Resenting God

Well, as one who believes that the one and only reality necessarily is natural and godless, I can't actually resent God. But I can object to teaching vulnerable children and adults who are capable of knowing better that they must worship and adore the God described in the various holy books. Must worship ... or else. We know what "or else" means -- depending on the religious variant, it means death on the spot, eventual annihilation, or eternal spinning on the divine rotisserie. Some loving and merciful God, that.

You don't have to read much of those books to be thankful that such a thing doesn't and couldn't exist. (Of course it's all fiction -- the greatest horror story ever told -- but the authors had reasons for telling those stories.) Tens of thousands were killed in God-commanded genocidal biblical wars; individuals, their families, and/or groups were burned to cinders or swallowed up by the earth merely for impudent thoughts and "murmurings," that is, speech acts. (Evidently, murmuring was a pretty serious offense.) If God was in a forgiving mood, he might just give you leprosy for seven days. If you were tempted to wonder why the seed of Aaron had priestly privileges (mostly free chophouse dinners every night) denied to other members of the Chosen, watch your step, especially if that top dog Moses ratted you out. You didn't stand a chance. And you didn't dare bring the Lord incense made from the wrong recipe. It didn't matter how high your rank; that'd be your last shot at making anything for the Almighty. God was rather picky about his aromas. Oh, and you didn't dare touch the Ark of the Covenant, even to keep it from falling in the muck. And as long as we're mentioning things, you'd want to make sure not to gather firewood on Saturday because if you did, God would instruct your friends to stone you to death for desecrating that Sabbath. (Whatever happened to that God?)

For those and the other reasons Christopher Hitchens enumerated in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, thank God there's no God. Who'd want to exist in a universe governed terrifyingly by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, jealous, petulant, moody celestial Kim Jong-un?

And yet if you tune into atheist call-in internet programs, you won't fail to hear one of the patronizing hosts say to a theist on the line something like this: "If you can demonstrate to me that God exists, that will be awesome, dude!" No, not awesome, dude. That would be hell.