If a god exists, he's a bastard

A few days ago I wrote about what I would say to the god I was raised to believe in, if he turned out to be real and I had a chance to confront him.

Now, it had passion and anger behind it, but I don’t actually believe a word of it. I had 40 years of practice at pretending a god exists, so it’s very easy for me to re-capture that feeling and write convincingly from there. But the reality is it makes no more sense to be mad at gods for not existing or for not keeping their promises than it does to be mad at Santa Claus for not existing or keeping his promises. I didn’t get any presents from a fat Dutchman (who’s an ascetic Turkish bishop really) because he was a story my parents told me when I was little - partly in order to inspire wonder, partly in order to get me to “be good” by telling me someone was watching my behavior even when they weren’t, but mostly because that’s what their parents told them at the same age and they didn’t think of questioning the moral or practical implications of telling your kid a fable as if it was true. In fact, all the same reasons they told me “God” exists – but on that one, there was the added complication that they actually believed it was true and so they never told me otherwise, even to this day.

 

I’m not mad at "God" for not existing.

 

I’m mad at the people who lied to me and said he does, even though there was no reason to believe it was true.

 

And there is NO reason to believe in the existence of a benevolent god. Any open-eyed look at the world should make that clear to any objective observer.

But…

Looking at the world in general, and my life in particular, I could almost believe in a malevolent god.

I could almost believe that the fucktangle of horribleness which has happened to me all my life can’t be the result of mere chance, that someone out there is actively making sure Murphy’s Law targets me in particular. How many other people can there BE who keep having intense physical pain for no fucking reason, coupled with trauma after loss after shitty happenstance over and over and over again? If someone up there is watching over me, it’s only to make sure that my path is as thorny as possible… despite my doing everything I could think of to love and serve him for 40 years, and continuing to do all I can to love and serve my neighbors even without any belief in some eternal reward for doing so or punishment for not doing it.

And I could almost believe that the god whose biggest fans have gone out of their way to make his plague spread as far as possible as fast as possible – the people who raised me to love my neighbor but would rather DRINK FUCKING SHEEP DIP than wear a mask or get a shot in order to protect their neighbor – that their god is actually out there laughing his ass off at all the death and havoc being wreaked by his devoted followers. I could almost believe that the people who STILL think that a violent overthrow of democracy would have been the best outcome to the last election; the people who STILL think that a teenage rape victim should be forced by law to have the baby and share custody with the rapist; the people who STILL won’t admit that climate change is real or do anything to mitigate it even as they watch it ravage everything around them; the people who STILL won’t do the bare minimum to protect the people they say they love from death by slow suffocation because they’d rather hold on to the illusion that they know better than experts; the people who STILL think that whatever they do is right because it’s them doing it, no matter how objectively wrong it is… I could almost believe that they are being driven by a will to malice that is far too powerful for them to break free of it.  Because the alternative is to realize that, no, these are people being as horrible as people possibly can, and still absolutely certain that all the people trying to stop them are the horrible ones. If there is a god out there, I am far more righteous than he, because I WOULD NEVER LET PEOPLE WHO LISTEN TO MY ADVICE DO WILLFULLY DESTRUCTIVE THINGS.

I can’t believe in a good god, but it’s tempting to believe in an evil one. Because otherwise, it’s hard to account for the cruelty of the universe in general and Evangelical Christians in particular.

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