the God concept COMMAND
us to need God. Many of us do not need God. Most of the people that ever lived
were happy to pray to statues and had no time for God. No truly good person
commands people to need anything. That is saying, "A need is something that is
essential to your wellbeing. You will suffer if it is unmet." It is a pity we
have needs. It makes us vulnerable. So to invent needs for us is cruel. To
command us to have a need aside from the things that we need to stay alive is
astronomically cruel.
The Church says that God has put a need for him inside all of us. That follows
from the doctrine that God is completely good and that he has created all things
and done so for himself. But if it is the good you want you don’t really want
him. The Church says then that he is his goodness so to want goodness is the
same thing as wanting him which doesn’t really make any sense. A man can want
his wife’s beauty and though her beauty is her to love her beauty is not the
same as loving her. Jesus said there is no greater love than giving your life –
all you have – for your friends. The Church says that the purest love seeks
nothing in return. “To pardon rather than be pardoned, love rather than be
loved”, as the awful prayer of St Francis of Assisi puts it.” Therefore to love
God as Jesus commanded you have to love God alone as if he had no good points at
all. You would have to love him even if he were bad. But then why God alone and
not somebody else? Why not your mother or your spouse? It would make more sense
to love your mother or your spouse for at least you can see and hear them. Why
not yourself? No they want us to love God instead for no sensible reason meaning
that we should let God and his emissaries run our lives. The fact that we are to
love God alone proves just how perverse and malign Christian – or any
God-centred - morality is despite its outward appearance. God is arbitrarily
chosen for conferring all love on which means that there is no morality (or
right and wrong) if this should be done because morality is supposed to be right
and you cannot arbitrarily make anything right. Morality and arbitrary don’t
mix. The God doctrine denies that morality, or right and wrong, exists.
If God is a need then he is the most important need of all for he is supreme
good and our creator. It follows then that secularism and atheism are
endangering that need and must be regarded as being opposed to human rights and
worthy of suppression. Rights are based on needs not wants. I may want a child
but that does not give me a right to have one. I need food so I have a right to
food. I don't have a right to have a child for I have no need to.
Now back to the doctrine that God put the need for him in us. Why did he do it?
For our good? For his? Or for both? It is not for our good for if he made us see
the need for happiness and how to get it better there would be no need for him
to interfere or get involved. There would be no need for us to need him. He
created a need where there should be none and since love respects freedom above
all else it is unmistakeably true that God does not care about us when he
constricted our freedom by making us need him. So he put the need in us for his
good alone (further implying that nothing and nobody matters but him – what a
callous monster!). And he does not need us to need and worship and work for him
for he is almighty and perfect and self-sufficient. You cannot be a perfect
being without being self-sufficient. So he just wants us to adore him though he
does not need that adoration. A person who has to work for a God who does not
need it, is just a slave even if he does get rewards. What benefit would the
rewards be when you have not really achieved anything? How can you achieve
anything or feel you have achieved, by loving a God who does not need you or
your love?
Jesus declared in the John gospel that his disciples are not servants or slaves
for they know the master’s business. A slave can know his master’s business and
still be a slave so that was another of Jesus’ many peccadilloes. Jesus was
saying the disciples knew God's ways so they were not slaves. But we know there
was a lot they did not know. They preached a God of mystery. Jesus was lying.
Though Jesus said we must be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, he
emptied this adage of any meaning whatsoever when he emphasised our overwhelming
and eternal dependence on God. To be perfect is to be self-sufficient but when
God’s help is what makes a person good according to the Christian gospel it is
obvious that we are never perfect in ourselves. We only act that way for we have
the props. The need for God is created by the Church and it is created for its
own benefit and not ours or God’s.
Nobody can say it is ever good to believe in God. Those who are made happy by
the belief are in delusion and to say this delusion is a good thing is to talk
nonsense. These people are being used by the clergy. When you are deluded you
might think your delusion is one that makes you cheery but when you are deluded
you will never know if you would be happier with another delusion or none. It’s
still bad. It’s still degrading. It stops you being yourself and empowering
yourself. When all is said and done, the main reason religion and God thrive is
because there are so many questions that people never think to ask themselves or
don’t take the time to. Atheism wants people to ask themselves the questions
about religion and faith that they wouldn’t normally ask and that is a vital
part of the therapy the system offers. When they do that many surprises will
surface. For example, the person who would insist that he or she is a 95%
Catholic in outlook and faith may when he or she asks himself or herself the
right questions could discover that he or she is really only 10% Catholic! The
Church takes advantage of people not getting to know themselves and what they
really think. It takes advantage of the human tendency to believe something
because of the arguments presented while forgetting to look for and ask for
missing information that would give you a totally different outlook.
