Note: Wherever I use the word “God,” you can put in the word “Gods” if you believe in more than one God. That way I’ll keep the text simple.
An idea about what Christianity (and, in a larger sense, religion in The Western World™) has become was developed in 2005 in the Book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by sociologist Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. In the book they came up with five different beliefs that, put together, they classified as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. They are as follows:
- A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. In other words, some being went out of His/Her/Their way to create a reality that included the world that we inhabit, specifically created humanity to be intelligent, and has a stake in how things turn out (otherwise said God wouldn’t be watching over us Humans). A clockwork God, in other words, who nevertheless has a certain outcome in mind for every person (see below).
- God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other. In short, a sort of morality is involved – a sort of reality which aims at a sort of equality that doesn’t risk harming the world’s inhabitants beyond what they can immediately transcend without training, ordeal, or extended suffering. You can find the basics of this in most religions, even the more warlike ones – even they’ll tell you to be nice, good and fair to your fellow believers and to those who stand a decent chance at becoming fellow believers.
- The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. This obviously is supposed to come about by being moral in relationship to others, but the implication is that you will have a running impression of how moral you are being by both your level of happiness and how good you feel about yourself.
- God need not be particularly involved in one’s life except when there’s a problem to be resolved. This would seem to imply that God is only needed when there is a problem that needs to be solved; otherwise God may go about his own business without concern about what’s goin on on earth. There are certain things that need to be fixed (such as when someone’s feeling good about themselves goes against the happiness of certain other peoples), that’s what God is for.
- Good people go to heaven when they die. Salvation by works, in a way that’s supposed to happen across religious lines. The good go to heaven, the evil go to hell, and everyone has the idea that they’re on the side of good (and thus will make it to heaven). This, of course, leads to the idea that practically everyone goes to heaven when they die; any thoughts about who end up going to Hell are quieted and pushed aside.
I won’t focus on this too much, as to be fair one CAN believe the above things and actually be a good Christian – just remember that faith and works are both important (James 2:17 and Galatians 2:16 do not place opposites in contradiction but instead state different views of the same reality – Both faith AND works are needed), that feeling good about one’s self isn’t specifically a feeling but an outcome of a life’s work on one’s self, and that God may indeed leave you alone for years…and, in such cases, a soul long willing to stand in such a state and believe will find themselves with great honor upon entering heaven.
Instead, I’ll focus on the atheists and non-theists (atheists have created intellectual bulwarks, non-theists have just set the question aside and live as if the idea of God/The Gods is a non-issue). Because, if you ask me, their issue isn’t necessarily the nonexistence of God(s) (whether by necessity or by dismissal), but what they expect the world to be like were there a God/Gods in heaven watching over mankind.
Thing is, there are a lot of people who “don’t believe in God,” and their desires about how such a God would rule (from what I’ve been able to figure out) tend to work as corollaries to the above list:
- God exists, and their handiwork is pretty much a self-running affair for the most part.
- Were humans to align their souls to the way the world is, the world would automatically work its way to Utopia, rewarding the good for being good from the beginning and punishing the evil for being evil from the beginning.
- Your happiness is directly measured to the degree that your life matches what God wish for you. conversely, the group of negative emotions signifies that your heart is misaligned with what God had in mind for you from the beginning.
- The universe actively shepherds people through to their destinations. The good can’t help but be good for the most part, but once someone aligns themself with evil (whether by active choice, inheritance, one action too many or a change in things sadly unforeseen) they’re locked into being incompetency and powerless evil until they die, and the Gods intervene either to keep a person good or to consign an evil person to their fate (ie to fix a mistake in the determined path of the person whose life is being interfered with).
- The good, having been properly shepherded, enter into heaven as they expect; those defined as evil go into hell with every sort of surprise and shock, only to suffer soul death moments later with their mistakes and choices staring them in the face for their last moments (which last forever as, it turns out, Roko’s Basilisk proves true and lives to punish the evil wrongdoers).
