God Damn

I’ve seen it happen among so many raised within the evangelist institutions. They let their faith slip away unnoticed and unrealized like grains of sand in an hour glass. So often they don’t even realize that it’s happening until there is nothing left. They sit on the rooftops staring at the sky with great skepticism and wonder, questioning whether or not they were meant to be here and wondering why God hasn’t answered their prayers. Questions arise as do many answers, but with each answer there appear more and more questions. A lot of us were led into thinking that we needed faith as our foundation, as if that we were supposed to believe that some deity would wipe away our tears and help us in times of need in the same way we believe that the ground won’t disappear beneath our feet. It’s pretty fucking ridiculous when it all comes down to it. Why must we rely on an invisible man (or woman) for guidance and comfort? The fact of the matter is that we don’t need to.

We’re brought up to believe that God is this all loving and all powerful being with free will yet perfectly good. However, if this was true wouldn’t life contain these same key elements? The way I see it we really need to consider that God is either, all loving and not all powerful, or God is all powerful and not all loving. Perhaps God is pure evil and we’ve been led to believe that he’s good. Why not? This scenario plays out with people so often, so why not the creator of the universe? If we find dishonesty and deception within the appearance and actions of doctors, cops, lawyers, politicians and our own neighbors isn’t it possible that we can find these same elements in God? Rational thinking has only led me to believe that God is either a.) non-existent or b.) a sadistic deity hell-bent on watching us suffer. This sounds like a very pessimistic view on life, but we must realize the harsh reality that our world is overflowing with a great deal of evil and death, therefore it holds true that if such a situation were created by God, then God must be evil.

In nature we see that all things die. Whether or not we’d like to admit it all living things given enough time will cease to exist. Often times, especially among mammals, our survival is based on the death of another living thing. An excellent example would be a hunter whom kills a deer. The hunter needs to eat and therefore must kill the deer to ensure that his life is sustained. It’s a disgusting cycle, in order to sustain our own lives we must destroy another. So if there is in fact a God he has us working on a very morbid system if I may say so myself. If what is said about God’s powers are true and not some blasphemous exaggeration then he is fully capable of stopping all natural disasters, disease, famine and war, yet he chooses not to. Why on earth would such a loving God allow his children to suffer so greatly? I recall being greatly confused by this when I was a young boy and when I asked those who claimed to possess such great wisdom and knowledge of God and his wonderful plan and they always gave me the same answer, “The LORD works in mysterious ways.” Even at the age of eight I knew that this answer was complete bullshit and a way for the clergy to say, “I don’t know,” without actually having to use those words.

These realizations became clear to me on September 11, 2001 after the destruction of the World Trade Center. I recall the moment so vividly, it was a Tuesday and I was in eighth grade. I stood in the middle of the street watching the smoke go over my neighborhood and realized how polluted this world truly was with pain and despair and realized that life is so closely tied to death that we often fail to recognize it. As I watched the footage of people jumping from the buildings and showers of glass and metal raining down upon pedestrians I knew that God had intentionally created life with the sole purpose of watching us suffer. Given the natural order of things it would be impossible to say that a good God exists. He is nothing more than a kid on an ant hill with a magnifying glass and we are his ants. This is all assuming that God does in fact exist, which is still unclear to the vast majority of us at this point, but if he does exist there is no doubt in my mind that he is an immoral being completely absent of kindness or compassion.

As negative and heart breaking as this may or may not seem, once we accept these state affairs we can get off our knees and live life to the fullest. Death, no matter what the circumstances, will always succeed in the end and we must use this new found knowledge to make sure that we don’t waste our time with menial tasks and bullshit that will reduce the quality of life for us and our loved ones. Only by eliminating our dependence on God can we truly throw down the crutches and be free. Life is too short to be caught in the web of Jesus Christ or any other ridiculous dogmatic belief system that tries to strike fear into the hearts of people with the idea of an invisible man waiting to judge us based on our works and good deeds or our sins of the past. Life is too short to be living in fear of a God who needs us more than we need him.