AW! Epistles
From Nik
Abstract
Saturday, 17 January 2004
Hello Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! The Social Psychology of Christianity - God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion?
Whilst, a lot of what you say may appear to be true, you are assuming that there is no God. You are assuming that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross for your sins and that he did not rise again and that he is not alive today!
You are quite wrong and utterly confused to say that I am assuming that these things did not happen. This is precisely the sort of indoctrination that I mean. You are saying that we should accept that things happened for which we have no contrary evidence. That is quite absurd, and, if it were true, you would have to believe every tall story you ever heard from ancient myths to urban myths. The precise opposite to your argument is true and the way we have been able to learn what we have in the years since Christianity lost its strangle hold on the Western world. Whatever we believe ought to be proven. All of this stuff you say I assume has not been proven. Until it is, I should not believe it.
Yes, there are many bad eggs amongst so called Christians, as there are also amongst non believer! The heart of man, left with out restraint tends towards evil in much the same way as a house decays from neglect.
If there are as many bad eggs among Christians as among the rest as you admit, it tells me that Christianity has no effect on the way people live and behave. What then is the point of it? How is this meant to show that Christianity is good for the soul, or whatever you might claim about it. It proves that Christianity is a sham and so then must be all the things that you assume that you say I reject. That seems a good reason for rejecting them, but I go further than that. I argue, as you will see if you read my pages, that Christianity is positively evil itself. Nothing that purports to be the institution of a good God could have the history of depravity and cruel murder that Christianity has.
Man would know very little without education and teaching from parents and educators. It is a poor argument that you use when you say man would not know God if he was not indoctrinated. We are all indoctrinated. Would you not rather be indoctrinated with truth than fiction?
Now you really ought to consider carefully what you are saying. You are assuming that Christianity tells the truth. Christianity is the fiction. If we are all indoctrinated as you say, then it should be the function of a liberal education to allow us to realise it, and make up our own mind about whatever points we have been indoctrinated about. Christianity does not do that in any way. It insists it has the truth. It has no evidence that it has. You just have to believe it. That is indoctrination.
Your arguments fail in so far as you have not considered the reality of a living Christ. If you only new him, if you had ever experiences his ability to change circumstances and to do magnificent miracles in your own life, and that without the influence of knowledge of the church or anyone else, you would write from a different stance.
If he were real, as you claim, then I would have known him, but as the article you have been reading shows, Christians are trapped psychologically into believing tripe. The sure sign of any scam is that “you must trust me, brother”! You buy a pig in a poke that turns out to be a rotting log, and out of embarrassment have to persuade yourself you have a bargain. Christianity is the religion of used car dealers. It assumes, with good reason, that its followers are fools.
Perhaps, one day you will have a great need. If this ever happens, try calling out to the one in whom you don’t believe. It may be that you will experience the amazing grace of the loving perfection of goodness. God manifests himself to those who call to him, not to those who want to prove him.
You are confirming what I say in the article. People who are mentally vulnerable are the ones whom the used car dealer Christ appeals to. If I got that sick, I’d be certified.
Almost everything you say is an inversion of the truth. That is how wicked Christianity is.
Just imagine for a moment, that you are the God whom you don’t believe exists. From a vantage point of about 22 miles, using human grade vision, you are looking at "Mike" standing alone in the middle of a prairie, (a bit like Carry Grant in the film, North by North West). It is unlikely that Mike could be seen or heard. You now take out a pair of special high-powered binoculars and slowly zoom in. “Mike”, slowly comes into view. You focus in so you can see his face and read his expressions. Now you switch to God mode, you view past his skin and enter his brain, and you read his thoughts and comprehend his memories. Of course, being God you know why he thinks the way he does, you know how accurate his memories are and how some of them are recorded differently from the actual events. You know and understand his cognitive processes. In a nutshell you know vastly more about him, than he will ever know about himself. You then start to adjust the binoculars and slowly zoom out. He gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears from sight, all in less than 22 miles!
