On the topic of Christianity: Angels and Lucifer

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This is a personal comment, ruveyn. Some of the perspectives you have revealed about yourself and your general disregard and disrespect you have indicated for people in other cultures and your willingness to exterminate them for what you believe to be justifiable reasons has horrified me. But, as here, you are getting me very angry with you for making it impossible to disagree with or dislike you. You are giving me a very tough time.

Your innate respect for all humans somehow keeps burrowing out to the surface and I wish you would permit it more often to sit in your lap and lick your face. As we both know, logic and good sense are frequently imprisoned by insane cultural and traditional chains and it is no simple thing to break those bonds.

Understanding is abstract and mental. Compassion is visceral and emotional. Since 9/11/2001 I have closed down compassion for anyone not in my family. I can be polite to non-hostile neutrals, but I have ceased to "care" about them. Compassion is weakness and I have strengthened myself. I have constructed a hard heart inside a harder exterior. Being an Aspie, I figured out how to do this algorithmically. By the numbers, by the book. I wrote my own book. I have replaced Compassion with Justice. And let Justice be done even though the sky falls.

In the meantime, be thankful I am not God. I would be a harsh and just God with no mercy for the wicked. I would not send my Only Begotten Son to bleed for the unworthy. F*ck'em. Let them burn.

And yes. I do love the human race for what it is. We are the Baddest, Smartest Apes in The Monkey House. We are wired to Get Even. God made His biggest mistake when He made Man. And eventually we will kill Him.

ruveyn

You cannot be harsher than reality. I understand why things are the way they are and am insane enough to not be entirely happy with it. But insofar as killing God is concerned, I'm with you all the way.

Metaphysics grows like science though. I'd imagine that the kind of God people know, as literal or as a figure of speech, reflects largely on what they've experienced life. Much like the people of the ancient world saw a character as calous as the hardships of those times, people now see him in a variety of other ways - some will just see a friend, some will still see someone who holds them to morality as being his primary characteristic, some will see one who died for all their sins (when people talk about scapegoating and accountability, its more realistically "try your hardest but if you come up short your still ok"), others see a God who's perpetually guided humanity through an intellectual journey that we're all on - that even nontheists are a deliberate part of and are likely protagonists themselves.

The one thing that is truly astounding though in a lot of senses is that - for all our shortcommings as a race, that society exists at all in its current form. It seems like it could only be a little bit better but could easily be far worse, that's cause for much optimism and wonder (I believe that to be true even as black as I paint it).

I think my own personal background goes like this - I grew up in the church but, being into a lot of things like metal, alternative, gaining a lot of feeling and joy out of things that were seen for seemingly arbitrary reasons as counter to Christian conformity, I slowly drifted. As I got older, especially as I had some major changes in my life around 19 or 20 I went all out, took it life and death seriously, to figure out the bottom-line of reality as best I could because I knew that I needed to - just for the sake of moving on and being an even remotely successful adult (AS was a huge weight around my neck and I felt like I needed to be extroardinary in so many ways to so much as break even and keep my head above water). During the midst of that search - 9/11 happened. I hadn't been much into politics until that time, had my parties who I'd been vaguely in favor of, but during this time I was also leaning hard on atheism or at least agnosticism in that direction and something both blew my mind and made me equally nauseous - in reaction to that event and the way things needed to be handled based on the machievellian and very basic/animistic things I kept seeing over and over that were cheapening IMO the broad-based human quality of life (I saw this in my peers, in adults, in the customs all around me, and yes HUGELY in the terrorists - people all trying to inflict delusions on people); the most bizarre thing was happening - I really would have thought that the secularists would have the most obvious lucid/intelligent answers and that the great pumpkin worshippers would be wackaloons; turned out not only kind of the opposite way around but full opposite. It turned out that the people who needed to make up a deity (IMO at that time) because they were too weak to face the possibility of unanswered death - were more than willing to face evil and the people who I always thought were free thinkers and were the epitomy of where it was at and where humanity should go - they were far more focused on fighting the people who fought evil rather than fighting the evil itself. To me it seemed like the secularists and the like were in a horrid degree of denial about everything, enough to attack the hand who was defending them and make up the worst kinds of libel and lies and it seemed like there was an ever-ready market to buy this psychosis, not even because there was any truth to it - much more that they likely new it was all self-delusion but that they had made the bargain with themselves that they'd much rather cling to a rose-colored fantasy about a peaceful little world where nothing bad could happen to this country, almost as if its existence were something metaphysical (again, the largely nonreligious engaging in huge magical thinking regarding politics and national security) - it scared the hell out of me. Whether it was Michael Moore, weather it was the people declaring that Bush would declare defcom 1 and lock us down under a police state, or remove term limits, the people who'd deliberately grab three words and make up their own context to place them in; whether they liked the guy, hated the guy, hated what he wore, hated what he religiously stood for - I really thought the issues that we were facing were deadly serious, serious enough that to see adults much my senior acting like complete fools left me VERY depressed. I really thought that the natural human urge, if we were truly anything better than apes, would be to aim for truth rather than label the facts based on who was presenting them and what they thought of the person.

