Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
How do Christians know what God is Like?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
God’s Habits
William Barclay, a prominent Scottish Christian spouter of the middle of the twentieth century, like all patriarchal liars knows precisely what God is like, having read his bible more assiduously than most Christians, and believing it to be true, as even the clever ones claim—or pretend for the benefit of the flock. Besides the Jewish scriptures and his own imagination, Barclay was also fond of citing the Jewish Talmud in one or other of its manifestations. Quite why, the authors of these ancient works should know better than a modern man is impossible to say other than the supposed influence of God in those days. This too is just a belief. From this flimsy evidence, Barclay nevertheless knows what God’s habits are:
God hears all men simultaneously.
God cares.
God is never wearied by men’s prayers.
I am a father to Israel (Jer 31:8).
Is not he your father who created you, and made you and established you (Dt 32:6)?
Since God is a father then we must be His sons:
You are the sons of Yehouah Elohim.(Dt 14:8)
Yet, O Yehouah, thou art our father (Isa 64:8)
It all sounds comforting to the smug clappies who are modern Christians but his fellow Christians called the Wee Frees would have been bellowing to their congregations the need to fear God as a jealous and vengeful type who did not brook any nonsense. The wicked cast into hell fire pleaded to God in the popular joke about the Wee Frees, “We did nae ken! We did nae ken!” But God scowling down on them from his lofty seat in heaven replied: “Well, ye ken noooo!”
To think of God as loving or vengeful is foolish. It is the ignorant and primitive projection of human feelings on to an entity meant to be more powerful than the cosmos itself. No real God could feel any love, joy, hatred or grief because any God that could feel such emotions must be subject to influence, and to be able to influence a god is to have power over him. Ultimately that is what Christians believe is the power of prayer—God would take pity on the supplicant—but no one can have any power over a god, or it is not a god, and so gods can have no emotions. Professor William Barclay, presumably not a stupid man, describes this as “indifference”, failing to notice that indifference is a word used to describe a human state of mind. No one could describe a blade of grass, say, as indifferent. It is a word that cannot be applied to something that is incapable of emotion. This is typical Christian dishonesty.
Serenity and Passion in Gods
The Goddess of the Adelphiasophists cannot feel compassion. She is serene but not aware. If she felt compassion for the sheep attacked by a wolf, or a mouse by a cat, or a lettuce eaten by a human, she would want to change her own set of natural rules. She would stop the wolf, the cat or the person from doing what was natural for it. Then the wolf or cat or human would starve, and she would feel sorry for them and have to find them a new source of food. She would be unable to live with herself, just as the Christian God ought to feel too after the events of 11 September, 2001, or many far worse atrocities suffered by human beings in historical memory.
Life exists with Nature as it is—unaware of the pain of individuals. The whole of Nature is what matters, just as the human body sheds cells daily quite unknown to the person shedding them, yet they too were life! Pain and feelings are ways that Nature has evolved to allow creatures to avoid damage. Pain therefore has a good purpose. It is absurd to give such a form of protection then to feel compassion when it works.
Epicureans considered gods to be calm or serene. Their serenity would have to be disturbed if they were concerned about worldly affairs. Neither Stoics or Epicureans, therefore, attributed human emotions to their gods because they realized that the very essence of any real god had to be detachment from the world.
The scriptural God was all too emotional, and in unpleasant ways, as any reading of Job would prove. God set out to humiliate the righteous man, Job, to win a bet against Satan, and the sorely abused Job had the temerity to question what God was doing to him. Yehouah replied with shear arrogance:
declare, if thou hast understanding.Job 38:4
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place.Job 38:12; and similar sentiments at 16, 18,22, 31, 39:19
If this god, Yehouah, is meant to have emotions then he is genuinely callous towards human suffering in the books meant to record his deeds throughout history. He bragged that he could squelch out the human race like a potter squashing a faulty vase (Jer 18:6).
Barclay knew of Richard Cameron. He was one of the Scottish covenanters. He had observably beautiful hands which were cut off by his enemies and sent to his father, who, naturally recognized them immediately.
It is the Lord’s will and good is the work of the Lord. He has never wronged me or mine.
One can guess that the elderly man thought the exact opposite but could not say what he felt for the fear of this “loving” God inculcated into him. So, we shall ask on his behalf: How can any good God permit such a wicked act? Was Cameron senior a latter day Job, being toyed with like a seal pup by a killer whale. Christians oblige us all to accept every devilish act that God must condone or He would stop it, because they think their everlasting existence might be at stake. They should look at what the God of Love permits and consider that He might be taking them in on the question of eternal life too. If He is, they have the comfort that they will never know!