It is a curious exercise to have to do this, and having done it, I do not know what good it was. Perhaps you will tell me when I read on, but, since I was to imagine I was God, I cannot see what the point of the binoculars was, the zooming in and out and so on. If I were to imagine I was God, then I ought to know without binoculars and zooming, and so on, precisely everthing about Mike Magee, and Nik Cutschool, and everyone else and everything else in the universe. You Christians tell me that the God I am to imagine myself to be is omniscient. I therefore know everything automatically. The God in the bible who begins by creating the world, then a few verses later on cannot find Adam because he is hiding is not a consistently described God. These two descriptions of God are by two different authors who had quite different concepts of God. That is the beginning of the reasons why the bible and therefore Christianity is hooey!
Questions? How big do you REALY suppose you are? Do you REALY think the human mind could ever comprehend God? Do you in all honesty think that your human mind, (not to insult you in any way, as you are obviously a very clever man), can answer almighty God? Have you ever read the book of Job? Are you greater than Job?
“How big do I think I really am?” you ask. Well, I think I am more modest than you seem to think. I am reasonably clever and have certificates to prove it, for what they are worth, but I am not “very” clever. As for comprehending God, I presume that all Christians comprehend Him in some sense or they would not be Christians, but, if I am to accept what Christians believe about this entity they believe really exists, then I cannot possibly understand what is in His brain because to be omniscient means that you know everything. I know well enough that I do not know everything. Moreover, it is even harder to know what is in the brain of something that is purely imaginary. It does not have a brain. You then ask yet another question. Can I answer God? Well, if I am supposed to still imagine there is a God that knows everything, it is plain enough that He must be able to ask me questions that I cannot answer.
Now let us leave behind all of these hypothetical questions, and turn to facts. God has never asked me a question, so far, in my life, and since you say He is omniscient, He would know there is no point in asking me a question that He knows I cannot answer. Perhaps there are questions that He could ask me that He knows I could answer, but because you say He is omniscient, He knows it is stupid to ask me them, because He knows what my answers would be without having to ask. There is absolutely no reason why any God that is omniscient would need to talk to me at all. He already knows everything I have to say. God knows your prayers before you pray them, and ought to have answered them without your needing to ask Him—if He is the God of Love that you say He is. It must follow that Christians who think they talk to God must be deluded. They are talking to themselves only, or showing off to their friends.
Personally, I do not believe that any thinking person is ever really an atheist. Your own website and all the energy you have put into it shout out, “I’m looking for God”, or, “I’m very angry with God and I defy him to strike me down or prove himself”. I don’t expect you to accept this observation; but that in itself ought to raise a question in your mind. If you are really attacking Christianity from a psychological standpoint, you must also analyse your own motives, reasons and psychological profile. The results of which also ought to be on your website.
I am not angry with God, nor am I looking for Him. It would be like being angry with Santa Claus, or looking for him. You cannot find what is imaginary. It exists only in people’s heads. Moreover, I have explained my motives and background on the website. If you have not found it then you have not read what you pretend you have read. You see, Christians always think that they are omniscient whether God is or not. You do not need to read the pages because you already know it all.
Probably the most significant issue that you have not addressed on your website is that of a spiritual nature. Just because someone happens to be a Christian, does not mean that they cease to be a human being. As humans, many of the psychological observations, phenomenon and occurrences you have recorded on your site, probably do take place, both in churches and in peoples responses. Christians are just as prone to the hypnotic suggestions as any other person, and maybe more so in certain circumstances where believers trust and even venerate the speaker. It is indeed a dangerous area, and church leaders have a great responsibility and accountability.
The word “spiritual” is itself a confidence trick. People who use it are pretending that they know something that others do not. There are no spirits and so spiritual pertains to something imaginary, and its meaning must be the same—imaginary. Most people think it means “religious”. In your next point, do you mean that Christianity has no effect on the way humans behave? If so, I am grateful you at least agree with all that, but I notice that it lodges in your brain only long enough to be instantly dismissed. You prove that Christians are neither fair nor reasonable.
The crux of Christianity is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and at its nucleus, you have got to identify with the death of Christ. You have got to believe that you died with him on the cross, and that you rose again with him. "It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me"!
Why do I have to do these insane things? My imagination is, I believe, much better than most Christians’ because I can imagine only too well how it must have felt for countless people whom the Christians mercilessly incinerated over a period of 700 or more years. If dying cruelly is the sign of a God then Christians have murdered myriads of gods. Anyone with any imagination can put themselves in the position of a victim tied to a tree so that they cannot move and having a fire lit about them. I doubt that anyone can imagine the pain or duration of such a death. Christians certainly cannot, because they would cease being Christians if they could.
