In one of our dailies

A Dr. Chacha wrote an article where he seems to lament the absence of god in Kenya during elections. One would think there are jurisdictions where god has a voters card since he tells us that god doesn’t vote in Kenya which should be obvious.

He takes umbrage on a politician calling himself a son of mau mau instead of a son of god and interprets this as choosing violence as a means of resolving political dispute instead of peaceful alternatives. I don’t think this interpretation is correct nor justified.

In the same article, he writes evil always triumphs over good evidenced by the bad leaders we end up with. These leaders are voted by the masses. I hope the good lecturer is willing to agree that the voters prefer evil to good, otherwise I don’t see how his argument can be sustained.

It is parsons who have always insisted leaders are anointed by god regardless of how dubious their character is.

His conclusion that religion doesn’t affect how we vote should not be mourned but actually celebrated. We are not electing the bishop but representatives who shall legislate on our behalf. And religion shouldn’t determine how people vote.That ethnicity affects how people vote is an area for study for social scientists.

And with that, have a great weekend everyone.

it was a great mistake

wrote Mrs. Ernestine L Rose

to say god made man in his image. Man, in all ages, made god in his image. and we find that just in accordance with his civilization, his knowledge, his experience, his taste, his refinement, his sense of right, of justice, of freedom, and humanity,—so has he made his God. But whether coarse or refined ; cruel and vindictive, or kind and generous; an implacable tyrant, or a gentle and loving father ;—it still was the emanation of his own mind —the picture of himself

A Defense of Atheism by E. L Rose

what has your god been doing for you?

What other gods are doing.

1. Does your god beat your business competition?
2. Does your god advise you to become an entrepreneur?
3. Does your god send you clients?

If your god isn’t doing any of the above, it is time you chose a new god. Gods are outta here blessing people and you are there sulking, praying to a god who will not send you clients, or even tell you when it is the right time to quit an employer.

As for me, I will continue to talk nicely to my clients.

Stumping atheists

If god didn’t create atheists, who did?

Maybe you are a catholic or a christian and are confused about evolution. You don’t know whether to reject it outright or to reject genesis. The Roman church has a solution for you. Following Augustine and other church fathers, church tradition recognizes that Genesis uses figurative language and as such cannot be a scientific text that rules out human evolution altogether.

If you had worn your dancing shoes after reading the above paragraph, just remove them. The same church specifically rejects the conclusions of Darwin which insist that evolution was the result of random forces. To the church, evolution is only acceptable if it is guided by an intelligent designer, god. The church having warned scientists to avoid pretentious claims that are beyond the realm of inquiry goes ahead and tells us god could have created human bodies through evolution but immediately created their souls at the moment of conception. How do they know this?

To justify its continued existence, the church then tells us the fall as recorded in Genesis was a real event in time ( curious people want to know the date and place). And following this fall, everyone contracts a sin, original sin, at birth. This hereditary blemish can be cleansed if you get the right baptism, the catholic one. However, this baptism leaves you with some spiritual and moral weaknesses that can only be overcome through god’s grace.

Just in case you are wondering whether Jesus inherited this blemish, he wasn’t because through some god magic, Mary was also born without it.

Any one in business who wants to reap where they didn’t saw for 100 of years if not thousands should follow the model of the church. Tell the people they have a defect. Be the only supplier of the remedy. Embed yourself in their lives, from the cradle to the grave. And make sure they are told about your product before they reach the age of reason and you will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Have a sinful weekend everyone, especially those who were not baptised. Your original sin is still intact.

Why can’t we see god?

This author argues it is because she wants us to choose to love her and to protect our freewill. This argument doesn’t hold unless the proponent can show that in the many narratives involving god showing up for bbq, that the people she interacted with had no freewill. If Adam and Eve had god immediately in their presence and still had room to eat the fruit, which among other things, god needed not have told them about its existence, then the argument about fear is moot. It doesn’t hold any water.

Christians, some of them, insist Jesus is God. If this is true, then what do we say about the disciples? Was it their fear of hell that kept them with Jesus? Didn’t god know this? The same Christians, who believe in trinity, tells us the spirit is god and it is with us. How is this then squared with the claim god doesn’t show herself because if that happened we wouldn’t love her?

I say we can’t see god the same way we can’t see Santa. God(s) so far as I can tell have no existence out of the human mind. This, to me, is the most likely answer. What gods are is unknown to us. What they look like is unknown to us. Besides, we have apologists tell us god is spirit, is without form and all that makes it way impossible for us to see such a being given we lack the necessary apparatus to see spirits.

It is absurd to suggest that a being desirous of having a relationship with you would seek to do this by hiding. What relationship is that even? A delusion?

For those interested in further reading, In defense of William Rowe’s Evidential argument from evil by Nick Trakakis, makes for good reading on the different arguments that apologists have advanced to defend divine hiddenness.

On free will

I know some of you are about to say, not again, but indulge me a bit. This will not be long.

I have seen a species of arguments that goes something like if god is omniscience, then we can’t have freewill as an argument against freewill but I think this line of argument is mistaken. Unless of course god determines or directs our actions, then we are puppets in a cosmic game that we don’t know its purpose.

But the omniscience of god still poses a problem for the problem of evil. God knows what we will do and in her godliness decides that it is best to let the baby be raped and the mother hacked to death to satisfy some cosmic ends.

It would be possible, in my view, to retain freewill and gods omniscience. Only thing is that we can not alter the future. It is determined unless god is misguided. This is all so confusing.

For avoidance of doubt, I am still a freewill and god skeptic. I am this morning attempting to be the devil’s advocate.

Have a confused Monday, will you and if you are Chinese, Happy New Year.

Belief has no place where truth is concerned

God does not exist

Does god exist?

These two videos speak to the same topic. I hadn’t heard of Prof Peter Millican before this, but I like him. He is eloquent. As for Krishnamurti, I have read some of his works and I agree with some if not most of it. The two videos will take a max of 35 minutes but you will thank me for days for contributing to your education.

Enjoy

created sick, commanded to be sound

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.

Is there a god

On my friend Ark’s blog there is a discussion or is it a narrative on where the burden lies in the god debate. And I generally agree with him. However, I think, and our late friend *my atheist life* would agree, we can say there is no god and the burden of proof doesn’t switch to us. Why so, you might ask, first, no coherent definition of a god has been provided that would demonstrate such a being(s) would exist. There are contradictory attributes of alleged gods that such beings are unlikely to exist. Whether such beings are necessary and in what manner of existence they are to exist have not been demonstrated. And attempts have been made to do this.

I know my empiricist friends wouldn’t commit themselves to such a statement arguing, among other reasons, new evidence may convince us otherwise. That is all fair. But until this evidence is adduced, we have nothing to go on with and as the good priest Jean Messlier wrote, to believe in God(s) is to believe in a chimera with no parallel in experience.

But I could be wrong

You need god for mental health

So says Scientific American especially in these times of covid related depression. I don’t know what you heathens are gonna do.

I am not convinced though. I think for some, their recovery is delayed because they have been convinced by their therapist their situation is complicated by some spirit for which neither the patient nor the therapist have a way of identifying or treating.

What do you guys think?