Tip #79 Examine What You Really Believe
Jun. 9th, 2017 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastNo, I'm not saying you're a secret Christian any more than I appreciate others saying that I'm a secret theist. I am asking you to examine what beliefs would make sense in light of certain actions and motivations. We, the non-believers, do that examination. And, it doesn't always work out like you want.
By analogy, imagine you're new at a job working under one of two supervisors. One supervisor, the supervisor everybody claims is the supervisor, is a great supervisor. This supervisor knows who's being productive, cares to get to know ground-level employees as individuals, plays no favorites and is not susceptible to smarm or flattery. This is the supervisor everybody talks about.
Then, there's the supervisor that everybody seems to respond to. Most everybody is careful to, at any moment, look busy. Your fellow employees actually take this as a priority over productivity. Your fellow employees are so careful to avoid being caught saying something critical or insulting of the supervisor that they even refuse to acknowledge that obvious abuses of power or failures of management would be such abuses or failures if the supervisor did them.
There's the supervisor people claim is real and the supervisor people believe is real. That belief might not be openly stated, even inside their own heads. The behavior only makes sense if they believe that the supervisor is obsessed with the sheerest surface and narcissistic enough to punish people the supervisor catches not believing the supervisor to be good.
We could over-extend this metaphor to the question of if there is a supervisor in the first place. That isn't the point, here. The point is to look at your own behavior and ask yourself if you're acting like God is good or if you're acting like God will punish you if you risk looking at all uncertain in your belief that God is good.
In some ways, this is a repetition of the Evil Jesus tip. That tip refers to your explicit beliefs about God. This tip refers to your behavior.
Are you avoiding contact with those who don't share your particular set of beliefs, outside of attempting to get them to change their beliefs, because iron sharpens iron? Is that the will of a God that wants you to love others or a God that cares more about keeping you under thumb?
Are you constructing theories of morality that allow God to commit any evil and still be called good? Is that the will of a God that wants you to hold to good or of a God that doesn't want you to stray from licking boot?
By analogy, imagine you're new at a job working under one of two supervisors. One supervisor, the supervisor everybody claims is the supervisor, is a great supervisor. This supervisor knows who's being productive, cares to get to know ground-level employees as individuals, plays no favorites and is not susceptible to smarm or flattery. This is the supervisor everybody talks about.
Then, there's the supervisor that everybody seems to respond to. Most everybody is careful to, at any moment, look busy. Your fellow employees actually take this as a priority over productivity. Your fellow employees are so careful to avoid being caught saying something critical or insulting of the supervisor that they even refuse to acknowledge that obvious abuses of power or failures of management would be such abuses or failures if the supervisor did them.
There's the supervisor people claim is real and the supervisor people believe is real. That belief might not be openly stated, even inside their own heads. The behavior only makes sense if they believe that the supervisor is obsessed with the sheerest surface and narcissistic enough to punish people the supervisor catches not believing the supervisor to be good.
We could over-extend this metaphor to the question of if there is a supervisor in the first place. That isn't the point, here. The point is to look at your own behavior and ask yourself if you're acting like God is good or if you're acting like God will punish you if you risk looking at all uncertain in your belief that God is good.
In some ways, this is a repetition of the Evil Jesus tip. That tip refers to your explicit beliefs about God. This tip refers to your behavior.
Are you avoiding contact with those who don't share your particular set of beliefs, outside of attempting to get them to change their beliefs, because iron sharpens iron? Is that the will of a God that wants you to love others or a God that cares more about keeping you under thumb?
Are you constructing theories of morality that allow God to commit any evil and still be called good? Is that the will of a God that wants you to hold to good or of a God that doesn't want you to stray from licking boot?
no subject
Date: 2017-06-10 08:40 pm (UTC)1. Not only is your characterization of how Christianity became the official religion of Rome misstaken, your concept of ethical parameters ignores what you now call the Old Testament. The laws of Ancient Israel were a mixed bag, but they did exist.
2. The same way we judge humans, with the information we have at hand and with standards that acknowledge the effects those actions have. This simultaneous resistance to judging God and insistence that he be called good causes big problems.
In terms of the point if this series see the tips such as "Evil Jesus."
3. Note that I am not a Christian. I don't enter this conversation believing that this is all according to some plan that works out to good or that what a character of God calls good even borders on mildly acceptable. So, this redirect onto hating humanity does not have the effect you likely expect.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-11 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-11 08:38 pm (UTC)No, that last question was pretty clear. You started discussing judgment of God, then you brought in, absent any context to show relevance, the basic notion that humans do bad things.
'
That's redirecting the conversation away from judgment of God and onto hatred of humanity.
You might not use those words. But, that's what it is.