People

by Currie Jean

Created on: June 09, 2008

One of the problems presented in answering the question, "Do you place more trust in people or god?" is that even those who claim to trust god more are really only trusting people.

Those who claim to "trust god" are trusting any of the following things: themselves (in trusting their dreams, fantasies, and judgements), their clergy (in trusting what is said at church services), a group of men who have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years (in trusting what's written in their holy book), and their community (in trusting what is said around them, day in and day out, about their god).

Only in trusting the things mentioned above does someone gain the belief that there is a real, actual god, and that this god has particular properties and makes particular dictations about how people ought to live. In this sense, no one trusts a god - they just trust people, sometimes the wrong people, at that.

All this trusting leads to convictions, ideas, and images that create the illusion, in some people's minds, that the god they've been told about by people and books exists in reality. In this sense, an imaginary god can technically be trusted, as long as the trusting person believes this god to be real.

Of course, whether or not he's worth trusting is another matter. Since he isn't real, belief in him opens a person up to severe gullibility, and thus manipulation by his peers (that is, clergy), who can then take his money, his time, and his praise, often using it to line the pockets of their robes.

Assuming the Abrahamic god to be real, he still isn't trustworthy. He condoned rape, slavery, gratuitous violence, viscousness, genocide, and infanticide in the Bible. In the Bible, he was as cruel and ethnocentric as his followers were at the time they wrote the Bible. These men, and their god, have moral skills inferior to nearly all of the people living in the modern-day societies of Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, among other places. If someone from these countries acted as barbarically as is condoned by the god of the Bible, they would be thrown in jail, or even put to death by the state. In democratic countries, the state is usually subject to this rule, as well.

Further, god came down to earth later on, disguised has his own "son" (as they say, "Jesus is god"), simply to confuse his followers into dividing against one another. Since god is all-powerful and all-knowing, he truly can do whatever he wants to do. Nothing is stopping him, as his knowledge and power are limitless.

Why, then, would god create a pantomime out of his own decision either to forgive people's sins or send them to burn and melt and scream in pain for eternity, when he can do whatever he wants anyway? He makes up all the rules himself. The only possible explanation for this is that he deliberately divided his followers by separating Jews from Christians. He did it again later by egging Mohammed on. No other purpose is served here but to divide humans against one another. What just, trustworthy god would do this, especially knowing that such separation would be used as justification of, and inspiration for, the holocaust, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and attacks on the Pentagon, as well as countless other violent atrocities?

The whole "died for your sins" business looks a lot like a lie. God can forgive whoever he wants to whenever he wants to, and he always could, by definition. By all appearances, he faked his death (Jesus didn't really end up dying, after all) as part of a fabricated story played on the world stage during Jesus's time, in order to confuse people, divide them against one another, and generally mess with their heads.

God's behavior can't really be explained any other way. If he was "testing" us, why? It's just a game he's created, and turning the existence of the universe into a test for humans makes god a self-serving egomaniac, bent on being worshipped and followed by the lowly clay figures on his pet planet. He doesn't look like much more than a child in a sandbox.

Some theists might say, in response to all this, that such ground should not be tread upon so critically because "we aren't meant to understand the mind of god." Well, sure. Why trust a being whose motivations don't make sense, whose ideologies are unclear, who takes it upon himself do dictate morality while making immoral choices, and who acts as unpredictably as a tyrant? If it's the case that we can't understand god and have no business trying, god is as untrustworthy as a tantruming toddler, and may as well be considered either a relic from humanity's babyhood, or an enemy.

It's true that people can be terroristic psychopaths too, of course. People murder, rape, pillage, hate, and destroy. We're often stupid, we're usually too highly emotional for our own good, and we're so incredibly obsessed with our own species that we've practically set Earth's ecosystems on a crash course, destination: obliteration and extinction. We're not that great, as a species. Those traits which make god untrustworthy are the same traits that make humans untrustworthy when humans adopt them.

It's easy to wonder: why trust either, then? God sucks, and people suck. How depressing. Fortunately, an important difference exists between people and their gods. At least in Abrahamic religions, god is unchanging and fundamental. He doesn't grow or develop. He's eternal. Judging by what he allows to happen on earth, as well as the atrocities he instigated in the Bible, he is, then, eternally bad.

Humans, on the other hand, are not eternal. We grow, we change, we learn, we replicate, and we die. We educate ourselves and our children. We philosophize. Most of us want, and strive, to be better for most of our lives. We desperately seek meaning, making morality intrinsic to us. And while we often end up on the wrong track, we keep trying. We can hope for ourselves, and our ability to nurture our world and one another. With god, though, there's no hope, because he's supposedly already "perfect." A change, even for the better, would negate his "perfection."

On top of that, most Abrahamic religious believers include an end-of-the-world scenario in their belief system, showing that their god not only isn't treating people well in the present, but plans to destroy us all, believers and non-believers alike, against our will in the ultimate genocide. Whether it's a man, a woman, a child, or an eternally powerful god doing this to us, one thing is sure: this being is not to be trusted.

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