Salvation for Sinners without Repentance?
What is more, Psalms 24:3-5 makes it clear enough that sinners, criminals and liars can never get into heaven, quite contrary to what Christians believe, and Barclay has to correct God with a quote from Part II of His holy work:
I came not to call the righteous but sinners.
It illustrates the utter stupidity of Christians over two millennia. Jesus could not possibly have been contradicting the Jewish scriptures to say that sinners could go to heaven. It has proved a useful misconception for the growth and long life of the religion itself, and might have something to do with its Satanic history, but no devout Jewish leader could have said what Barclay and his doltish teachers say he did.
Jesus, like his predecessor, John, called upon sinners to “repent”. Repentance followed by baptism washed people free of the sins they had accumulated in life to prepare them for God’s kingdom, but the repentance had to be sincere and the penitents had to remain righteous until the gates of God’s kingdom opened. That is the plain and obvious meaning of the parable about the virgins awaiting the coming of the groom. Those who did not remain ready would not get admission. Christians pretend that people can remain sinners, repenting daily, or having a final repentance when they die, but there is no evidence that the Essenes or Jesus had any such opportunistic thoughts. On the contrary, they were ever conscious that the least stumble could debar them from the coming kingdom, and “stumbling block” was a regular expression of Judaism.
Christians quickly forgot the importance of repentance and the need for its sincerity and took baptism to be a magical rite which removed sin like a detergent removing soil. And so Christians believe until today—even Christian professors.
Kingdom? What Kingdom?
Barclay tells us that “the kingdom is at hand” does not really mean that a kingdom is coming, but that “the reign of God is at hand”. He seems not to like the idea of associating God with the concept of a king, or he does not know what the word “reign” means! The fact that the Church is not united and is so diffuse and spallated that it is hard to tell that some churches are actually Christian is perhaps the reason why Barclay wants to get away from the notion of a united kingdom under God. His motives do not really matter. What matters is that he again does what Christians always do—he tells us that he knows! But he does not know what Jesus meant when he spoke of a kingdom of God. Any honest man would deduce in the absence of any other evidence that men mean the words they utter to mean what they seem to mean! If they do not, then no one knows what they mean!
Barclay has no right to claim that Jesus did not mean kingdom when he said kingdom. Christians do not care to read their bibles but prefer to hear what the evangelists who dictate to them mean by it. So Barclay is confident that his flocks will believe what he tells them. That is why they are sheep. The Jewish prayer called Kaddish, used in the synagogues, says:
May He establish His kingdom during your life.
The Jews wanted God to establish a Jewish kingdom of David. It would be God’s reign all right but His agents on earth would be Jews. So when the Lord’s prayer says:
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth as in heaven,
the prayer is for a Jewish kingdom subject to God’s will. Nothing voluntary is implied here. People, in God’s kingdom, do not choose to do God’s will—they have to do it. God’s will will be done! That is why sinners do not get in. Those who get in habitually do God’s will. They are the ones who have no objection to it being done.
Barclay and his Christian listeners want to believe that the diffuse and unpleasant conglomeration of Christian sects constitute the kingdom of God already. If that is so, then it proves to any unbiased mind that God is indeed Satan. In fact, the kingdom of God was always an eschatological idea—not one which evolved on earth but one which just arrived suddenly and ended the world as we know it. Christian scholars know this but do not want their happy devotees to be disillusioned. In case they learn about eschatology, they have renamed it “rapture.”
No, Barclay tells his readers with immense certainty that Jesus is the kingdom of God, a notion that Jesus would have thought certifiable. Barclay forgets, as does the gospel writer dubbed John only a few years after Jesus, that the Essenes were noted for their humility as Jesus was too, according to the synoptic gospels. Christians, however, cannot abide humility in anyone other than monks or poor neurotics that like to live on pillars or in cells. Christians want a king of glory and they want him to know it and say so. So, they make him, because Christians can do anything at all for the glory of God, even once murdering tens of thousands of daft old women, and now, we hear preparing to nuke twenty million innocent Arabs in Iraq. Jesus is glorious. He is not just a king, he is a tyrannic kingdom!
People like Barclay also tell their poor dupes that Jesus is a supernatural Son of God, able to do astonishing miracles while being just a man, even though this man is God himself incarnated! None of this makes sense except to those determined to pretend it does by suspending their brain functions. Professional Christians like Barclay cynically persuade innocant people who are not so clever that he knows what they do not. When faced with any confidence trickster, it is wise to be skeptical.
