Blasphemous ideas -2000

What follows is two separate notes I scribbled in a hurry (in the summer of 2000) to explain my current view of god. I’m pretty sure most people would consider what I have to say extremely blasphemous, but the idea has sort of imposed itself. I don’t try to impose it on anybody …
If I’m wrong then I will probably burn in hell forever and if I’m right then my fate might not be very different either. Yet I don’t lose a moment of sleep over it. I’ve had no reason to become paranoid so far. …….
…. As I said, this view of god has imposed itself, but I know that my presentation is neither original nor particularly insightful. To me it’s all just plain obvious, but I’m happy to listen to any arguments that might refute it and present a better idea. ….
Here goes:
First note: "What if god thrives on both the pain/suffering and the joy experienced by all creatures? ….
Do I believe in satan? No — I never really believed in the existence of such a thing …. To me, satan is simply one aspect of god. It’s not a creation of god in the same way we are, though perhaps it can take possession of the mind of a created being. The aspect of satan can be a useful tool as god uses it in different ways to inflict the pain on man and beast that is his ecstasy or to draw maximum pleasure from the joys also experienced by man and beast. God can also use the concept of satan to make us fear because that fear is also one of his great sources of pleasure. If we could completely stop all pain and suffering and fear we would undermine god’s very existence — but of course there is no way we could do that. Yet if god were really a good, loving god as we were led to believe, that is exactly what he would want to do — relieve all beings (including animals, plants and whatever else is conscious on some level) of suffering, fear and pain. But look at how the world we know is designed: the fear and the pain are built in — violence, death, destruction and chaos, conflict — it’s all totally ingrained from the start. One being has to kill, destroy another in order to be able to survive. And isn’t there both fear and pain involved? Doesn’t the antelope fear and suffer when the lion pounces on it and tears at its throat? It’s designed that way. That is god’s nature. But if he had natural life evolve to the point where it produced us, maybe he wanted to — no, had to — bring in elements of uncertainty. I believe there is unpredictability — even for god, and he needs it. Or maybe there are many gods and the uncertainty/unpredictability arises from that. I find it hard, though, to think of god as not one but many — because I grew up believing in a single god. So I think, anyway, that there might be a chance for us to change god and {for him to be} happy with that because he needs the excitement of not knowing what comes next. I’m making god seem very human but this is because I can only describe him in human terms — no human being can really do it otherwise anyway. My conclusion is that god is most certainly unworthy of worship — though I’m sure he likes people to worship him just like Hitler and Stalin … (etc.) liked to be worshipped."
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Second note (from a message to a friend): "….
….. My doubts about god come from the way I see nature, and that cannot be explained by the idea of a "fall of man": I cannot believe that a truly good, loving god as I understand it designed a world where animals and even (some) plants have to tear others to shreds in order to live, where thousands of different species of parasites can only exist by sucking another being’s blood or harming it in other ways, where there are always fights to determine who is to dominate whom, where some are always expelled from a group and often hunted down and killed, where a male lion, for example, always kills the offspring of a new mate who lost her previous mate, the father of those cubs, where…. I could go on and on almost endlessly, just giving examples of totally unnecessary cruelty and violence in nature because it was designed that way — without ever getting to the cruelty of man, which, of course, is all the worse because he understands it. But could primitive man, for example, really help being cruel? Now we can, to some extent, and hopefully more and more so. Many people seem to believe god created the world but cannot be held responsible for the way it turned out. Not me. Did he really have to design it that way? So why didn’t he design us in such a way that we wouldn’t even be able to perceive this as cruel? Maybe he mainly designed us in such a way that we could develop our minds and hearts ad infinitum, so that he himself could evolve through us. I think he is indeed evolving through us, and I hope we can someday go so far as to completely change his original design of this world to accommodate the sensitivities that, with god, we are developing over time (too slowly, unfortunately). And we might be just one of many intelligent races in the universe — who knows — all going in that direction, more or less. Perhaps I choose to believe this simply because I need to find hope whereas the belief that god is really good and evil all rolled into one forever offers no hope at all. Of course, the god who created this world could easily fool us forever without us being able to find out for sure. No one can tell me god couldn’t pull this off, to make people believe he was all good and the bad was all their fault and that of some fictitious satan, so that they would worship him faithfully, which of course would tickle him pink. We should remember Gödel’s theorem showing that all finite systems are incomplete and their full truth is unknowable from within them."