I know now that, that's all politics. But the way huge delusions would grab people, things that a second of thought could dispell in a heartbeat - people who could hold great jobs, be brilliant engineers, doctors, lawyers, do things that I couldn't even do; things like that I think almost acted as a subtle proof that - if there were truly no God or Devil, stupidity on this grand of scale couldn't exist. Very anecdotal but, it kept me from slitting my wrists out of sheer disgust (not only over that - I had many issues, mainly that who I was, what I'd accomplished, what I aimed for, meant nothing to people as compared to that somehow I just metaphysically looked wrong, vibed wrong, didn't have the right..err...bisishwah... to even be able to date, had friends but still had people guessing I was ret*d or a huge loser who didn't know me - it was torture in that sense from all sides).

I guess part of that is why I can easily see our race as pitiful - we have a great gift, ie. existence - and the norm is not only to waste it but to waste it in the most obscene ways. Whether its the youth thing that you have to be borderline criminal to be seen as worthy, as an adult that the measures are largely still off-point, style being valued over substance, the fact that we'll run ourselves into the ground while no one notices; the fact that you can't even be real with many people because they're so corrupt - that's something I've never been able to understand. Hell, I got the s--- kicked out of me through childhood strictly because I didn't have an ounce of that in me, let alone I couldn't understand the first thing about why people had inherent cruelty. Even as a devout nonvictim in my early 20's, absolutely dead-set on making sure that I handled the world around me and dictated (through using *they're* social strong-man tactics), many people were still absolutely determined to make sure that if I pushed - they'd pull, I pull - they push, ie. make sure I'm completely ineffective and even go so far as inventing misunderstandings as much as possible (no, my social skills and ability to read people were good enough to know what was going on and they were openly insulting my intelligence). The goodness of a person, what they have in them, what's at heart - when it comes to trying to date someone now - I find that I'm as broken as anyone else and externals still matter; that's at least been one of many factors that knocked me off the horse so to speak and brought me around to the reality that much of human stupidity is largely involuntary.


All that said, and sorry about the rambling, I'll likely always be addressing my beliefs, testing them, reevaluating them, I firmly believe that unless I've heard every argument and thought all of them through that I'm giving in to the same form of death other people do - ie. setting a comfort zone and living by it until I'm in the ground. Because of that I'll likely be on that knife's edge between theism and atheism for the rest of my life, looking at both, see what both have and where both miss the mark. Right now I see equal possibility, the only reason why I phrase it that way. I doubt anything grand scale enough will clarify that in my lifetime or likely ever on this earth but, I guess at the end of the day - like you mentioned - we do all have to live at piece with ourselves, our unique wirings, our experiences and how our inner worlds have been shaped by them.

That very long comment makes clear that you, like many of us here, have difficulty finding pieces of the puzzle that fit and work together. I am encouraged in that you are permitting yourself room to have and accept doubts about any simple solutions. Too many of us merely swallow the concepts manufactured out of history and tradition the way we buy a car or a radio or any other gadget and figure it fits well enough and deny any other possibility. I am careful not to permit any solutions take me in completely and understand that the discomfort of doubt is the stimulation that keeps me alive and alert. But, for me at least, the fantasies of formal religions are really much too naive to possess any sensible theoretical utility. They are obviously cut from the cloth of trying to fit the universe into our totally limited social systems and the universe is obviously too big a monster to wear such ill fitting clothing. Religions are clearly constructed to exert control over people to the ends of its leaders and this is completely distasteful to a free mind that must accommodate what scientific discovery has brought to the table. Having an open mind is very uncomfortable but it keeps you on your guard and alive and, to me, that is much of what life is about.