AW! Epistles
From Rick
Abstract
Saturday, 27 September 2003
Mike, I have the following comments on: AW! Discussion Pages for Christianity, Judaism and Truth.
I was raised a Christian in the US. I became a fundamentalist and a self-proclaimed apologist (knowing what I beleive and why) in the later years and use to debate and argue with many cult members (everyone who didn’t beleive as I did). I am 34 years old. My family on both sides is stooped in various forms of Christianity (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Evangelicals, Lutherans) and recently Judaism. All religion has done for my family is tear it apart. Fortunately, some of them are coming out of it and our family is repairing itself.
My father started my quest for the truth by studying Christianity and discussing it with me. But he was doing so to disprove Christianity and prove Judaism. Much to my own horror, he had some very good points and arguments that I couldn’t get out of my head. Some arguments were just plain common sense, such as: If Hashem is one, how can Jesus be God too? And Hashem plainly stated not to have any other gods but him, but yet Christians worship Christ much more than they do the Father. This is absurdly simple, but when you have been raised on Christian arguments for the trinity and the deity of Christ, it is very hard to step aside and look at it objectively.
Well, I’ve been able to step aside and finally look at the Christian evidence objectively. The “evidence” makes me cringe. Christianity, in my opinion, is a hodge podge of religions, managed by the early Romans. I can’t honestly consider myself a Christian any longer, I just can’t intellectually do it. I want to out of fear but that is not a good reason. If God is going to kill me because I am seeking the truth, then I guess I am going to die. But I can’t help it since He made me this way, right? It is all just a giant nonsensical mess.
My father is a converted Jew, but it seems he stopped examining the evidence at the doorpost of Judaism. Well, he got me to “ask why” with Christianity, I am going to get him to examine the evidence for Judaism. At least he has learned to never say never and is open to the evidence.
Anyway, I love reading your arguments and your writings. I get a huge laugh out of the way you slap around Christians, but they deserve it, especially in a historical context. Religions really screw up this world.
I am not an atheist yet because I haven’t come to a conclusion, I am still investigating the evidence. All I can say at this point in my life is that it isn’t looking good for the God of the bible. I have been seriously seeking the truth for about a year now.
Christianity is out the window, Judaism seems to be a little more credible, but your arguments are making me question this religion too. I still have to verify for myself your arguments and evidence concerning the origins of Judaism, as I will never just beleive someone just because. So far, I don’t think you make quite the case against Judaism, but I haven’t finished reading all your writings yet.
I am now faced with the question of morality. If my prior God no longer exists, what keeps me moral? What keeps the world moral? For me, my answer is pragmatism. What keeps you moral? Why not lie, cheat on your wife, steal, etc… if you can get away with it?
Living a life without believing in a God is foreign to me and uncomfortable. How is life for you, how do you deal with it? Are you happy and content? Does it take a while to get used to? Really, I am curious.
It is a pleasant change to get a letter like yours that is appreciative, and it is nice to know that people are breaking free of the Christian spider’s web. I suppose families tend to think fairly alike, certainly from the older to the younger generation because of parental indoctrination, and the best chance of breaking free, apart from having parents who are themselves free of dogma, is to have parents that disagree about it. That was my case in a sense because one was Catholic and the other Protestant, though neither was actually fanatical about their religious ideas. It meant I was brought up notional Protestant but really pretty dogma free, so I had no trouble in rejecting what seemed to me to be of no importance. It sounds as though the freedom in your own family to discuss these matters has been a help, even though the various members have had strongly held views.
The whole relationship between Christianity and Judaism that your father highlighted has always puzzled me too. I cannot see how the bloodthirsty monster of the Jewish scriptures can be the merciful father of the New Testament, given that God is supposed to be unchanging. Nor can I understand why the tenets of Judaism have any importance at all in Christianity when the Son is supposed to have abrogated the Mosaic law. I can accept the argument that the Jewish scriptures are still in the Christian bible to show God working in history, if you like, but not for bigots to pick on some abstruse Levitical rule and to use against something they do not like their sheep from doing. Either the law was abrogated or it was not. It was supposed to have been a law introduced by this same unchanging God, so it makes no sense to me that He later decided to drop it totally. Obviously Jews do not believe it, and their position makes more sense to me. If He did drop it, though, why are Christians picking and chosing quite arbitrarily bits of it that must still be obeyed? The reason has nothing to do with God but with the power mad ministers of the churches, who want to control people, and to do it claiming God’s own authority.
Not that Judaism has any more authority. You say you are still reading about it, so I’ll not go in to it, but Judaism is an offshoot of Persian Zoroastrianism. First century Judaism was probably much closer to Zoroastrianism than the austere intellectuallism of modern Judaism, hugely changed after the Bar Kosiba rebellion from its much more apocalyptic origins. Even so, it is identifiably Zoroastrian and the proof is that Zoroastrianism explains Jewish beliefs that Judaism does not explain, such as cleanness and uncleanness.
Now, not surprisingly, you sound a bit anxious that God might have some awful punishment for you. That is why it is so hard for people indoctrinated with guilt like this to break from obnoxious Christian teachings. The answer is to use your head. Christians never do, but I cannot see how they can deny that their brains are given to them at birth by God Himself, since they believe God is the Creator, and even that He created humanity in His own image. The point therefore is not to accept the propaganda of Christian ministers and priests. An almighty God simply cannot at the same time be an idiot, yet that is what Christians are taught. An almighty God must know whether you are being sincere and whether you are doing things for the best. A loving and just God must know that people are seriously trying to be good human beings or are not. It does not matter therefore about the outward trappings of religiosity because God, as the Jewish scriptures suggest, must know what is in your heart. Since you are sincerely seeking a way out of the moral dilemma you have been in, it is impossible to imagine that any just and loving God would be aiming to punish you for it. To think otherwise is to make God a fool, a puppet of His greedy puppet masters in the pulpits of the world.
