...What I Wondered, sidebar continued:
believers suffer the exact same number of tragedies, joys, accidents, promotions, illnesses and “miracles” as everyone else? When tragedy strikes, why don’t they have a noticeably easier time with it, as the Christian God unequivocally promises? It is at precisely those times when believers most wonder where he’s gone.
Why is it that miracles are always about things that could happen through the natural course of events? Why no miracles to replace lost limbs, for example, say maybe for a devout woman who has young children to care for, and could use at least one arm. Salamanders re-grow extremities all the time; presumably a mother could benefit from it more. Yet we only see “miracles” in things that already occur naturally, or in cases where the results are out-of-sight or ambiguous.
Why was God so mean—evil, even—in the Old Testament? If he is the very essence of love and wisdom, and if he “changes not,” why did he send his favorites on bloody rampages to capture slaves? Why is slavery consistently supported throughout the entire Bible, if God is the essence of love and the Bible his his word? If he is generous and loving (in contradiction to the Old Testament), then why did he murder so many people at the drop of a pin, slaughter animals needlessly and even kill innocent pets?
Why does the biblical description of God sound exactly like all the other gods of the day? Like all the others, he’s a “jealous” and vindictive God. Like all the others, he rewards us with eternal life if we flatter him enough, or tortures us forever if we don’t. Almost all the other gods of the day had virgin births, and Christianity was not the first to have resurrections. Given this, together with the failure of biblical promises, why should we not see this religion as the same as all the others just like it? (More on this in the main article.) How can we say the others are foolish, but this one is genuine, when its source, the Bible, contains hundreds of direct contradictions and is scientifically less accurate than other writings of the day that preceded it? To set itself apart from the others as genuine, wouldn’t it need to distinguish itself as such, in some way?
If I ever made fun of a preacher for any reason, my parents would never kill me for doing it, and they certainly wouldn’t be so cruel as to send a bear to eat me alive. Why would God do this to 42 children? Doesn’t that make us better than God? How can this be?
Then, as I matured, questions of a more fundamental nature arose. Why did God permit sin? Why didn’t he endow us with sufficient brain power and foresight that we would make the wise choices in the first place, using our own free will? We are smart enough not to walk in front of a train of our own free will; why not smart enough to detect and avoid more complex dangers, using our own free will? Why would we be punished for not being smart enough, when he’s the one who decided how much wisdom and insight to give us in the first place?
How is it “free will” if we have two choices and one is to be tortured to death (or tortured forever)? When I was robbed at gunpoint, I later told friends, “I had no choice, but to hand over my wallet.”
How can Adam and Eve’s crime make everybody else guilty? And if you want to accept that, then how can one person pay for the crimes of everybody? This is totally foreign to intelligent people; no one can “stand in” for the punishment of a criminal, it doesn’t make sense. Such a notion would make the law itself the important thing, rather than justice. And if we can bend the rule about one man standing in for everybody's punishment, then why can’t we bend the rule to simply apply Mercy?: “Forget it, I forgive you?” THAT kind of loving god-behavior would have spared billions of humans immeasurable misery—and to think, they weren’t even the ones who started it. We're told God is the very essence of love and wisdom. If we must pay, why couldn’t it be a lighter sentence? Why the same horrible penalty for every infraction, no matter how tiny or how egregious? Or why couldn’t God just change his mind? When his predictions don’t come true, we’re told he changed his mind!
If God cares for nothing more than the care and keeping of the creatures he created, then why does it take him millennia to work out a plan, with all that love, wisdom and power at his disposal? And if the wages of sin is death, and people have already died because of their sins, why will this loving-beyond-comprehension God bring those people back to life, just so he can torture them to death again? (And that would be if they're lucky; the prevailing Christian view is that he’ll torture them for trillions and trillions of billions of years, never allowing them to escape the pain through death.)
If God wants nothing more than to save us, then why is he so cryptic? Why all the the mystery? Is he just playing games with our lives? Why wouldn’t he just reveal himself more fully, like it’s claimed he did before, instead of this apparent attitude of “I told you once, and if you still don’t get it, tough!” If this is really all about just saving us from this predicament, and not some kind of “reality TV” game he’s using to trip up most of the people, then why not just be real about it? Why not speak directly to us, as any parent would do? Think about it. When the fantastical claims are already prone to be doubted, simply by sheer reason and logic, wouldn’t non-cryptic communication be all the more important? Aren’t cryptic writings, signs and mental impressions a rather lame way to communicate (for someone sincerely wanting to get a message out), precisely when clear communication is called for?
I’ve heard all the answers proffered for these questions (I grew up with them), but the contrived answers only defy simple logic and raise more questions. On the face of it, it all looks preposterous. In any other areas of our lives, anything that problematic would be tossed in a New York minute. What, if anything, makes Christianity not preposterous? Is there some kind of clear revelation from the world of the supernatural that offers compelling evidence? Does the Bible stand head and shoulders above anything humans could produce? Was it beyond the ken of humans to write at the time? Can we show that prayers are actually answered? Can that be the evidence that this religion which looks as foolish as all the others just like it is actually for real? What about prophecy? Can fulfilled prophecies rescue the Bible
All of this is discussed in the main article.
—LH