We can be content with imperfect happiness and yet we have the Church trying to
condition us to believe that we want perfect happiness and hey presto the
solution for getting this happiness is God! This is a cruel set-up and shows the
Church is an evil confidence trick.
The Christian Church opposes good and puts a clever counterfeit in its place.
Himmler believed he should inflict horrors on innocent people because his leader
persuaded him it was best for Germany. This does not excuse what he did (page
14, Ethics: The Fundamentals) or anybody who approves of what he did. Islam and
Christianity with their doctrine that certain sinners such as heretics or
homosexuals will suffer in Hell forever without any hope of release just make a
caricature of that principle. They approve of the horrors these sinners may
face.
The Church says that God comes first and not only that but all we do should be
entirely done for his sake. So what God thinks matters and what we think does
not. But real good requires a lot of discerning what good is and doing that and
trusting entirely in yourself for you have to decide for yourself what is good
for you and others. So God is in opposition to goodness and therefore love. It
is in opposition to difference. All are called to become clones of God for he is
perfection itself. The view that God has made some people to be good at nursing
and others have the talent for teaching does not refute this but actually
supports it for all are made weak and are called to be perfect at everything and
these talents are only encouraged for when we are weak there is no other option
but to zoom in on what we are good at and develop that as a prime concern. Think
of it this way. People are asked what they would have on their gravestone for an
epitaph. When God comes first and loving him with all your being is the supreme
law it follows that the epitaph should be, “She tried to love God”, or, “He did
not try to love God.” Whatever is not best is what is wrong. Such a God cannot
give meaning to life except by the craftiness of the Church which deludes people
to think that they need him and which corrupts their thinking and makes their
emotional needs abnormal. We need a world that celebrates diversity not one that
tolerates it. God is in opposition to such celebration. Any version of God that
is not is just a pile of inconsistency and not a real God.
I will spell out another way that God removes a sense of purpose in life.
Christians say they get meaning in life from the fact that God loves them no
matter what they do. So they have to pretend the shamelessly absurd lie that the
sinner can be loved while their sin is hated is true. Believing that God loves
us unconditionally may make us feel safer but it should not. In real life, we
tend to feel safe if we prove ourselves to be worthwhile people. God’s love
cannot make us feel safe without that so to derive comfort from it is indicatory
of disordered self-esteem because you need the God-crutch. God’s love can ask
for some horrible things so there is no sense in feeling safe with him. It would
be presumptuous to feel safe.
We can be content with imperfect happiness and yet we have the Church trying to
condition us to believe that we want perfect happiness and hey presto the
solution for getting this happiness is God! This is a cruel set-up and shows the
Church is an evil confidence trick.
If you err even with the best of intentions you still do harm. You harm your
power to perceive the truth every time you err. You harm yourself though you
feel no pain. You harm others by giving an example of error to them. To err is
to take the side of error even if you never get the chance to express and live
out your error. If somebody is wrong but sincere we can praise them for the
sincerity but not for being wrong.
Conclusion
The God-belief is a danger to our standards of right and wrong. Those who say it
is essential to believe in God before one can believe in any of these standards
are lying for there is nothing in this book that hasn’t been constantly said to
the Church by its critics over the centuries. Belief in God is bad for us
therefore to promote the belief is bad. To say we must believe in God to be
moral implies that the evil doctrine that "an act is never good in itself but
needs a God to approve of it to make it good" is true. This is because it
implies that even child rape, for instance, would be good if God allowed it. If
good is independent of belief in God then no big deal should be made of God. It
would mean that good is good whether there is a God or not. We have enough
trouble trying to work out right and wrong without religion adding to the
difficulties and making a laughing stock of our efforts.
* Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch
Publications, East Sussex, 1995
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, SPCK, London , 2008
Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007
