The Spark of Divine Inspiration (or, a Wasted Afternoon on Reddit)#
So I spent a good amount of time replying to this post ↗ on Reddit, like ~2 hours (don’t judge). By the time I finished writing though, the post was removed by them mods T-T. Figured I might as well just post it here since it’s a substantial amount of writing I didn’t want to just chuck away.
Luckily, my browser still kept the cache.
Here was the post. The Gospel According to u/[deleted]#
Change My View: I dont believe in God because the concept is stupid as fuck#
The concept of an all loving God who makes flawed and even evil people and sends them to hell is retarded as fuck. If God knows everything then why would he make people suffer and go to hell. There’s almost no evidence the events in the Bible actually happened besides Jesus being a real person. And, it’s just fucking stupid. It was made by people who didn’t know that women writing weren’t witches, or even how to cure sicknesses. If God’s real, (which im almost 99.99 percent sure he isnt) even then, he isn’t all loving. I was raised as a Christian my whole life but no, it’s stupid as hell.
In all honesty though, I went all Akshually here without regards for the guy’s temper tantrum or the audience at all. It’s really like showing up to a fire-alarm blaze with a copy of Fahrenheit 451 to discuss its literary themes; I’m probably not changing anyone’s views with this rambling text. But anyways, here’s the “you’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole” comment (added section titles for more shazam).
My Humble, 2000-Word Sermon That Nobody Asked For#
tl;dr: religious ideas (God, myths, scripture) evolved as cultural tools that compress moral heuristics, help us coordinate social action, and produce motivating ideals. That doesn’t prove a supernatural God, but it does explain why these ideas persist and why they can be morally useful. If you’re upset about suffering, we’re already doing a lot now with social policies, medicine, ethics, etc, which we didn’t have back then. Suffering is now more of a societal/structural/political issue. And “evil” is probably just an illusion.
Long ass writing, but try to get through.
So, Which ‘God’ Are We Arguing About, Anyway?#
First, a clarification. People mean different things by “God.”
- God-as-person: a supernatural being who intervenes, judges, rewards, punishes.
- God-as-idea: an organizing symbol or ideal (perfection, ultimate love, sacrifice) that cultures use to shape behavior.
If you find (1) implausible, you’re in good company because lots of philosophers and scientists doubt it. But (2) is where human history lives.
Let me be clear here: I’m an atheist. I was raised in a Catholic household, then I got into physics, majored in it, then slowly shed the thought that there is a bearded old man up there that micromanages me, whether I’m masturbating too much and whatnot. What I’ve come to appreciate, though, isn’t that (1) God, but God the concept, the stories. I’ve started to see them the way you’d see The Epic of Gilgamesh, Hamlet, or Harry Potter when I started to read more arts and history, and some prominent thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Jung. And I’ve gotten away with the following.
In my view (not even sure if it’s original, probably more a synthesis of everything I’ve consumed), God is all of the things that separate us from complete “brainless” animals. There’s a reason why the antithesis of God is a chaotic beast (666?); I mean much of the eternal sins are acts of humans only living to follow their animalistic instincts (anger, sloth, sexual drive, etc) without much concern of the greater whole and their own humanity.
Have you ever seen a beaver sacrifice itself for an idea? Humans have; we know at least someone has… like Jesus (the person). And we probably need self-sacrificing individuals every once in a while.
These stories encode these abstract ideas, and they abso-fucking-lutely matter.
Religion: The Ultimate Zip File for Morality#
We humans have to compress information to pass down each generation. If it’s easier to hand down bullet lists of things to do and not do for the greater good of oneself/one’s community/us as a species… we probably already have been doing so. But writing is a recent invention, and no one has got the time for that. It’s also boring, and kids would ask “why the heck would we blindly follow these rules?”.
With stories you could just tell a short parable and compress so much that it would take a creative genius to breakdown what each aspect of it means.
I suspect Jesus the person or maybe the writers of John (or some other followers in John’s school of thought) knew the importance of stories; I mean, “I am the word”.
Before science or psychology, myth was our compression algorithm, a way to store complex knowledge about behavior, ethics, and survival in a narrative we could remember easily (David Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral argues exactly this: Religions are group-level adaptations).
Hell Isn’t Fire and Brimstone, It’s Just You Being an Asshole#
Calling theists stupid for inventing Hell is like calling architects stupid for inventing doors, both are responses to a problem (keeping things out). Just because a tool was misused doesn’t mean the concept never had use.
Hell is probably more like the natural consequence of a life lived in complete self-absorption (your “animalistic instincts”). It’s the isolation you choose, the judgement of others, etc.
And there’s a reason why Jesus is a story that sticks in many civilizations across time. It’s hard for even humans to highly prize humble sacrifice only out of love. It’s hard for us to prize sacrificing our needs now to trade with a better future yet we should always do. Going to college, saving money, eating healthy, exercising, working hard, etc. are all modern forms of the sacrifices we make now for a better future. It’s hard to do that without some sort of motivating ideal that prizes self-sacrifice.
”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.#
And “Word” here means Logos (Greek), meaning something like a “rational structure, a sort of pattern”.
This is Spinoza’s entire thing. His Deus sive Natura (“God or Nature”). For Spinoza, God is the “structure.” God isn’t a person who makes the rules; God is the rules. God is the sum total of reality, including us.
Now we can see the problem of “evil” through his lens as well, which he thought is just a human illusion. A tsunami is just nature doing its thing. For him, God didn’t “make” evil people. “Evil” is a label you put on people whose actions are a consequence of the universe’s “structure”, or a deterministic, causal chain. You’re just mad at reality, at physics, at the universe, not “God”.
The Existential Carrot on a Stick#
You can also see that God the concept serves as an ideal (God as perfection, ultimate love & sacrifice, ultimate father & a fair judge) that humans may never reach.
Because, as it turns out, we humans need some sort of objective that we can’t reach in order to move/do something. Ideals give us purpose. Ideals are useful fiction that coordinate social behaviors.
Which is why Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is actually him being terrified that we actually lack the higher purpose to move forward, and we’ve replaced true God with a facade, religions as a virtue signaling tool (his solution was the Übermensch, which is a man that creates his own values wihtout having to follow preexisting ideals).
Why Everyone Thinks God is a Dude in the Clouds#
My point is, there’s a reason it’s easy for people to conflate the two: God as the “magical bearded man up there”, and God as… that something else. I think it’s precisely because it’s so abstract and deep and all over the place that it’s just easier for everyone to read it in a practical lens and can wrongly walk away with that “bearded man” thought.
If I had to put all of this into a couple of sentences, it would probably be this: God is humanity, God is the structure to the chaotic nature of… nature. This is one of humanity’s deepest attempts at self-understanding.
The Bible is literally written over millennia by people from all walks of life, by various thinkers, philosophers, schools of thought, all compressed into one small pocket-sized book that random kids will call stupid just because they’re angry at their Christian moms.
And we haven’t even gotten to ANY of the other religions, but there are definitely parallels.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, and Qur’an are variations on the same human project trying to encode ethics and meaning through metaphor. I’ve come to appreciate these texts that are artifacts of us humans trying to grapple with such massive existential questions, the texts that helped give us practical purpose & structure (other than wars, etc).
I don’t believe in a God that judges, but I think I understand why humans needed one because without a story bigger than ourselves, we lose the ability to act as if anything matters.
Maybe “God” was never the problem, maybe it was just our failure to read him symbolically.