As for thinking you can come back to life when you have been killed, it requires no imagination at all, or the littlest amount of it. Small boys aged about five onwards die ten times an hour, and jump back to life again in seconds. By the age of fifteen we should all have grown out of it and realised that life is easy enough to loose but is impossible to regain. Those who believe it as an adult are dangerously deranged, and are liable to blow up themselves and others in revenge for some slight. That is why Christianity and the other patriarchal religions are insane.
People’s experiences are different, and people go to different depths. Not everyone is a Moses or an Elijah, (though human pride makes many Christians think they can be, and can leave them very disappointed).
You ought to consider the seriousness of what you are saying. Moses and Elijah are as mythical as Jason and the argonauts or Finn Mac Cool and the Fenians. You might as well have James Bond or Conan the Barbarian as a role model. People who parade their delusion that they are Elijah or Moses in this day and age would be locked up in an asylum. Yet Christian heroes like John the Baptist and Jesus the Nazarene were thought by their followers, and perhaps themselves, to have been Elijah and Moses respectively.
Identifying with the death of Christ and then allowing the resurrected Christ to live in me provides proof beyond any shadow of doubt, that there is a God. Obviously, because faith is a requisite, such evidence is only available to believers.
This argument is utterly circular, and you prove your lack of reason by citing it. You only get proof of your belief by believing. You have to believe first before you get the proof. Christians insist that their God is a crook. No good God could make such an unrational demand on His supposed followers, unless He is Devilish.
I am not just talking about things that can perhaps be explained or rationalised such as joy, peace, hope and love, but very concrete things such as direct answers to prayer and miracles. No amount of psychological or psychic manipulation can undo the over tightened wheel nuts on a 3.5 ton truck! But it has happened to me! Do not say, “coincidence”, I experience so many, “coincidences”; no statistician would ever concede the point!
Not coincidence but insanity, dear Nik. If you think that God has undone your rusted in wheel nuts then nuts is the word! Why is it that God is brilliant at doing trivial things but can do nothing of significance? If the Islamists of Osama are the Evil Empire as Christian cracked pot propagandists say incessantly, then why is the God of love only undoing overtight nuts? If He sent George W Bush to save us then why did He not warn him about 9/11? Your miracles make a supposedly all mighty God sound like a mischievous child with only the supernatural power and sense to tighten and untighten nuts but to do nothing important. Are you sure you are not worshipping an apprentice or an infant God? Perhaps you are worshipping Screwtape’s nephew.
Neither am I a rarity, life as a Christian is often hard.
Nothing like as hard as it was for non-Christians in Christendom until only a few centuries back. All Christians are smug. In my reading of the New Testament, that counts them out of the kingdom they are sure they will enter. Christianity, if Christ himself is to be believed, demands humility. Humble Christians are the true rarity. Hell must be full of the rest.
Where does Gods trying of your faith and the Devil’s continual desire to destroy and deceive begin or end? I have had more than my fair share of troubles, and still it does not let up. If you had any idea at all, of what I have lived through since being a Christian, you would not conclude that I had been brain washed or duped. I have experienced, in the endless fire, Gods help, Gods presence, Gods deliverance and Gods outstanding miracles.
Endless fire? I think not! If you accidentally touched a burning cigarette you would withdraw your hand in a trice. You could not stand the pain even of a cigarette for a second, let alone endlessly. If God has imposed that as a punishment, then God is Satan.
And you would have had the same help, presence and miracles if you had worshipped any other god, or even a rabbit’s foot with the same passion. Why are religious Americans Christians when religious Arabs are Moslems, and religious Indians Hindus, and religious Tibetans Buddhists? God plainly is not almighty, or He would not have condoned such confusion. Mainly, people join the religion they are conditioned to believe. You are the same. It proves no religion is absolute as you mistakenly think.
In my experience the most outstanding movements of God are completely outside of the church building. There is no hype, no hypnotism, just a pure clear miracle or a healing. (In my experience, not only does the Lord manifest himself more frequently in such circumstances, but also I like to look for such situations. It is so exciting when you are in a position where unless Jesus shows up and turns the water into wine, you have a temperate experience!)
