What if there was a god, and he was evil « Unreasonable Faith
What would you do? Worship him and hope for the best? Ignore him and try to live your life in peace? Rebel? Try and fight him somehow?
Over at Unreasonable Faith, That’s Daniel Florien’s question after he poses a killer scenario: imagine we have definitive proof of the existence of God, only — he’s evil. Baby-killing evil. Ugly, mean, nasty sonuvabitch.
Fun, ain’t it?
In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, that is essentially the premise. The story the Church tells is largely true, though there is no real god — just a senile old angel who claims to be God, and is controlled by other, nasty bastards. And the books deal with a multiple worlds/realities rebellion against those forces. It’s pretty heady stuff, especially for young adult fiction, and it’s a reason so many Catholics got their panties in wads over the movie made of the first book.
I often surprise religious folk when I drop the Ethical Bomb on them — namely, that before any other question, whether about God’s existence or whether Jesus was his son or was just a man or was maybe just fictitious, I have this problem: on purely ethical grounds, I can’t accept Christianity. The idea of Original Sin, the notion of a scapegoat death “paying for our sins,” many of the specifics of Christian ethics: rejected. Actually, these days, I have a simple ethics test for religion — do they condemn or otherwise disapprove of homosexuality? Yes? Then I reject it. Simple, end of story, bye-bye, homophobic religion.
So it’s an interesting question — I like to say that if such a God existed, it would be necessary to fight him, even if it was hopeless. But if confronted with the reality, man, that would be hard. Maybe I’d just try to fly under the radar, try to get a few moments of happiness in this life before I inevitably end up in Hell.
Of course, I guess we could hope that if that evil bastard existed, that other, older gods mgiht exist, too, and will awaken to kick his sorry ass. (That link is to the lyrics of a most excellent song from Faith and the Muse, “Cernunnos.” It’s one of those songs I tend to listen to when I’m angry at the stupidity of the world. It’s very therapeutic.)
