Facebook is rather holy today. This morning, a friend posted this:
I love it when distractions that Satan would want to use to hinder our worship are overcome by the Spirit of God! I am thankful for people willing to be obedient and lead us in worship despite their fears, sadness, grief, or any of the other emotions that I know were at work this morning!
Fear, sadness, and grief aren't terrible emotions and there are appropriate times for all three. I'm not a psychologist, but I don't think it's healthy to view one's normal human feelings of sadness and grief as tools of Satan.
I'm scared half the time — of life, of the world. I have grief. Is this evil at work in me? I have nothing against the person who posted this — in fact, I consider her a dear friend — but these ideas are ridiculous and alarming.
I scrolled more and saw another posting, this one from a gay man with completely opposite political, religious, and social perspectives as the first friend:
The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing bigots, misogynists, and homophobes that they were patriotic Christians.
The people who wrote these posts are in opposite camps, politically and socially. The first is a minister's wife and the second is a middle-aged homo. While I value them both, I'm a little bugged that both of them used the trick of devil-blaming to reduce and oversimplify the complexities of human nature.
The devil doesn't make anyone sad or fearful. The devil doesn't convince anyone to be anything. Why isn't this obvious? Humans do things — good and bad. The devil is just an old, antiquated story on which we dump all our guilt, shame, and personal responsibility.
I think the devil is great. If Lucifer exists, so must his dogmatic counterpart, a being that created a world and people to live in it — who was omniscient enough to foresee Eve's stunt in the Garden of Eden and know that we would fall to sin, destined to suffer. Why did he not create a way to prevent her slip-up? Why did he create his creation with the built-in impulse to sin? God is invariably responsible for human sin and therefore must be responsible for evil. To punish us for this thing he made us with is sadistic and cruel. Why do Christians want to believe in such a being? Why worship one?
None of this is new. The logical fallacy of a benevolent god has been presented by people who can think critically for thousands of years. Since before Christ, in fact. See below.
God cannot be benevolent. If god is omniscient and omnipotent, he sits in Heaven and watches things like the Holocaust and AIDS and permits them — or worse, generates them. If he truly made all things, he cannot be a hands-off observer — that would be abandonment — and be benevolent. By the assumed logic of those who consider themselves blessed (white, middle-class Christians), god elects to give some the comforts of privilege while giving others (starving Black children in Africa dying of AIDS) lives of misery and pain. This is actually a classic conundrum with Biblical precedent. The story of Job and the problem of suffering (sometimes called "the problem of evil") leads to just one logical conclusion: If god exists, he is evil.
I've only written about the Christian god, the god of Abraham, but this applies to any being believed to be both omniscient and omnipotent. If your god is all-knowing and all-powerful — if he or she made the world, runs the world, sustains the world, or in some way directs natural events — they are invariably responsible for unspeakable cruelty and suffering, so they must be unspeakably cruel.
Compared to such a being, the devil should be celebrated. If Christian lore is believed, god will presumably wage holy war against the cosmic undergod in the final days. I know who I'm rooting for.
Everything I've written in this post is simple logic, so I'm baffled that a well-educated minister's wife and well-educated Christian gay man haven't worked it out. I imagine they choose to accept this cognitive dissonance in order to continue believing in a world run by something good rather than a world run by nothing. If a world run by nothing sounds more appealing to you than worshipping and praying to a cruel cosmic dictator, don't worry, you're just sane.
Atheism isn't the natural state of humans — we are, by default, religious — but for me, it's the kinder reality than believing all suffering is permitted or, worse, willed into existence by something powerful enough to stop it. I'd rather believe in nothing over that.
I'm not trying to recruit anyone to atheism — that's what this post is for. But Satan, if you're real, keep fighting the good fight.
Love, Beastly
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