“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.” — Albert Einstein
There are two types of Christianity that I can stand.
One is the Christianity that clearly, unequivocally, does not believe in a personal God. Those who follow this Christianity think that God is wholly and completely a human construction that symbolizes things like “order” or “love” or something similar. But it’s not those things itself, it’s not bound to any book, it’s not someone it would ever really make sense to talk to except as a ritual that brings you personal comfort but that you know does absolute jack-squat in the “real world.”
The “God” of these Christians is nothing more than the sense of community they get when they hang out, and the moral code that they craft from a ground that is STRICTLY man-made, as there is no personal God to dictate this moral code to them. Nothing is “just so” — their morality is completely and wholly and thoroughly a product of the thought of human beings.
This kind of Christian may sound outlandish, but when I talk to Christians sometimes it seems like one is always trying to dismiss God by saying that He doesn’t matter. Therefore I should tolerate Him.
But the frustrating thing is that these same Christians will turn right back around behind my back and tell other people that — hey, wait a second, God is real, God is wonderful, and we NEED to follow Him.
No, no, no, no, no no, no, no. You don’t get to have it both ways.
Either God is completely a fiction, completely a figment of everyone’s imagination — just a big, grand metaphor — OR God is a real external entity people dictating to people that they need to follow.
It’s not complicated. People have found ways to make it seem complicated, but it’s not, and what we need right now is clarity.
If you do not believe in a personal God — if you think God is completely a human construction — then say it. Unequivocally. I mean, it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that lack of clarity on this point can be bloody confusing (and even Einstein, when he was unequivocally clear on this point, still has people who are trying to misconstrue what he meant by “God”).
I call myself an “atheist” partly because, frankly, that kind of so-called “God” just looks like ornamentation to me and causes too much damn confusion.
Be straightforward. Be up front.
There’s another Christianity that I can actually stand, though it is still a bit nauseating. In this Christianity, adherents think there is a God but don’t know how this God operates, why, or even, for sure, what religion he favors more, if any. It’s a God so securely behind the curtain that it might as well not even exist. You’ve got that God behind the curtain, so that’s irritating and problematic sometimes — but I don’t mind so much because you don’t know jack squat about this supposed God, so it’s presence or absence has no bearing on our day-to-day affairs.
And you’re clear about it. Clear as in, “Yeah, I think there’s probably a God, but I don’t know jack squat about said God, so it has no impact on my life.” Problematic, still, but I can stand it.
But…most Christians are SO unclear and maddeningly inconsistent about this. Ugh. Like, when I ask a Christian about hell, they’ll almost invariably say, “Well, that’s up to God.” And yet they’ll walk out the door and tell anyone who will believe it that they need to come to God to be “saved.”
No.
Again, you don’t get to have it both ways. If you can’t know God’s judgment, then you can’t not know God’s judgment one moment and try to preach it the next. You gotta be consistent. Stop telling people they should be saved if you’re not sure about heaven or hell or who is saved. Just shut up about things that you’re so insistent to me that you don’t know about.
That’s what makes conversations with so many Christians so frustrating. They’ll hide behind “I don’t knows” about God and I’ll look like a dufus when I keep arguing because they’re in steady-on denial. I know they’re in denial because the MOMENT my back is turned I can hear them talking about God’s qualities in intricate detail, and telling people they need to be saved, and so on.
Just be clear. Just tell the world that you don’t know jack-squat about God, that for all you know no one else does, and be clear on the logically following fact that the best we can do is disregard concepts of God (since we don’t know them) in our day-to-day decisions.
This ESPECIALLY goes for apologists try to do a vanishing act with God (which, to be fair, is easy enough, as God is conveniently nonexistent in the first place) and challenge whether we can know anything about God at all (including God’s supposed nonexistence), and do all that to defend, behind the atheists’ backs, a God who supposedly likes rainbows and killing people in floods and all kinds of outlandish stuff.
Don’t do that.
If you don’t think there is a personal, conscious God, or if you think it exists but think (as people seem to tell me) that you know absolutely jack-squat about it, then be clear about that; stop obfuscating and trying to do sleight of hand to defend the notion that you or other Christians or your Bible have the inside info on God. You can’t have it both ways. Be up front.
Like Einstein said here:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Or here:
“I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. … It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all.”
Einstein didn’t identify as an atheist, so he differs from me in that respect. But he was absolutely clear that he was not defending some half-baked religious conception of God, nor was he endorsing a personal God — God, to him, was a metaphor for his admiration of “the structure of the world.”
Christians today need to learn from his clarity and stop with the double-timing doublespeak.
Seriously.
Thanks for reading.