Jun 25, 2020
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Hey! Don't you feel like the way praying is normalised is sort of sociopathic in nature. Imagine God is your mother and you have to beg her or "pray" to her for food and basic amenities and mother can provide you easily without any begging but still insists you beg her. That would be considered child abuse and narcissism. I don't know how to word it properly but I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
Absolutely.
I think you described it perfectly, and you’re completely right. A god who knows about and can resolve human suffering with trivial ease but doesn’t or won’t is a god who doesn’t care, or even set it up that way in the first place. In which case, why would you pray to it?
“The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority.” - Christopher Hitchens
But believers do pray to it, to direct it on what would be more convenient or satisfying to them, to explain what it doesn’t know, to convince it to change its grand Plan™, to request an exemption, or to stop it outright. I know some believers will say “that’s not what prayer is about!1!” Except that the Pope thinks that is exactly what it’s about.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8125507/The-Pope-says-asked-God-stop-coronavirus-epidemic.html
This isn’t just some vague “guide the doctors and scientists” thing:
So the number one Catholic in the world believes that he can pray for direct, divine intervention. Literal magic, delivered by this god, “with his hand.” Because apparently this god can do something about it - this is the Pope after all, he should “know” - but wasn’t going to do anything until the Pope petitioned for it.
“Prayer, in my opinion, is an act of doubt, not an act of faith, for if you truly trusted your god’s plan, you wouldn’t pray for anything.” - Michael Sherlock
If you have to ask it, it’s not all-knowing. If it can’t do anything about it, it’s not all-powerful. If it won’t do anything, it’s not all-loving, or even good. This is essentially a version of the Problem of Evil.
Believers sometimes invoke the parent analogy themselves. This usually comes about through the psychotic explanation that their god, who sends people to eternal suffering for a temporal slight (against its own ego, naturally), is analogous to a parent lovingly disciplining their child. You know, by lovingly sending them to the fire-and-lava naughty corner for infinity minutes, rather than the regular quiet corner for just five.
In your example, the mother is negligent at best, malevolent at worst. A mother who puts their own narcissistic need for adulation and praise above the wellbeing of her children is certainly not “all-loving” let alone the definition of love. Nor is a mother who constantly reminds her bruised and bewildered children that she can “make-you-or-break-you” at the drop of a hat, that you exist at all solely at her mere whims (”I brought you into this world, and I’ll take you out”).
But what they always carefully leave out of their “god=parent” analogy is that parents are held accountable for their parenting, they’re held responsible for the wellbeing, education, socialisation, understanding of right and wrong, etc. If that’s the analogy they want to play, then we can play it, but it won’t turn out well for them when it comes to this accountability. Believers simply won’t have a bar of it - not without a worthless platitude like “mysterious ways” or “testing you.”
“With great power comes great responsibility.” William Lamb/Winston Churchill/Uncle Ben
It’s jaw-dropping mental gymnastics, constructed to avoid piercing the confirmation bubble they’ve built around themselves. Because apparently their creator god who made everything and knows all can’t be held accountable for the results of its own actions, the choices it’s made.
So while all credit goes to the god, all blame resides on humans - their imperfectness (due to god making them that way), their sin (that god won’t just resolve or abolish), their susceptibility to Satan’s influence (who he created, sent and won’t destroy), their insufficient - or outright lack of - worthless “faith” (due to the god insisting on being all insubstantial, undetectable and mysterious).
And despite it just being superstitious nonsense, the fact is these people believe it and construct their lives around their undisguised distaste for real humans and the world around them, in preference to their needy, negligent, malevolent god. It’s anti-humanity.
Thank goodness this unfit mother is imaginary.
A god who holds humans to a higher standard than it holds itself.
A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell — mouths mercy, and invented hell — mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger”
Even if Jesus existed, suffering on a cross "for humanity" should not be grounds for worship. So the phrase "Jesus died on the cross for you" has absolutely no bearing on the situation. Self-sacrifice for others is not a monopoly of Christianity. Worshipping one sacrifice while not worshipping the countless others throughout history, documented ones for truly valuable things at that, e.g. Bruno, makes no sense. In other words, that venue of guilt/debt based persuasion is out. What now?
It’s not a “sacrifice” if they do something you didn’t agree to and they demand eternal repayment afterwards anyway. It’s not even good. There’s no altruism there. That’s just a scam. Even more so when the one being “sacrificed” is in league with the one demanding the sacrifice and the worship, and they go home together.
More importantly, it doesn’t remove personal responsibility. In this case, “god’s” responsibility over every element that lead to the “original sin” debacle. From storing knowledge in a magical fruit, to putting that fruit on a tree in range of mental children, to giving serpents the ability to speak, to putting the “crafty” serpent in with gullible children, to not simply getting over it the way he gets over rape, murder and cannibalism without a second thought.
Neither “Jesus” nor any other scapegoat myth can remove our responsibility for the things we do or have done. And by the same token, we can’t take responsibility for things we didn’t do that others - such as Abraham’s omniscient, omnipotent god - are ultimately responsible for.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” William Lamb/Winston Churchill/Uncle Ben
An all-powerful god must also be all-responsible. No finger-puppet pantomime can change that.
Jesus died for me. So what? For guilt I don’t have over responsibility that doesn’t lie with me for something I didn’t do? And now I should worship him and his dad-self over this overwrought entrapment scheme? No, thank you. In some tellings of this inconsistent fable, he was a pissy brat about his great destiny all the way to the end, anyway.
Spock never demanded repayment or worship. He had no expectation of resurrection. He would have been appalled at the notion that he should be worshipped simply for doing the right thing, when doing so was completely within his abilities.
Spock is a better moral guide than Jesus. And that isn’t hyperbole.
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