What a Christian believes in
Churches tell people to believe in a male god who, though lacking anything like human spermatozoa, managed to impregnate a human female and have himself born in human form in order to have himself killed to induce himself to forgive some but not all humans for committing the sins he knew they would commit because he made them that way, and although he claims to love them all, he has condemned most of them to eternal torture in the hell he created for the purpose.
He has also demanded that in order to make him happy, people would have to kill each other in astonishing numbers through wars and crusades and pogroms and inquisitions and holocausts, even though his sacred books forbade killing, while also describing the constant killing that he has ordered his followers to do, and has done a lot of it himself.
He has also ruled that in order to please him best, people must give up most of the pleasures that his creation makes available to them, and even subject themselves to painful ones.
He has ordered people to resist innumerable temptations — while making them constitutionally unable to do so.
Though claiming to be above petty egotism, he demands incessant praise night and day, and constant abjectly respectful credit for everything, everywhere, even though the world he claims to have created has both bad and good elements. By mistake, apparently, this allegedly infallible being created a devil who successfully opposes him, despite his equally allegedly almighty power to eliminate every kind of devilry.
A Christian is one who has suppressed his own common sense enough to believe all these absurdities, and may actively help in their continual promulgation, and who is sycophantic enough to define as “bliss” an eternity of singing praises to flatter the insatiable ego of this vain, cruel, jealous, erratic, amazingly vindictive deity who seems to embody the worst qualities of the human male. The grateful deceased thus takes part in a postmortem occupation that would normally entertain one for perhaps 20 minutes or a half hour, but which, extended into eternity, would constitute torture; yet this is considered something to look forward to, when in fact the total unconsciousness of our inevitable nonexistence is far more preferable.
FFRF Life Member Barbara G. Walker is a researcher, lecturer and author of 24 books on comparative religion, history, mythology, symbolism, mineral lore, knitwear design, the tarot, the I Ching, a collection of original Feminist Fairy Tales, an autobiography, a novel, and two essay collections: Man Made God and Belief and Unbelief. Her Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has been in print since 1983 and was named Book of the Year by the London Times
He has also demanded that in order to make him happy, people would have to kill each other in astonishing numbers through wars and crusades and pogroms and inquisitions and holocausts, even though his sacred books forbade killing, while also describing the constant killing that he has ordered his followers to do, and has done a lot of it himself.
He has also ruled that in order to please him best, people must give up most of the pleasures that his creation makes available to them, and even subject themselves to painful ones.
He has ordered people to resist innumerable temptations — while making them constitutionally unable to do so.
Though claiming to be above petty egotism, he demands incessant praise night and day, and constant abjectly respectful credit for everything, everywhere, even though the world he claims to have created has both bad and good elements. By mistake, apparently, this allegedly infallible being created a devil who successfully opposes him, despite his equally allegedly almighty power to eliminate every kind of devilry.
A Christian is one who has suppressed his own common sense enough to believe all these absurdities, and may actively help in their continual promulgation, and who is sycophantic enough to define as “bliss” an eternity of singing praises to flatter the insatiable ego of this vain, cruel, jealous, erratic, amazingly vindictive deity who seems to embody the worst qualities of the human male. The grateful deceased thus takes part in a postmortem occupation that would normally entertain one for perhaps 20 minutes or a half hour, but which, extended into eternity, would constitute torture; yet this is considered something to look forward to, when in fact the total unconsciousness of our inevitable nonexistence is far more preferable.
FFRF Life Member Barbara G. Walker is a researcher, lecturer and author of 24 books on comparative religion, history, mythology, symbolism, mineral lore, knitwear design, the tarot, the I Ching, a collection of original Feminist Fairy Tales, an autobiography, a novel, and two essay collections: Man Made God and Belief and Unbelief. Her Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has been in print since 1983 and was named Book of the Year by the London Times
