The Immorality of the Missionary's Position

It's been nearly a year since the shits stopped hitting my fan and it's time I finally got back to updating this, given I pay for this place and have a right to use it.

What brought about this decision? A debate I had on Facebook these last couple of days, one that has done nothing but strengthen my belief that religion is a blight on human decency.

My position was this; God is all knowing, or so Christians claim, and so must logically know whether we will 'find him'. By extension he must be creating people whom he knows he will condemn to the lake of fire upon death. This contradicts any notion of his benevolence.

However, what really stuck in my craw and got me typing was this;

I made the case that a child could be raped by a pastor and, as a direct result of that abuse, lose their faith in God and the church, turning atheist because they cannot reconcile a loving God with one who would sit by as a child was abused, a completely understandable consequence and one I suspect is all too common given the pervasiveness of paedophiles within the Church. According to Christian doctrine this child will be cast into the lake of fire upon death as they didn't repent. On the other hand, the pastor could later repent their actions and be forgiven, being granted Heaven upon their death.

This struck me as patently unjust and contrary to all logic and reason. Not to the former Irish prison missionary I was debating, oh no! His response was that all people are sinners, including the child, and if the child didn't later repent for his own sins he was deserving of God's judgement and an eternity in a lake of fire, and the pastor was deserving of forgiveness if he repented.

I said that I would never hold against a person the results of such abuse, I would certainly never eternally punish them for losing faith in me for not helping. His response? That I was just trying to justify sin! No, if I was there to have stopped the rape and save the child I would have done so, then he might have repented and be spared the lake of fire. That's what makes most humans better than God!

He also tried the tired old argument that the child could later repent, even though in my scenario I had explicitly stated that they didn't due to the trauma they'd faced robbing them of their faith. How could the child repent if God had already foreseen that they wouldn't? Logically they can't.

Think about this...

God knew before he created the earth that the following would happen.

1. The child would be raped

2. The child would, as a result, lose his faith

3. The child would, at God's behest, be eternally tortured

Where in that scenario is God not a complete and absolute psychopath?

If we use an analogy, imagine the following;

A father has a child. That child is sexually abused in full sight of the father, who stands by and does nothing as the child pleads with him to stop the attacker. As a result of this the child loses all faith and respect for his father, they grow apart and the child never speaks to him again, even hating him.

Who would you blame, the father or the child? What if the father, because his child rejected him, decided to later kidnap and submit him to intense and agonising torture for not loving him?

It would seem that according to the complete whackjob I was debating this would be an entirely just outcome, because God punishes all crimes. No, he doesn't. We've already established that the pastor suffers no punishment because he repented. He wasn't even obliged to make reparation with his victim, only to apologise to God. God wasn't the victim, God was the passive voyeur of the crime!

It is encounters such as this online that drive my antitheism. It takes a very sick and perverse sense of morality to defend a God who is so sadistic that they would punish a victim under these circumstances.

I'm aware that many Christians who may read this will argue the cockwomble I was debating is wrong. Is he? I've seen similar sentiments from other Christians, some of whom even admit it is troubling. Christians don't seem to ever agree on doctrine, that's why there's thousands of denominations all claiming the others are doing it wrong.

Let it be said, though, that if this prison missionary is right God is a vicious, capricious monster who cares not one jot for us but only for his own self serving need to have his arse kissed. The fact that these people spout such poisonous rhetoric without so much as a scrap of evidence their God exists leads to me to think humanity is infected with a disease, one that only rationality and reason can hope to cure. No amount of apologetic gymnastics and cognitive contortions can change that.