God Wants You Dead. Really.
We are temporal beings. And we are temporary beings to. We understand our lives and surroundings through a sequential experience of moments, during which we witness each previous moment causing the next. This way we see all things, including our own lives and that of the universe, encapsulated by a beginning and an end.
source: God Wants You Dead - scribd.com
We're bound to the concept of time, we're slaves to it and the rest of reality. The fact that we understand everything in this fourth dimension as a chain of causes and effects, has created our greatest mysteries, one of the best being the quest for the first cause. And on a smaller, biological level there's the question what happens after death. I'm not going to try to answer these questions, at least not today. It's 42, everybody knows that. But the most popular first cause is still God.
Proponents of the Bible, Christians of all denominations and doctrines, often use this cosmological argument as a reason for the need for the existence of God; the universe must have a beginning, nothing can come from nothing, so there has to be something outside space-time, something transcendent, that caused the universe to spring into existence, ergo God. This omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creature, if it indeed was able to create all we know, has to wonder about it's own origin also, which makes this argument a circular argument fallacy. If you don't want to apply the cause and effect principle to God Himself, you cannot use it as an argument at all. God, in other words, cannot be eternal or "outside" of time if you want to use God as an explanation for something purely temporal as the beginning of the universe.
But I'm losing thread here, sorry. The title from this post is not of my own creation:"God Wants You Dead is the title of a brilliant book by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg. The picture in this posts heading is from the cover. The authors made the title and cover very provocative for good reasons:
Holding this book in your hands, do you find yourself worried that people around you might see what you are reading?
If so, why should that be? Reading a book is in no way an endorsement of the contents of that book. Reading is a quest for knowledge. There should be nothing wrong with wanting to learn why other people think differently than you, or differently than the group in which you find yourself. You don’t have to already agree with everything you read – in fact it would be boring if you did.
source: God Wants You Dead
Right from the start the authors make clear that the book is not only about belief in God or the Bible, but essentially tries to answer the question why people believe the things they do. Why do we seem to want to believe in a higher power, if not the God from the Bible, then maybe some political party or ideological leader. The book is about taking control over your own mind and ideas. But I want to focus on the title for now and talk about it's implications.
It's always a good idea to hear the other side of any discussion, so if you're interested here's a lecture from an online Bible fellowship on the very topic we discuss here, namely that God really wants us all dead:
2013 Seminar Part 6 - God Wants You Dead
Eternal life is the ultimate reward God grants those who live by his Word, but, as the title says, you have to die first. Eternal life therefore is to be granted by God only... So would that mean that if we could conquer death, if we could somehow "kill the aging-gene", that Christians would refuse eternal life on earth to gain passage to eternal life in Paradise? Don't get me wrong: I personally don't think it would be beneficial to our species if we would live forever, but that's for very different reasons. Christians have been known to refuse vaccines or other forms of medical treatment, even for their kids, because their God knows best when it's their time to leave this world, not those pesky dokters.
Some people seem to think that medical science can be "too good." They feel that current research directed at extending the human life span is unnatural.They will often say that it is not good to be "playing God."
So we wonder, at just what point should the faithful believe that trying to stay alive messes up God’s plan?
An even more important question this book will address is why people believe the things they do. Why do some people believe that taking penicillin will thwart God’s will, while others would gladly accept an artificial heart? Why do some religions require a strictly regulated healthy diet, while others mandate the drinking of poisoned fruit punch?
source: God Wants You Dead
The fact that we know that one day we'll die, gives our lives a sense of urgency. It's a good thing we cannot eternally say "ah well, I'll do it tomorrow, all the time in the world..." We would become complacent, we would stop having kids; evolution, in the biological sense as we know it at least, would stop. And what's so attractive about eternal bliss anyway? How happy would we be if happiness was all we knew? What is happiness without grief or sadness?
Ultimately it is a good thing then that God wants you with Him only after you leave this world. And when you die He'll judge you first and decide if you indeed deserve to live forever, or if you will just die, or spend eternity in Hell, depending on your particular variation of Christianity. While this book is supposed to be somewhat lighthearted, some aspects of religion are truly troublesome in my opinion, the refusal of modern medical treatment being one of them and willingly giving up your free will, to the extent we have that, to the service of some unproven entity. It's so difficult to think about, but isn't this a large part of the reasons suicide-bombers do what they do? Their religion might not have caused the will to do harm, but it surely makes it a lot easier to sacrifice yourself and countless others if you truly believe you're doing your Lord's will.
![God_Blessing.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUfLz7ZqjUbkokca3RvZCQGL4mCw3Sce1ywxDeURYJY4q/God_Blessing.jpg)
"God Blessing the Seventh Day" - a pen and watercolor painting by William Blake, c.1805
source: Wikimedia Commons
If you are a religious person, please don't take this as an intent to insult or hurt your feelings; I genuinely am trying to understand why people believe what they do and how this shapes our shared reality. So I would welcome your opinions on these matters, I would love to read them actually. And if you're at all interested, yes you non-religious people to, in learning about keeping your mind flexible and open to new ideas, please read this lovely book. You can read it for free here: God Wants You Dead.
