First of all, let me preface this by saying that I don't even know if you're real any more. Honestly, I guess I never "knew", but I sure thought I could and did know. I felt emotions, saw connections, and had a community. Sure, when I was a kid most of it consisted of "I am so bad and the fact that G-d loves me anyway is nothing less than a miracle.", but it was something. Now, I don't know if there's anything beyond human need and imagination.
The things that happened to me in your name were awful. And I'm not sure I buy the explanation that I've been offered: that you value free will so much that you will allow humans to do anything they want to each other without any interference from you. I mean, if that's true, dude, you have one hell of a free-will fetish. And the amount of evil allowed by that requires a hell of an explanation. Especially since that wasn't your MO in the bible. I mean, you intervened all over the place back then. Sending BEARS to eat children who teased your prophet?? Dude. That was over the top, no? Although, to be fair, if some fucking bears had shown up to eat Sherry Mattheson when she kept pushing my head in the toilet when I was in fourth grade, I would have thought that was awesome at the time.
New Testament You didn't really slow down any. Water into wine, miraculous healings all over the place, tongues of fire, and REAL speaking in other languages, none of that stupid emotional babbling that the Pentecostals claim is the Holy Ghost; you were bending the laws of reality all the time then. What happened? You can't spare one lousy smiting for a pedophile? (Okay, granted, given the scope of the problem, you'd probably be spending hours and hours smiting all over the damned place, but still!) And besides, you're the one who claimed that if anyone put a stumbling block in the way of a child it would be better that they be drowned in the sea with a millstone hung around their neck. Pardon me for wanting to see some millstones.
The real problem I have is with prayer. We're told to do it. Do it all the time. Pray without ceasing. And we're told, specifically, BY YOU, NO LESS, to ask for what we want and what we need. We are told specifically to ask to be healed. And yet, people are still DYING because they asked to be healed and you didn't do it. What about that fish and serpent, bread and stone thing that Jesus brought up?
I've read through the whole bible eight times so far. There's a lot of confusing crap in there. I've asked for guidance, prayed for guidance, and studied more. I've talked to Muslims too. There's a whole lot of confusing crap in their scriptures. It's almost like they were written by finite, fallible human beings over centuries in different places with different agendas, and then ascribed to you instead of, you know, being inerrant and all.
I think pretty much every group of people in every place and time have had a concept of a divine creator and ruler. And a whole lot of them claim that they, and only they, have a lead on The Truth! That's just not possible. It's not possible for every single little splinter group of humanity to have the one and only truth that everyone, everywhere, everywhen has to believe or suffer the consequences. I guess it's kind of like the Highlander: There can be only one! (or none, I suppose none is a logical option.) And what a person believes is correlated most strongly with the community one is born into. That's a damned inefficient way to disseminate The Truth, innit? Of course, then we have war. Brutally efficient way to distribute The Truth, but kinda opposed to any kind of decency at all.
(to be continued)
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