Does God Think Exactly Like You?

When a troublesome verse from the Bible is brought up in conversation, I always find it amusing that the usual Christian defense revolves around how you can't take every word literally, and each individual must interpret God's word.

Basically what those Christians are saying is, "God thinks how I think."

If you ask a Christian how their God could banish a wonderful Jewish individual, who has given his life to helping others, to hell for being born into a household that taught him Judaism was the correct religion, they'll often respond, "Well, I believe that God will handle such cases appropriately and not make any good person suffer in the afterlife."

In other words, "That does seem harsh, and even though God says he'll be harsh to all non-believers, I choose to believe He'll reward those who led decent lives."

To that, I retort, "Then why doesn't He say as much!?"

If you are going to believe in God, then why don't you take Him at His word? It's because His word is sometimes difficult to stomach, isn't it? Yet you continue to believe!

Instead of picking a deity and then pretending he thinks exactly the way you do, why don't you just pick a deity that really does think like you!

Or, better yet, why don't you consider the fact that there may not be a god!

I know, you'd really miss your friends and they'd probably kick you out of the slow-pitch softball league.

But shouldn't you make a choice? Because unless you believe everything in the Bible, aren't you really disrespecting your god. You wouldn't approach an author/philosopher and say, "I really like a lot of what you say, but you didn't really mean what you wrote in chapter 5, did you?"

"Of course I did. I wouldn't have written the chapter had I not meant every word. Who writes things they don't mean!?"

"No, you were just testing us to make sure we still followed your teachings even though you sometimes say a bunch of crazy stuff, because you don't actually believe all that crazy stuff. You only believe the things I already believed before I read your book."

To most Christians, God is like a Barbie Doll. They place Him on a pedestal and dress him up in their favorite beliefs. "He'll be good to people who were kind on earth, regardless of their religion. And He'll also be good to people who were only bad because they had rough childhoods. After all, it's not fair that some people were born without the opportunity to blossom into decent human beings. But individuals who were born into good homes, yet still grow up to do bad things, will rot in hell! Like preppies who commit murder. Preppies who commit murder will burn for all of eternity. Unless those preppies only killed because they had a mental deficiency. In that case, God will take care of them. But if people are born rich, don't have any mental deficiencies, yet still go on to kill - then they will rot in hell! But hell won't be too terribly bad, because nobody's perfect."

While it would be pretty cool if a deity went through a similar thought process, it ain't the one in the Bible.