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The following denies the definition of God as the Origin that has always been.
"This omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creature, if it indeed was able to create all we know, has to wonder about it's own origin also, which makes this argument a circular argument fallacy."
One cannot decide to redefine the term God, so they can win an argument. Such is like the redefinition of faith so that religion looks stupid. Being a deist I find such arguing insulting to everyone involved. Faith does not and never has meant "believing in something with no evidence." Faith historical has always been explained as believing that the Sun will rise, because it has risen everyday of our lives.
Thus faith is the expression of both belief and doubt at the same time. The belief comes from past experience and the disbelief comes from the experience of being wrong about what will happen in the future, which is unknown. Yeah one should know that the scientific method comes from religion and not the other way around.
If your interested check out : Ortega y Gasset 4 rules to uplift society in postmodernism. We can't think for ourselves enough in my opinion.
Nice post and subject by the way.
Hi there @commonlaw, thanks for the response, I appreciate that a lot :-) Since you're a deist and I'm an atheist, I hope and think we can respectfully disagree on some points ;-) First, I think that there's no argument here; religion, faith and science all fail to conclusively explain if and how the universe started. The difference is just that science is honest about it and simply says: we don't know. A true scientist will also never say that God doesn't exist, only that God is not needed to explain stuff. God just never enters the picture.
The Big Bang theory holds that the question "What was there before the Universe?" simply makes no sense. Time itself came into existence so there was no "before" before. Deists on the other hand have a transcendental and supernatural God that exists outside space-time. He has to have a brain if he created us in his image, so the thought to create the universe had to have come before the actual creating of that universe, hence God isn't "timeless", or at least he experiences time and cause and effect. This means you have to apply the same rules to explain God itself; He must have had a creator to. And so on and so forth.
That said, I really don't know where I changed the definition of God. Also, I cannot stress this enough, it's only my opinion. And I just wonder why people believe so many strange (in my mind) things. I often wonder if the human mind is even meant to understand the real nature of reality.
If you mean to say that religions made the first schools, then maybe you're right. Otherwise I wouldn't know what you mean here. The scientific method is a purely human thing, evolved by our interacting with the natural world, trying to come up with other explanations than a supernatural all knowing creature. Religion was here first probably, but science doesn't come from religion. And religion doesn't come from science either. They are both different, largely incompatible, world-views.
If it doesn't mean belief without evidence, then what does it mean? I don't have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. You don't use the word "faith" to point at something you trust will happen. I don't have faith in the sun rising each day. I know it will because it has risen every day of our lives. And if you say "faith" implies "doubt" also, which I would agree to, does that mean you doubt the existence of God? And if so, do all Christians think as you do? I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here...
I would follow your suggestion, but this is a topic I've been studying for decades now, and my mind's pretty much made up, I must admit. We can argue about definitions maybe, like what is faith, is it the same as trust or belief, that would be an endless discussion, these types of faith-related discussions usually are, not only between deists and atheists, but between different faiths as well.
Maybe we'll never agree on some topics, but it's important to at least try to understand our fellow humans, especially when it comes to something so deeply ingrained in our cultures and minds like faith and religion. And even though I'm not convinced that a God exists, I'm also not convinced about the purely material and mechanical explanations science has come up with regarding the deeper questions in life. Consciousness is the tool we use to understand stuff, but we cannot use that tool to examine the tool itself in any scientific way.
Thanks again for sharing your opinion here and I'm glad you also think that we need to think for ourselves. Sorry for the many words, but your well thought out and genuine response deserves no less, I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us :-) <3
The Blake picture is worth an upvote in itself:)
Thanks @andrewmarkmusic, for liking the illustrations to :-)
Nobody has found the answer in 5000 years in human recorded history, but everyone can find the truth himself.
Thanks so much for your continued support and comments, @chesatochi :-)
And that's why we keep looking ;-)
Finding personal truth is tricky: "truth" is just our best shared understanding about the nature of reality, and can therefore not be "personal". In politics and economics there's no worse discussions than between those who have their own facts and truths. Everyone can have their own opinion, but truth, or facts we need to agree on, or discussion is just not possible. It's a fact that we don't know how the universe was created, or even if it was created. And from that fact we all draw our own personal opinions or hypotheses or beliefs. I'm perfectly okay with the possibility that we'll never know reality's true nature ;-)
I believe we need to believe in something to make a sense of our life and have a purpose.
I believe in the process of life and the purpose of that process and believe in making life the best I can, as long as I can.
Thanks for your comment and taking the time to read all that @joeyarnoldvn; I really do appreciate that a lot. And I think you found a good way: I to think we all need to make the best of our time here, with each other, as long as we can. And we create our own purpose while doing that :-)
Awesome.