I agree that the essence of the Gospels is what we ultimately wish to hear. In these scriptures we recognise a natural yearning for God. It is what God made us for.
Another, far graver issue with this:
Back in #8670 you listed a few things which you say that the Gospels state but which human beings are averse to hearing:
Love your enemies
Do good to those who hate you
Turn the other cheek
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter Heaven.
Sell everything you have, give it to the poor and follow me
Now you're saying the opposite in agreeing that the essence of the Gospels (I assume by this you mean my reference to the fact that the Gospels state that if only you believe the correct set of implausible and improbable claims, you won't die but will live for ever) is something that human beings naturally
do want to hear. Which is it? It has to be either one or the other. You're flip-flopping back and forth between one stance and its opposite - and very far from for the first time, at that.
The nub of the argument here is that you have erected in your mind an indefeasible God - a God whose existence is taken so much as a given that there is absolutely no scenario or situation which would make you pause for thought and go: "Hmmmm ... wait a minute ... maybe I'd better rethink this whole business." This is nowhere more clearly played out than in the current, ongoing tragedy happening to your friend Becky and her family. I submit that a brain tumour, a stroke, three bouts of pneumonia, profound mental damage and physical disability in a fairly young wife and mother of five is enough for any rational person to
at the very least very seriously question the traditional notion of an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful deity in charge of the universe and all that happens within it. Those two scenarios cannot be made to jibe with each other without evacuating the concepts of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence of practically all meaning. For the utterly determined theist, however, God is the Procrustean bed (look it up, if necessary) into which absolutely everything is made to fit, either by being stretched or by being trimmed down as deemed necessary. There is literally no state of affairs into which God cannot be crowbarred no matter how wretched or hideous. Everything, absolutely anything and everything, has to be made to fit your pre-desired template. Plane crashes. Praise the Lord, it was God's will. Everybody barbecues, children included, in an explosive fireball of burning aviation fuel and molten plastic and metal. Praise the Lord, it was God's will - he has a plan, he knows best, and his ways are not our ways. Oh, no, wait, there's one survivor after all. Praise the Lord, it's a miracle! But 414 other people have just di - shhhhh. It's a miracle, so shut up and praise the Lord. Again.
I think most people, Alan, have woken up to the fact that anybody who operates in this manner has disappeared over the horizon in search of the farther shores of utter lunacy, the lunacy of asking for prayers petitioning a "good" God not to torment someone who already has a brain tumour a bit more - can you
really not see how this sounds to others? At all? It may have been bluehillside recently (not entirely sure so apologies if wrong) who said that it's often difficult for atheists not to come across as "that guy" (i.e. a tactless and insensitive arsehole) on these occasions of desperate tragedy, but frankly, some of the comments on the relevant thread, thanking God that the brain tumour and the stroke and the three lots of pneumonia and the coma aren't worse than they
already are, come across quite simply as deranged. The old ones are the best, in tunes and jokes, so they say, and the simple questions are also the best - do you think a God who could be swayed by petitionary prayer at all could have been prayed to a little bit earlier in the sequence of events not to have inflicted or at least allowed a brain tumour in the first instance? Yes? No? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? There is a mewling servility here, a feeble and pathetic begging at table for the least little stray crumb, a fawning, cringing "Don't hit me again, master ..." of the whipped dog which is unworthy of self-respecting adults. It's taking the old concept of making a virtue of necessity and turning it up to 11 - making the most egregious and Byzantine horrors, the foulest and most despicable brutality and degradation, somehow all part of the smoothly-running plan of the dear Lord, who knows best and whose ways are not our ways yadda yadda yadda.
You assert (as usual ...) that your beliefs are not based on desire, want, wish and need, but to me there could scarcely be a clearer or more obvious case of somebody who is absolutely desperate to believe in something no matter what, no matter what the evidence of their senses tells them, no matter how much their emotions, their sense of fairness, dignity and justice are outraged in ways utterly inconsistent with what they want to believe in. Some theists are fond of asserting that atheists supposedly have a "God-shaped hole" that they're always vainly trying to fill with other things; but if there are any God-shaped holes knocking around the world, they're to be found not in atheists but in theists like you who take the obscenities of Baroque cruelty, hideous disease, injustice and unfairness in the world around them and still insist that their God is driving the ship. It's so huge and so needy a hole that you'll even take the genocide of millions, bone cancer in kids, natural disasters and every known kind of pain, misery, suffering, cruelty, injustice, degradation and defeat just to plug it.
It's one of the hallmarks of the scientific endeavour that a good theory should be defeasible. In other words, scientists in constructing a theory are obliged to come up with all the ways in which they could be proven wrong and to think of all the evidence which would falsify the theory - to show their model to be wrong in order to clear it away, chuck it in the bin and move on to a greater, a better, a clearer understanding of what stuff is and how it works. Now, you may very well say that you don't treat your God as a scientific theory (not least because it isn't - at the very best it's a hypothesis, and that's a stretch in itself), but I think it's a worthy goal to go to your grave having had a life spent trying to have as many true beliefs about the world as possible and as few false ones as possible. People who abandon any pretence of this - you, in short - are intensely and immensely disturbing individuals, not least because we know what the results are when people cut themselves loose of all ties to evidentialism.
