There’s a couple major issues with the concept of “god” that I can’t really reconcile in my mind that prevent me from believing in god, or at least the one from the bible:
1. Free will. First of all, god cannot be all powerful, all knowing, created the universe and everything in it down to the finest detail including us, AND we have free will. The existence of an omnipotent god that created everything precludes the idea that mortals have free will and agency, because that would mean we have the power to defy god’s will by our own actions. Which would make god not omnipotent, it’s a logical paradox.
Think of Laplace’s demon or whatever, if god created everything and knows what’s gonna happen that means we live in a purely deterministic world, which means from the moment we’re born til the moment we die we have no free will, we’re all just puppets playing out god’s play. What is the point of that?
I’m not sure I even believe in free will under natural laws, let alone supernatural ones. The power of prayer is also impossible under these rules, because again it implies that mortals have the power to compel an omnipotent being to action, i.e. nonsense. So the bible says prayer works, but that can’t be true.
2. Faith. The idea is that you must have faith that god exists and he will offer you salvation, but you will never be presented any evidence he exists. Your faith is a test to see if you’re worthy to enter heaven. There’s a number of contradictions to this.
First of all, what about Jesus’ apostles that witnessed his miracles? They weren’t given the option to have faith because they saw it for themselves. They were basically given a direct free pass to heaven, because anyone who witnessed those miracles would not still deny him thus they required no faith. I for one have never seen a miracle.
Also some people claim to “feel” god or that god speaks to them directly and the bible makes some mention of this. If that were true again no faith is required, you already heard it straight from the horse’s mouth. So that doesn’t make sense either. Why would god favor some with his voice or presence directly and not others?
3. Eternal life, heaven, hell. The whole concept of eternal life as described in the bible seems like a nightmare. Say you make it to heaven but everyone else in your life who you loved and who made your life matter were sinners and ended up in hell forever. Would you be happy with that? Normally no, but Jesus had an answer for this.
From what I recall a couple jėws were asking him what if they had a wife who died, then remarried and that wife died, and so on a few more times, which wife would they end up with in heaven? Something to that effect. He basically answered that when you and your wives reached heaven you would have no more desire or other worldly considerations, you wouldn’t be married and your children aren’t your children, they’re god’s children. You’d have no relationship with any of these people anymore, because the very concept of relations would be meaningless in heaven.
So heaven essentially means that you rejoin god and become part of him in a way to live eternally in a state of perpetual grace. So what does that really mean? Do you still have thoughts? Do you still have things to do or experiences? Would you have any individuality at all?
Presumably not, you won’t have a body anymore or any desires or any individual attachments to anything or anyone besides god, so there’s nothing left to do except be perfect and sit in your perfect kingdom with god forever. Eternal life and eternal boredom, except you won’t feel bored because you won’t even be “you” anymore, not really. Doesn’t that sound like a fuckin nightmare?
And my problem with hell goes back to the first point, why is anyone condemned to hell when god created them for nothing else except the express purpose TO go to hell? Seems kinda shitty.
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Anyway those are the broader points of how I feel about it, there’s all kinds of other inconsistencies and absurdities when you play out most of the different points of this belief system to their natural conclusion. Plus the obvious lack of any actual evidence of any higher power, that goes without saying.
This isn’t really meant for anyone I just started typing my thoughts out to kinda organize them in my own head.