I often play on the Topix atheist forum, and today, I am reblogging words by Mr. Smartypants from Andover, MN:
Jehovah is presumably omniscient, so he knew at the beginning of time that Adam and Eve would fall prey to temptation, yet he put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden anyways. Also, if he knew ahead of time that they would eat the apple of knowledge, then how could Adam and Eve even have free will in the first place?
(Side note: the apple is representative of knowledge, and ‘Lucifer’ is Latin for ‘bearer of light’. Why is knowledge such a horrible sin in Judeo-Christianity? Is it because smart people realize that the Mighty Oz is nothing more than an image conjured up by the clergyman hiding behind the curtain?)
So, Jehovah banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden forever. Fair enough. However, he basically poisons every human after Adam and Eve with Original sin so that they’re born with one foot in hell the moment they’re born. It wouldn’t be so bad if every human born had signed a consent form, but nobody ever does–they have existence forced upon them.(On top of that, isn’t sin something YOU do of YOUR OWN volition? The idea that Original Sin can be transferred like a disease to non-consenting people seems like a oxymoron.)
On top of that, anybody who’s born with just Original Sin is automatically doomed to eternal torment in Hell, in spite of not asking to be born. Even if your particular denomination of Christianity doesn’t support Original Sin, that doesn’t mitigate things much anyways. He supposedly gave humans free will–not enough free will to cheat death or even levitate, just enough free will to damn yourself to eternal torment.
Jehovah has no sense of proportionality; if the only sin you ever do is steal a piece of penny-candy as a child, you go to the same Hell as Hitler and Stalin and suffer the same torment. On top of that, Jehovah gives no credit for good behavior; if you make up for stealing that piece of penny-candy by spending the rest of your life building hospitals for lepers and doing other good deeds, Jehovah ignores that and focuses only on the one bad thing you did.
And how does he mitigate the Hell which he created in the first place? By some absurd legal fiction in which he sends his kid, who is also himself, to Earth to die horribly on a cross. Talk about the ultimate whipping boy. That, like Original Sin, is based on the absurd idea that sin can be transferred like a disease or a legal contract. To make things worse, he allows billions of people to live their lives totally ignorant of Jesus so that they’re doomed from the moment they’re born. Worst of all, Jehovah knew at the beginning of time which souls would ultimately be doomed to Hell, yet he allowed them to be born in the first place.
Finally, Jehovah never bothered to clarify which of the thousands of denominations of Christianity was the right one, dooming further billions to Hell. Not only that, he sat by and did nothing while Christians were torturing millions to death for heresy and witchcraft, launching bloody Crusades, and committing mass murder against indigenous people.
I really wonder how any decent, ethical person could worship such a cosmic monster. If anybody ever deserves to suffer eternal torment, it’s the cosmic bastard Jehovah himself. It’s a good thing I’m an atheist/Freethinker; if I really thought that such an evil monster existed, I’d probably become a Satanist.
Intelligent, well-thought-out responses are invited, even from True Believers. If your only reply is to threaten damnation, I hereby condemn you to being an idiot…
Nina's Garden 