Who Are You To Worship God?

[TheRedneckProfessor]

“Who are you to question god?  Who do you think you are that you would judge Him?  You are a mere human—fallen, sinful, a disgusting, miserable wretch.  Who are you to question your Creator, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who loved you so much that He gave His only Son to die for you and save you from your sins?  You should be falling at His feet and begging Him for mercy because you are a sinner and the wages of sin is death.  God could crush you in a second and not think twice about it.  The only reason He hasn’t already done so is because He wants to give you as many chances as possible to repent of your sins and escape the flames of Hell.  Yet you sit there, with that smug look on your face, and in your arrogance, you question God?  How dare you!  Who do you think you are?”

 

Your God said that you would know them by their fruit.  By what fruit is your God known?  Who am I to question God?  I am a man.  I am a moral, ethical human being.  I am an individual who would see justice done, who would see evil prevented, and who would see the weak and powerless defended.  I may be only one man, but I am not alone. 

 

I am a man gifted with an insatiable intellectual curiosity—a man whose quest for truth will not be satisfied with anything less than absolute, indisputable proof.  Possessing the ability for logical, objective reason, coupled with the capacity for abstract thought, I am a man who can examine the evidence as it is placed before me and draw sound, well-balanced conclusions.  For this reason, and this reason alone, your God condemns me to Hell.  He doesn’t condemn me because I have murdered, raped, or stolen; He is willing to forgive these treacheries.  But for the sin of using my own free will to seek the truth rather than seeking first the kingdom of God, He is willing to cast me into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

 

What sort of father would take his son into a candy store and say, “Son, you can have anything in this store that you want; but if you don’t choose what I want you to choose, I will beat you until you are black, red, and blue”?  What would we, as a society, think of the father who would commit such emotional blackmail?  Would the bile not rise in our throats?  Would we not rejoice when the police and the child welfare agents removed the child from such a tyrannical monster?  And if you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more so the Father who is in Heaven?  Why should your God’s behavior be excused, simply because He is your Heavenly Father?  His actions are no different and neither are His motivations.  So, why do you recoil when I call Him into question?  Why are so quick to join your God in His vengeful damnation of my eternal soul in eternal Hellfire and Brimstone?

 

I am a man who has seen first hand in Northern Ireland the hatred one man can have for another, simply because the one sees your God through the eyes of a Catholic and the other sees Him with Protestant eyes.  I have seen the kneecapped legs, felt the terrifying rumble in the streets as pipe bombs exploded nearby.  But the evil I felt was not that of bigotry; it was that of indifference.

 

I am a man who has walked through the archway of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland and felt the evil that is still just as potent, just as palpable today, as it was when the smoke rising from the crematoria chimneys still snowed ash down upon the inmates.  The evil I felt there was not the evil of the murderous Nazi regime, nor the evil of collaboration, either forced or willing, of the Poles and Jews, in the extermination of more than a million and a half human beings.  The evil I felt there was the evil of ambivalence.

 

I am a man who has looked into the eyes of a young Bosnian girl who escaped from a rape camp during the genocide in her country during the 1990s.  I saw in her eyes the horror that she, along with more than 50,000 other Bosnian women and young girls, some as young as 10 years old, experienced as they were systematically brutalized by Serbian soldiers who had come to cleanse their country of the Muslim hoards in the name of your God.  The evil she spoke of was not the wickedness of men, but the benign indifference of God.

 

And there is the crux of it; your God sees the atrocities committed against the innocents of this world and He does nothing to stop it.  Was He able to stop the troubles in Northern Ireland but not willing to?  Was He willing to prevent the Holocaust, but not able?  Was He both able and willing to keep 10-year-old Bosnian girls from being brutalized by drunken soldiers to the point that the majority of them took their own lives just to escape the abject horror their lives had become?

 

Then WHY did it happen?

 

Do you want to tell me that your God refuses to intervene because He doesn't want to interfere with free will?  If so, you are telling me that your God would rather send me to hell than to provide me with the proof of Himself that I needed when I was in my darkest hour.  You are also admitting that your God would rather allow the free will of 10-year-old girls to be violated in the most brutal of ways, simply so that He doesn't have to interfere with the horrific intentions of evil men.

 

Do you still wish to argue that your God has a plan for everybody?  Was His plan for those 10-year-old Bosnian girls that they be gang raped on a nightly basis?  If so, then His plans are atrocious!  Did He have different plans for those girls, but His plans were ruined by the evilness of men?  If so, then His plans are appalling!  Isn't it more logical to conclude that He simply doesn't have plans for anybody?

