The poem below by Baron Brooke serves as an answer to this
O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offenses that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
For how should man think that he may not do,
If nature did not fail and punish, too?
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard,
Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,
Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks
He finds the God there, far unlike his books.
The author of the linked post asks
Created, as we have been, in the image of God, and endowed with the faculties of intellect, emotion and will, and possessing a moral sense; at the same time we are capable of enormous cruelty and injustice. Sometimes the question is asked, Why would a good God allow bad things to happen? The real question, however, is why do we as human beings do bad things, when we should know better?
And I think s/he asks the wrong question. Why such an outcome if we are the work of an all-knowing, powerful and loving god? It would be asking why a code behaves badly if it was coded by genius? Should we not investigate the source of the code and not the code? And in the case of men, the problem is really with a maker, if you posit a deity. Man, the only animal with a moral sense. Man the sad animal.
Next s/he writes
What began as good is now ruined, the result of moral rot and decay. What a sad commentary on human existence!
which again should be rewritten to What a sad commentary on god’s handiwork!
It is interesting what passes apologists give their gods. It seems we demand more from our fellows than apologists ever demand of their gods.
This one left me in stitches. The author thinks presenting an argument would take the place of evidence. In effect, an argument for fairies is all that is needed to believe a fairy is real.
Random thoughts 
A sad commentary on human existence? Really! A much depressing commentary on the supposed reality of an omnipotent deity! 🙂
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Especially because this “god” keeps failing. The fall of Lucifer, the flood, Jesus….
My only caveat (h/t Zande) is anyone clear sighted would never claim “nature” is perfect and pure. The world was ever thus…bloody and raw. So…is humanity really destroying “the earth”? The earth abide. We as a species may not.
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The god can’t help it. It keeps failing
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Exactly
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This — It is interesting what passes apologists give their gods. — sums things up quite succinctly!
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How can they be so blind?
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Need is blind. The human impulse is for survival, and that survival is very often dependent on delusion. The abused child, for example, is still wired to keep in place the mechanisms of parental protection (even if parental protection never materialises.)
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I shudder to think that for a long time, I believed these stories and made excuses for god instead of seeing where that problem really was
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This may be number one reason why I find the Abrahamic religions such utter incoherent rot. And the Baron’s poem sums it so well…I quote it often in conversations with religiots.
Awesome post, Mak!
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I think religions can’t help being incoherent
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My favorite “intellectual” black metal band also phrases this rather well.
2. Fiery Serpents
…I had a salowe vision
wherein were fiery serpents and scorpions and drought
…sand, in an abrasive swirling murk,
covered the crackled book of life…
A testimony
from the dimension of regret.
This voice comes
from the second right after the disaster
when all there is left to say
in a distressed whisper is
It is too late.
The irreparable has been carved in stone
and those made accountable for it are you.
Standing, shivering in cold dim light
waiting for the sentence of the Holy Dead
like Adam and Eve at the end of time.
One may argue that it was flawed
since the beginning
that the dice were loaded
that God had it all within
that He is the Source.
O heavenly Father!
pathogenic agent of contamination.
harbringer of catastrophe,
icon of the impending Fall:
but what difference does it make?
Altitudines Satana
the vertigo of Liberty
tipped the scales.
A shadow of horror is risen.
This will not be redeemed
no matter how sincere the genuflection
and ardent the confession.
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I like this.
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Me too
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The essay is here https://faculty.mtsac.edu/jmcfaul/thedamnedhumanrace.html
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You have the book, right?
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Yes, I do.
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If we take out the idea of a god and the irrationality that there was a “good beginning”, what beginning one must ask? Which is of course is completely irrational nonsense, then what we are left with is the means to an end throughout all nature and we are just one of many by-products, a momentary agitation, which takes itself far too serious.
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You indeed are right. We take ourselves too seriously. We imagine there was a beginning that was without blemish and that we spoilt things along the way and now the gods we created are angry at us
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It was “only” a television show, but the Rust Cohle character from American police procedural TRUE DETECTIVE had some great line.
“I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”
-Rust Cohle.
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Mark Twain makes a joke of it in his essay on man, the damned human race.
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Letter From the Earth….a great book
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Letters from the earth is a great book. I think I have read it 3x or more
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Since the Moral Sense has but one office, the one capacity–to enable man to do wrong–it is plainly without value to him. It is as valueless to him as is disease. In fact, it manifestly is a disease. Rabies is bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a thing which he could not do when in a healthy state: kill his neighbor with a poisonous bite. No one is the better man for having rabies. The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways. Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having the Moral Sense. What, now, do we find the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.
Mark Twain
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Mark Twain is so amazing. And he was a man of the 19th century. I put him up there with Thomas Paine.
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He is amazing. His satire is so up there
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It would be asking why a code behaves badly if it was coded by genius?
Ooooh, I like that!
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Why do the Bible Babblers who natter on endlessly about the omnipotence of their petty Semitic tribal god not see that SIN and
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EVIL and DAMNATION are all part of His ineffable plan? That He created us as playthings, as bugs to pull the legs off. God as a Toxic Toddler who in His aseitic timeless state cannot even comprehend what He has done…or doesn’t care one whit.
Why do we nonbelievers even care? Because (most of us) were indeed raised in an Abrahamic faith and one cannot easily purge all cultural contamination so there is a bit of a cri de coeur here.
Christianity is a wicked thing. It is a religion of slaves. At least the Norse and the Greeks’ pantheons were amusing, good stories.
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Religion, especially the Abrahamic ones, are the single most destructive and terror filled absurdities that man has ever invented and for what. A means of power and control..an old story that never seems to go away. So is it in essence, a population control along with disease and natural disasters?
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Mankind does not face too many predators other than his own kind. So I can see that! A mechanism for encouraging intra-human predation,.
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It works well for population control. Meek and all
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Well, as the author of the quote referred to in the blog post, the biblical position is that God created man good and that man, of his own volition, fell. What we see today is that we, as human beings, have a sense of right and wrong, but routinely do what is wrong. So what explanation do atheists have of this? They, of course, unlike us religious fanatics, are logically consistent. We live in an amoral universe. Morality is an artificial human construct used by those in power to suppress the masses. And Stalin and Mao both demonstrated what you can really do once you get rid of God! To paraphrase Scripture, the Catholic Church hath killed its thousands; the Communist Part hath killed its millions.
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Hello Bob.
To start from your last statement, it is not a numbers contest. It is not the case that Stalin or Mao were killing to advance the case of atheism. If you have evidence to support your claim, share it.
You say man fell of his own volition. Seems like you didn’t read my post. If god created man with such flaws as an ability to fall, it is really god’s problem not man.
The universe just is. Cold. Indifferent. We all are just actors.
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I assume, then, that you don’t have a problem with the slave trade, the Nazi Holocaust, etc. That’s just nature at work in our amoral universe?
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I like your thinking. It is flawed.
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