Atheism Corner

One of the things that non believers, agnostics and atheists need to confront many times when discussing religion and beliefs is the questions about god, “do you not believe that god really exists?” is one common question. However you will find that many believers do not really have a clear picture of god (not in an abstract way) and do not know what to expect of that god, not in terms of reward or punishment, and not in terms of characteristics it might have.

If you would have the misfortune of being a Jewish person living in Spain about 500 years ago, your tormentors would have told you that all that burning of the flesh and cutting of limbs and stretching of bones is done with express permission from their god, and it was ultimately in your favor to suffer those. According to most of the writings of the time God in the 1,400s’ has nothing to do with love, its all about fanaticism and exclusivity, zero tolerance for anything which is not his disciples single version of religion.

In European wars, up until the second world war, god was frequent in appearing for the true side favor, only that the Nazis had sworn by their god, and the allies by theirs. For a Nazi soldier in the war, murdering Jewish infants or executing a handicap, or burning a gay person could have been morally wrong, but not religiously wrong, since the church was very clear in it being in favor of Hitler’s thinking.

The closer you get to modern times you will find that the Christian (and Jewish) God becomes much more relaxed, less angry and less intimidating. Now you can find even religious Jews that would tell you that being gay is alright by god, as well as Christians who will tell you that slavery is not accepted by Christianity (what a difference one hundred years can make). You could, however, turn to the “good book” at any time and show them how much god likes slavery, and how busy it was with the thought of slavery that a whole manual for slave owners is included with every copy of the bible. Homosexuality is explicitly marked out as a sin in Jewish belief, and it is only that this modern form of believers have adapted a “do nothing about it” policy.

So God used to be angry, bloodthirsty and incredibly violent, however in the last two hundred years its priests and ministers are telling us we got it all wrong, and that in fact god is love and acceptance, well, tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people your colleagues burned an tortured, the children that were murdered in the name of that same god. And if God is ever changing, and if we can not really know its nature, we can assume – with the highest degree of clarity, that this God does not care about anything that happens to us, since in all the atrocities committed in written history there was one event in which God presented itself and put an end to human misery, on the contrary, God was always there, on the side of the criminals, justifying every blood drop that took.