 

Your God tells you that if you fail to prevent evil from happening, then you are guilty of the same evil through the sin of your omission.  He tells you that if you see a 10-year-old girl being raped but do not try to stop it, you are as guilty as the rapist.  Yet, He, Himself, did nothing for the Bosnian girls, or the Jews of Europe, or the people of Northern Ireland.  Human trafficking, child molestation, famine, pestilence, wars and rumors of wars—these define the world we live in, and your God does NOTHING!  Yet He still blames you for the sin of omission.  There is a word for that kind of mentality, a term that we use to describe that kind of behavior.  The word is “hypocrisy”.  That is correct, I have just called your God out as a hypocrite.

 

No God, who displays such cavalier behavior, such ruthless ambivalence, should be considered divine; just as no person, who justifies such a God, should be considered human.

 

So let me ask you this: Who are you that you would worship God?  Who are you that you would fall at the feet of that menacing demon and call Him good, and call Him righteous?  Who do you think you are that you should attempt to force, manipulate, and cajole the rest of us into joining you upon the altar of such a despicable fiend?  What does it say about your character that you would use the Word of that insidious tyrant as the basis of your perceptions of the world in which you live?  What does it say about you, as a person, that you would use the Hate of that maniacal despot to pass judgment upon the people around you?  I do not need you to try to convince me of who you think your God is; I've already seen Him for a liar and a hypocrite.  I want you to try to convince me, and yourself, that you are something other than what we both know you are. 

 

Who am I that I would question God?  I am a Man.  Tell me who you are that you would worship Him.

[MerryG]

Bravo! Bravo!

 

I've had similar thoughts but never could have put them so eloquently.

[sdelsolray]

Much better -- separate paragraphs are a good thing.

 

Your writing is alluring and meaningful.  Lotsa questions, mostly rhetorical and cleverly aimed directly at theists, which is a limited audience around here.

 

Good job.

[ExCBooster]

Well, I think they're so rare because they're afraid of catching rational thought cooties. Unlike the opposite gender cooties, they still haven't developed a cootie shot for those...

[RipVanWinkle]

I don't question God. I question men who created a mythical god. A god who must have never eaten from the tree of good and evil. since he seems to only know evil in the last analysis. If there is a real God,

which I doubt, he/she/it would not mind my questions. bill

[Sybaris]

That all makes sense to us that practice rational thought but the fundy would just pull out the Almighty Caveat and dismiss it with "we can't know and wouldn't understand Gods rationale".

[GoddessOfWisdom]

Oh. Oh, wow. This is profoundly poignant.

Greatest and humblest respect to you as a writer, sir.

 

This article will be referenced to my family as a VERY LAST RESORT if all gentler means fail. 

 

Thank you.

[★ Citsonga ★]

Very well put!

[Margee]

Do you want to know what I'd like to do with this piece of art you have written Professor? I would like to make a k-zillion copies of it and start handing them out to the world. One of the reasons I still come to visit Ex-c everyday is to read the material that you deep thinkers write. I know I am never alone when I sit here and read, even though I live amongst a world of believers. Do you know how comforting that is to me? It means the world to me, knowing I am not alone in my doubts about the Christian god who I believed in all my life. Thank you for this.

 

Absolutely brilliant!

 

Somebody pin this for newcomers!!

[RipVanWinkle]

TheRedneckProfessor: That was truly great. I could feel your outrage. Free will v. genocide. Great

question. Xtian: Which would you chose? You have to make the choice. Any answer except to remove free

will is a vote for genocide of unimaginable numbers of people. If you choose god, you're saying ok to

genocide.

 

I like this because it turns the so called "simple" choice for salvation on its head. That is, it does to anyone willing to think. Great post. bill

[Denyoz]

“Who are you to question god?  Who do you think you are that you would judge Him?  You are a mere human—fallen, sinful, a disgusting, miserable wretch.  Who are you to question your Creator, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who loved you so much that He gave His only Son to die for you and save you from your sins?  You should be falling at His feet and begging Him for mercy because you are a sinner and the wages of sin is death.  God could crush you in a second and not think twice about it.  The only reason He hasn’t already done so is because He wants to give you as many chances as possible to repent of your sins and escape the flames of Hell.  Yet you sit there, with that smug look on your face, and in your arrogance, you question God?  How dare you!  Who do you think you are?”

 

That first paragraph brought a lump in my throat.  I don't know how many times I heard my dad say this to me each time I would question God's "wisdom".  He would say it exactly like you wrote it, almost word for word.  He died in 2004.  You must have been channelling him, this is amazing.

[Evelyn]

[TheRedneckProfessor]

Do you want to know what I'd like to do with this piece of art you have written Professor? I would like to make a k-zillion copies of it and start handing them out to the world. One of the reasons I still come to visit Ex-c everyday is to read the material that you deep thinkers write. I know I am never alone when I sit here and read, even though I live amongst a world of believers. Do you know how comforting that is to me? It means the world to me, knowing I am not alone in my doubts about the Christian god who I believed in all my life. Thank you for this.

 

Absolutely brilliant!

 

Somebody pin this for newcomers!!

 

You have my permission to do so, Margee.