You sound quite a sad case. Christians are convinced that the least thing like being able to unwrench a wheelnut is a miracle. I have never seen a miracle, but you see them everywhere. What I see is the amazing wonders of Nature, and human ingenuity. Until we start to value these things properly and try to preserve them, we are doomed to extinction. Doubtless you will live forever, but you shall have to live in a wasteland. Fortunately, you need not worry because you will be dead forever too, like the rest of us.
I do not know what experience you have had which has led you to believe the way you do at this time, but please note the word, “believe”.
You ought to know. I say it often. The experience is reading about the unpardonable wickedness of Christianity through the ages. “Believe” means abandon your reason.
You are a “believer”; but alas you believe the lie of the Devil himself. As the great deceiver, his ace card is to make people believe that he himself does not exist! His next step is to deceive people that God does not exist! Of course he will continue, and as a man who is without doubt cleverer than me, you will find many holes in my statements. Dare you ask yourself this question, “What if I am wrong”?
Again, these questions that you put to me, you just cannot understand in relation to yourself. If the Devil exists and is indeed a great deceiver, what makes you certain he is not deceiving you? You accept some commonplace psychological experiences, experiences that in other people make them Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, or believers in alien abductions, and convince yourself that they tell you God is a Christian. Yet Christianity has such an evil record. A record that is there for you to examine, but few Christians do, and, if they did, would see that any God that influences Christian behaviour could only be an evil one. The deception is proved by your utter refusal to look at the mass of evidence, only some of which I present, and my pages on Christianity alone are long enough. So, just consider the final question you put here and answer it yourself. The fact is that the historical evidence shows Christianity is monstrous, evil and even Satanic, whereas your arguments boil down to your delusion that God, unseen by you, adds a little grease to your wheelnuts.
The problem is that you are arguing from the mind, from the brain. God is not a brain. God has wisdom, but he isn’t just wisdom. God is spirit. Whilst it is possible to feel and experience the emotional/physical effects of a spirit using the brain processes; spiritual comprehension is not processed with the brain any more than the soul of man dwells in his head. In Christianity it is the spirit of man that comes alive. Until this happens to you, you will not be able to understand what I am saying.
You are no doubt right that I will not, but perhaps you will tell me why God took the trouble, on your own hypothesis that He made us all as part of His Creation of everything, to create us with a brain. Christians always use your absurd argument that we are not supposed to use our brains even though they presumably were put inside our skulls by God Himself. It is the used car dealer God, or rather the tricksters that you believe in who persuade you that God is no better than a used car dealer.
Or do you think that Satan put our brains inside a cavity that God forgot to fill, so that we could be easily tempted and think things that God would never allow us to think? If this is picking holes in your statements, and you cannot help it because I am cleverer than you, then I suggest that you are possibly not clever enough to resist the temptations the Devil puts in your way, and the biggest and most compelling one is to ignore the very organ that God gave you to stop you from being fooled by rogues and tricksters. You even become an instrument of the Devil by trying to persuade others not to use it. Whatever the value of your arguments, I cannot accept, and think you should not either, that God gave you a brain wanting you to ignore its presence in favour of liars who want you to think your God is an idiot. No wonder they call Christians sheep!
The reason I said in my previous email you might cry out to God if ever you are in a desperate situation, is that many people only ever seek God at such times. When all is going well, both with things to do with politics and God, people are apathetic. Desperation sometimes cause folk to bypass their normal argumentative thinking process, to recognise their vulnerability, weakness, dire poverty and wretched sin and in this state to admit their need. There is no pit so deep, but Christ is deeper still. Why deny the blessed hope?
When I bruise my knee, I want attendance, a mother to rub it as a child, or a doctor to check it out when I am an adult playing football, or rodeo riding. It is part of our nature as social animals to help each other, and to expect help from our close neighbours when we need it. The same applies to psychological disorders and traumas. When a beloved relative or friend dies, consolation helps me. When I am struck by multiple misfortunes and I am inclined to fall into depression, a sympathetic friend can help. Regrettably, you extend this into the supernatural and think there is a heavenly mother to rub your bruises, except that you prefer to call her a father because patriarchal religions dominate our society. It has the same psychological benefits as a placebo, and has the advantage over the placebo, that you can blame its failure to work, when it does not, on to the Devil. For Christians, God necessarily wins, yet the briefest examination beyond personal psychological delusions shows that God never helps in anything important. The “blessed hope” is the victory of lunacy over reason.
