pez@pyuxn.UUCP (Paul Zimmerman) (08/20/85)
An article responding to an article about how faith is the idiotic part of religious thinking said that Christianity was not based on faith, but on factual testimony. Chris Robertson responded to that article by asking questions about how reliable that testimony could really be judged to be. To be sure, what we are judging is not testimony, but accounts of testimony. Accounts written by people whose purpose was to spread this religion in any way possible. Chris goes on to discuss another possibility of the scenario behind the birth of Christianity. His hypothesis concerns ``an all-powerful Evil Deity who created us so He could watch us suffer.'' He deliberately resurrected Jesus (or maybe just fooled people into thinking this) with the sole purpose of deceiving people into whorshiping Him. They pray to Him expecting help and goodness, but all they get is suffering. A select few are given help as intermittent reinforcement for the believers, but most of the real help is actually given to evil people, so that God's reign of evil can be expanded further through their actions. This can be shown to be statistically valid. The hypothesis concludes by saying that the ``good'' afterlife promised by the Damager-God is no better than this life, or perhaps it is even worse or non-existent, intensifying God's pleasure in deceiving and humiliating us. The strange thing about this is that Chris goes on to say ``Of course I don't believe this, but it is logically consistent with the facts.'' I must ask you then, Chris, why you don't believe it? To be sure you are correct, it is logically consistent with the facts. Still you say that both scenarios are possible (``good'' God and ``bad'' God) but ``no one wants to believe in the Evil Deity. This is saddest of all, because a hypothesis should not be rejected when the evidence supports it just because you don't want to believe it. Yet this is what Christians and other God whorshipers do each time they decide to ignore the facts and fall for the Damager-God's deceptive line. The atheists ignore the facts, too, when they see the evidence and choose not to believe. They claim that ``the evidence could point just as much to an evil God as to a good one, so with that much ambiguity there must not be a God.'' They work from the assumption that a God must be a good God, and in so doing ignore the presence of an evil God, choosing to believe there is none at all. Unfortunately, there is one, and we're stuck with Him. -- Paul Zimmerman - AT&T Bell Laboratories pyuxn!pez