God’s in Ur Brainz, Rearranging Ur Neurons
After lurking for a while, I decided to dive in to the Religion and Spirituality section of the Yahoo Answers website. A few of the questions are pretty good, but most of them are not really questions or are intended to raise the ire of a particular group.
I came across a “question” today, in which a young woman beseeches people to pray for her sister, who is going to church for the first time tonight. Ostensibly, the holy spirit will come into her “heart” and her sister will be saved.
Basically, she’s asking people to send telepathic messages to an all-powerful, invisible god in the hope that said god will change his mind about this girl’s path, send an invisible messenger into her body, and rearrange her invisible soul such that she now believes that the same invisible god sent part of himself to earth in human form only to let himself be killed, and then to resurrect himself three days later as penance for original sin committed 6,000 years ago by a man and woman swindled by a talking snake.
Christian theology basically teaches us that right now, standing next to us are invisible angels and demons fighting over our very souls. I’m wondering what they’re doing, exactly. Do both of them have their hands inside of my brain, actively rearranging neurons that control my emotions and feelings about god? Is my soul a tough guy, able to fend for himself against ninja demons? If I’m in a saloon, is there a spiritual, parallel saloon where the angels and demons are like throwing each other through the plate glass window, or sliding the kind of nerdy angel down the bar until he hits the angel barkeep who is innocently standing at the end?
Why should someone have to “believe” anyway, as if a leap of faith is good measure of human focus. Is god so worried about his deposit on the place that he has to throw humans into everlasting torment because we leave a few beer cans on the floor? I can’t think of a stupider and more needlessly complicated way for a creation to have gone south, and for a supposedly all-powerful god to let man redeem himself. If god were a contestant on the Gong-Show, he would have been the first jackass out of the joint.
i didn’t know we were still using ’swindled’.
Comment by ania — 8 July, 2008 @ 08:12
You know, Jake, I feel like your post is trying to swindle me. How swindled am I if I believe that Big G is a swindler swindling some woman into swindling random internet folks into swindling the Big Swindler in the Sky to swindle said woman’s sister into believing in the Holy Swindle? I just can’t swindle that.
But here’s the real swindle: faith. Faith is believing in something for which you have no proof, and for which no proof can ever be found. Faith, then, is something portrayed as good. Is it? Have we been swindled into thinking that that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) an open question?
Comment by Dave — 8 July, 2008 @ 21:24