That's the first part of one my favorite George Carlin punchlines.

"...and he needs money!"

It troubles me when people try to engage with the sensibility of religious belief on religion's own grounds though, on the basis of what really amounts to nothing more than a thought experiment. Ok, let's imagine God is real exactly as He's depicted in the Bible. Moving beyond the nightmare shitshow of the insane tyrant we live underneath based on the conflicted, sometimes petty, sometimes weirdly forgiving, sometimes strangely into incest depictions we're given, that argument against His existence feels juvenile to me. "If God is all powerful, all loving, etc. etc. yadda yadda, then why do bad things happen to good people?"

Putting on my long-discarded Religious Thinking Cap for a moment, that's the easiest one to answer, guys. It's not worth spending time on. The answer to why it's bunk is because it was an idea cooked up sometime in the last 10,000 years of our merger 250k year existence, a blink of time in the billions of years neurons have been colliding. But the answer to "why does an all-loving God allow bad things to happen to good people" is simple, and going back to the first point I made, I respect you all considerably and am not trying to pick a fight with any of you. This is just a pet peeve of mine.

Let's imagine we could have a discourse with God. Let's make a list of all the things that happens in this world we dislike. "Hey, it's really messed up that you let kids die of cancer. Can we please not do that anymore?" Boom, child cancer's gone. "While we're on the subject, a lot of kids are basically born into slavery and die in factories, or as child soldiers, or through prostitution. That's hardly fair, can't we get rid of that?" Done, gone. On that topic, why should anyone die of cancer? Or gun violence, wtf is up with that? Let's do away with wars. Murder. Abuse. Ok, no more. 

And we could keep going, and God could keep striking down all the injustices we perceive in this miserable, spectacularly beautiful existence of ours, and before long we would find ourselves living in a world without unexpected death (or maybe death at all?), or violence, or war, or suffering of any kind ... and doesn't that kind of world describe a very specific Christian concept? Wouldn't that just be Heaven? And would that mean people would exist in Heaven with those who, were they given the choice to act as they see fit, might delight in causing murder, mayhem, violence, death, delight from suffering, you name it? From the Biblical perspective, isn't Heaven a place to be earned? 

No, I don't have an issue with living in a world where it's hard, sometimes unfair, far-too-frequently unjust, because that's a world we can improve through the choices we make. What I have an issue with is anyone purporting that an unfair, far-too-frequently unjust code of morality written by a bunch of assholes over the span of the last dozen-or-so thousands of years is somehow the unlocked secrets of the mystery of our existence, and anybody who believes otherwise should be shunned and derided, because that's just fucking nuts. 

But I do understand that this forum has something of a reputation when it comes to religious discussion, and I certainly don't care to rock the boat in favour of Christianity or any other flawed human idea. I just think there are better reasons to reject it than what's being presented here in this topic. If I've been too incendiary for any of you, and you've taken offence, I'm sincerely sorry and don't plan to rock the boat any further. I'm having a hell of a time in France on vacation right now anyway, and yes, I'll be visiting Notre Dame tomorrow, feeling somewhat like a hypocrite the entire time I'm there.