In short, the sort of God they wish to believe in would have created a powder-puff world where things always turn out the way they’re supposed to turn out with good preemptively rewarded and evil preemptively punished from its earliest thought (or expression). And, naturally, they know what is good and what is evil – which is both convenient and a source of frustration (convenient because THEIR deities would be the ones in control, of course, and a source of frustration because the world has yet to work perfectly like they wish it to).
Naturally, I have issues.
I love how convenient God would have to be for these people to believe in such beings. It’s like part of the bargain would have to be that reality would need to be remade so as to suit the person fully before said God would be believed by them. Everything they saw as good would be rewarded by God, and everything (and everyone) they saw as evil would be punished by God. Not only that, but the powers above you would have to change with you or stay still whenever you stayed still. The person who wishes to believe in such a God would, of course, mark their story as a “then I was wrong, now I am right” to make said God seemingly always the way they are – have to create SOMETHING rock-like to put your beliefs in, even if the change to fit your convenience.
They then state that, because things are not like they wish them to be, they don’t believe in God.
Which, of course, leads me to this question:
What if the Heavenly Worlds are nothing like what you think they are?
Again too many atheists and non-theists think that “because the spiritual world doesn’t act like it’s supposed to, I can’t believe it’s real,” and I think they’re missing the point about other worlds: That God doesn’t HAVE to conform to your idea of how things should be.
Yes, God may be deeply interested in you and want you to live your best life. And yes, maybe if the world were exactly like you believe it should look like right now, it would be a Utopia. After all, many systems have the formulation of “As Above, So Below” in some way (with the idea that the above world is a perfected version of the world below, working in ways that the world below either fights against, ignores or doesn’t know about).
But…
There is one thing about God that I’ve come to appreciate, and it’s this: If you worship a God (or a set of Gods), you’d better be ready to obey all their dictates. Their lesser and more obscures ones, as well as the greater and more obvious ones. And it may be the obscure rules that you get judged on, as the greater and more obvious rules will easily be followed. So:
- If your set of Gods want to be put to bed at around 2:45pm for their afternoon nap and awakened at 5pm for evening activities, you’d better give them their afternoon nap time.
- If your God wants you to bow down in the direction of the main worship building 3-5 times a day, you do that.
- If your God tells you that you have to spend a day doing little or nothing and avoid the use of electricity as much as possible, you spend that day following those dictates, including limiting your travels to within the limits of a wire hung high over your head.
And there is another thing that needs to be understood: What if God, in full wisdom, is willing to take the time that it takes for some people to come around and self correct, complete with seeing their sins and coming to regret them. Lots of people would like to see sins punished immediately with there being no allowance for regret or possibility of rehabilitation, and to be honest I can see their point. Still, if the God (or Gods) you worship decide they wish to take their time for you to either return or to confirm your alienation it’s their choice to wait to decide. It’s also entirely possible they’ve already made their choice and that there are other considerations which must be made during that time – and that, for those considerations to be worked through, things must be allowed to go on as they have.
That’s probably the one thing needed to understand about the Spirit Realm: God’s agenda is God’s agenda and God’s alone. The specific agenda may mesh with some people’s desires, cut in opposition to other’s desires and maybe have nothing to do with most others; but the agenda is there and needs to be dealt with.
Which means reality goes on as it goes, not as your average atheist/non-theist wishes it would go.
And yes, it means that sins and crimes seemingly go unpunished, that good people are punished for the crime of being good while the evil are rewarded for being evil, and even when justice gets done it’s always seemingly at a reduced scale that, while it may give satisfaction to a specific wronged person, does little or nothing to the wronging party.
I’m not going to say things are fair. Just that things are as they are, and – outside of the not-necessarily-occasional time when things just go out of control – fairness can make its way to the world, sometimes in surprising ways.
Just almost never in the way your average Atheist/Non-theist thinks it should.
finished 24 December 2023.
Here’s something to consider:
If your world always gives you what you want and calls it justice, you may just be heading to hell and not know it.
Sorry I'm Late… 