Rusting Car Bumper

It's hard to blame what doesn't appear to exist.

I know humans exist.
I know humans who believe in god exist.
I know humans who believe in God from time to time do horrific things.
I know that is can be argued that these horrific things have been *the most* horrif things done by humans.
I know that these same humans do these things in the name of their god.
I know of no evidence of gods.

I do not know of any humans who do horrible things in the name of "no gods."

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

DC

livius drusus

Rima, your version of xianity seems nice enough, but I feel compelled to point out that quoting poetry describing some arbitrarily defined god is not much of an answer to a serious question.

I could answer this with something from Dante, or possibly even ee cummings, but that would add nothing to the discussion, so I will limit myself to telling you that from my perspective, you have no reason to hate or blame God since no such creature exists.

Biff the unclean

I think the problem with this "I hated GOD when I was an atheist" is that the people who are claiming this are both stupid and they are liars. It speaks well of the kind hearts on this board that they suggest less obvious, less damning answers.
We Atheists often, when dealing with Magusesque Xians, point out how the attributes assigned to the God character in the bible completely contradict his actions. Of course all this shows is that the story is not only fiction, it's poorly written fiction. It's like the robots at the bottom of the screen on MST3000. "Hey what's a vampire doing on bikini beach at noon?!!" Sort of like a Tom Servo saying "If this god is omni-kissy-sweety then what's he doing drowning all the babies, puppies, kitty cats and bunnies in the world?" Being stupid…and there is really no other way to put it, the people who don't understand this painfully simple point are out & out stupid…these believers think, 'they are saying that God is mean. But God is kissy-sweety. They hate God.' These Xians are just not bright enough to understand that Atheists are talking about story-line problems.
They also seem to have no problem with lying through their teeth too. To promote their faith thingy they will lie and say that once upon a time they were atheists (always a lower case "a" when they write it) but they some how got smart and decided to believe. But, being stupid in reality, they don't even know what an Atheist is and interpret the attributes vs. actions contradiction as only saying that the actions are bad. Therefore atheists hate God.

Amaranth

I've heard of imaginary friends before, but never imaginary boyfriends.

Hmm...I wonder if I could get an imaginary girlfriend...

Anyways - As has been stated, you can't really hate something you don't believe is real. I hate the concept of the Abrahamic god, and I'll admit to a good amount of *ahem* disharmony with believers in that concept, but I don't hate the Abrahamic god.

fishbulb

Actually, the story is reasonable enough (from a character point of view). At the time it was written, the idea of a god producing obedience through fear, conducting genocide, punishing multiple generations for the sins of their ancestors, and generally hurting people for no apparent reason was pretty much the kind of god people wanted to have; on their side, mind you. At the very least, people generally thought of gods as being capricious, vain, and tempermental by nature. Certainly, it was easier to explain why your village got buried in an earthquake in terms of a violent god, angry with you for your sins, than in terms of a loving god who just wanted to bring a few hundred apparently random men, women, and children home to heaven, and bless many others with crippling injuries and typhus.

But, much like George Lucas no longer likes the hero potential of a gruff, mercenary Han Solo who shoots first, many people no longer like, or need, the idea of a god who is angry and destructive most of the time. But they don't want to abandon the parts they like: the chosen people thing, the afterlife benefit, and the general protection a powerful god can provide against one's enemies. So they redact, rewrite, re-interpret, add in badly-edited digital footage of Greedo shooting first, and whatever else they need to do in order to rationalize how their new hero is the same as always, but didn't really do all of the now horrible things that his biography describes.

It's not that the Bible itself is substantially worse than any other story of its time and genre, but rather that a lot of modern believers refuse to admit that the god they believe in is not the one described in the Bible.

Demigawd

There are also those, who trying to reconcile the concept of an all-loving god with the monster of the OT, that view the biblical stories of genocide and rape as happening to extremely bad people. You know the line: "boy, those must have been some really sinful bastards if God lost His Cool like that. I bet they were taking His Name in vain when they were sodomizing each other while teaching their children to smoke the ancient Middle-Eastern version of crack."

Biff the unclean

But, much like George Lucas no longer likes the hero potential of a gruff, mercenary Han Solo who shoots first…

I notice similar things happening when Xians attack science in favor of a creator God and try to use science themselves to discredit it. They use the bible because it says that God created everything. But when you bring up the fact that the bible doesn't stop there…that it says he created everything with a magic word and blowing on magic dust, and that the universe it says he created bears no resemblance to the one we live in…you are always met with silence. If you go past the section they like, and have yet to re-edit, they just go blank.
I've even seen Xians on this board claim that if you saw evil in the bible that meant you were evil yourself. I can only imagine that Hans Christian Andersen was talking with such people when he wrote The Emperor's New Clothes."

mike_decock

At the time it was written, all acts of nature were acts of God(s). There was no science to explain how and why natural events occured at all. There was no distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Science has and continues to separate God(s) from nature. At this point in history, God occupies an ever-diminishing supernatural realm.

We can also see how cultures have changed over the last several millinea. We have been whittling away at the caste system, the notion of royalty. We are rejecting the notion that one person deserves status just for being born to a royal family. Kings and Pharaohs were praised and elevated to a divine status, not because they had earned the title, but because they had inherited it.

Through the lenses of the culture, dimmed by the ignorance of science, it was fully acceptable for people to worship a capricious, temperamental God. You worshipped a God because He was God, not for because he was "good" or "loving".

It is easy to see that what they were worshipping and imploring to be kind and generous to them wasn't God, it was nature all along. Nothing in this universe is as beautiful and terrifying, creative and destructive, capricious and unpredictable as nature itself.

Modern believers are simply attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance of God vs. Nature, the notion of royalty vs. equality and Jealous Yahweh vs. Loving Creator.

-Mike...

emotional

It is the greatest achievement of the West, and it clearly shows that Western culture is the best culture. I hate it when Westerners grovel apologetically before Muslims. The Islamic world is backward, medieval, primitive. The Islamic world really is a helpless baby that needs the helping hand of the West in order to grow to maturity. That's not colonialism, that's simply the blessed certainty about the rightfulness of the Western way.



But now we know, thanks especially to Lyell and Darwin, that the laws of nature have been immutable ever since the beginning of creation, so that there is no use in worshipping or imploring anyone.

BioBeing

Rima - you should give your god a new name - how about George? - since it is obviously a made up god-concept only loosely based on God, Yahweh. When people on these boards say God (with a capital G) it usually refers to a specific deity, the one of the Christian Bible. None of us can hate you loving George - certainly its the first time I've even heard of him - if your special invisible friend is pure "love".

However, Yahweh has been described and expounded up for centuries, and we have some idea of what he is supposed to stand for, although good luck getting two Christians to actually agree to the specifics. Yahweh is supposedly the God who created Good and Evil, who flooded the Earth to rid it of the evil he made, and then "sacrificed" his son/himself to try again... he has sent plagues and commanded people to kill their own children. I certainly don't hate him - since I don't think he exists - but even if he were proven true tomorrow, I'd want some damn good explanations (better at least than any Xian has ever given on these boards) as to why I should WORSHIP such a callous bastard.