The next stage is to accept that however you think of God, it is impossible to be personally involved in every aspect of your life. That too is to make the Creator into an idiot who could not devise any forward plans to relieve Himself of an interminable burden. The foolish argument that the universe has to be sustained by God’s personal intervention at every moment of its existence is the same. It makes God into a dunce! If you wish to think it, there are rules and laws set in Nature and they were set there by an almighty God so that He could take His rest on the seventh celestial day and therefter!
Even more advanced then is to to appreciate, that, if God did create the world, then He could not have created order in it. For God to have existed in any sense beforehand means that order already existed, because no hyper-intelligent and almighty God could have existed as Chaos. Indeed the Creation myths of the ancient near east were nearly all the separation of order from chaos, but it must have happened first or there could have been no God, unless God is Himself thought of as a basic eternal order in matter. That is the conclusion that the Zoroastrians seemed to have, although they had a thinking God emerging out of the order of the world (called arta, a cognate word to order). It is also the idea that the Stoics had, but they thought there was no thinking god at all. God simply was order and could not go about sticking His fingers into human history at a whim, although human history was of course subject to the order inherent in the cosmos—to God!
Finally, you can reckon that a God who is the order in the universe is a part of Nature itself, and the Christians have falsely elevated a part of Nature into a sole God. The only proof of God they have is the wonder of Nature, rejecting Nature, as is their wont into a secondary position as soon as they invite us to wonder at it, by telling us that God made it all! We see Nature all about us, experience it, touch it, smell it, it feeds us, it clothes us, it has hidden marvels that we can explore and make use of, and it has horrors that we have to learn the sense to avoid. Nature is God. Serving God is serving Nature, and even if it is hard to let go of the personified God that the Jews and Christians believe in, if all of Nature is God’s creation, it is impossible for us to believe that He made it so beautiful that He wants us to destroy it by our greed and selfishness.
Morality then is accepting as a basic principle that we should not offend the earth directly or indirectly. We cannot gratuitously kill Bengal tigers in foreign zoos, for example. Even more so, we cannot kill other human beings because we do not like them, or think they do not like us. The earth is not just humans and animals, of course, it is everything in it, so ploughing up a field to say we are not planting cotton and thereby getting a government handout is a crime against the earth. Land is not meant to be ploughed, and when it is necessary to plough it, we must make sure we do it with regard to that necessity and the consequences.
Of course, you do not worship Nature, or even a God that is the Order of the Cosmos. They are not even thinking about it, let alone in the megalomaniac way that Christians make God behave. What you do is celebrate it! You take joy in it, and you can do it alone or in a crowd according to your mood or preference. Nature is real, and it is worth celebrating, it is so wonderful. God is a figment of the imagination of a bunch of crooks who have traditionally used it to get rich.
I have said enough, so let me just recap the main thing. If you believe in a God, please believe that He is not an idiot. If God is intelligent and omniscient, He knows what you are trying to do. Goodness is doing good. If you can cast off the need to believe in a heavenly father, then believe in what really benefits you, and needs your attention, if it is not to be spoiled for your kids—Nature.
Thank you for your reply. Very interesting and a lot to think about. It is nice to know you are so accessible. I am sure in the coming months and years, I will be calling on you for some advice in dealing with my religious friends and family. One in particular is about to go to seminary out of state, this will be a big hardship on him and his family. I am sure he is doing it as a sacrifice to God and is counting on God to ’bless’ him for this sacrifice.
Do you have a book that contains all of the information (prologue through appendix) contained on the website Christianity Revealed? It would be a great mobile study tool. I will buy your other books.
Anyway, I will keep reading. Thanks for all of your hard work and for making this information available at no charge. I appreciate it.
Thanks for your latest mailing. You are welcome to write to me of course, but I hope I am not setting myself up as a sort of religious agony aunt. The way your views are emerging seem sound enough to me.
Depending on God’s blessing is hardly a reliable thing to do. If my reading is right, half of the population of the USA are pious Christians, so half of those who died in the twin towers will have died praying, but doubtless Christians are happy to die with a prayer on their lips just like Moslems.
To sacrifice your family for a selfish fulfilment of some dream of devotion does not sound right to me. But then I cannot see what Christians seem to believe all too easily, that God is a megalomaniac who has created humanity so that they can worship Him. If there is a God, then He must expect human beings to help each other, and the natural environment, but hardly to waste their time perpetually singing hymns and saying prayers of praise to Himself! Your friend or relative ought to consider that he could fulfil his feelings of piety while looking after his family adequately too. In the end that is what most Christians do.
I would love to publish such a book, but it just would not sell. The publishers know that it is Christians who need the reassurance. Most non-believers already have it. You can always download the whole of the AW! and Adelphiasophism websites and store them on a recordable CD, then you can use a search program like Agent Ransack to find anything you like in the pages. The host ISP for both sites only allow 100MB for each so they both come in at less than 200MB, and probably less than 100MB, including pictures, so they should fit easily on to a modern hard disk and a 650MB CD.
Thanks for your kind words. They are fairly rare in this mailbox, and all the more appreciated for that.
