NATURE OF BELIEF
COMMANDS
UNBELIEF IN GOD
Religion, particularly the Christian religion, is mainly responsible for
the myth that people can be condemned as sinners for having wrong beliefs.
You
cannot help what you sincerely believe.
Examine yourself.
When
you believe in something that there is little or no evidence for it is said
that “this is certainly a belief you can help.
The facts do not force you to believe.
If you believe you believe freely.
You can just as easily not believe.”
But how could that be real belief when it is your perception tells you
that it is likely to be true? Real
belief has to be forced on you. You cannot
help what you perceive. Perception causes
belief and perception, as perception, is out of your control. For example, you cannot turn off your
eyesight. Even if you close your eyes
you still see something, the behind of your eyelids.
You
cannot have free will unless you use your intellect to some extent first for
otherwise you are being like a zombie.
Therefore, your decisions are caused by your beliefs. So, God can force good beliefs on you so that
you will do good all the time. The doctrine of free will actually
contradicts the free will defence which endeavours to explain that God can do
nothing about our bad choices.
What
if you pervert your thoughts to trick yourself into believing what you know is
untrue? But you wouldn’t be perverting
your thoughts unless you believed in the first place so there is no freedom to
believe anything be it proven or doubtful.
The new belief is faked. Every
change of belief is not caused by the will but by a belief that is there
without having anything to do with it.
Self-deception is trying to believe that you don’t believe what you
believe and the result is a pretence. Even if the will is free we are not free to
think what we wish.
Therefore,
if God existed God would program us all to believe when we are compelled anyway
by the way we perceive things.
If
you change beliefs it is because you believe or perceive that you should change
before you go to change. The belief
causes the change. You cannot help what
you believe because you cannot choose to change your belief and if you trick
yourself you do so because belief has already determined you to. It is all programming by what is outside you
and how you see the world.
Therefore
all would believe in God if there were a God.
This
argument silences all who say that there are aliens or fairies, angels or Gods
out there in space who want us to love them or demons who want us to be hateful. If we were made by intelligent designers who
are now dead they could still have implanted the right beliefs in us which we
could inherit from the first people.
This
argument refutes the Catholic claim that Mary had appeared here and there for if
she did she would ensure that we all believe.
The Catholic God does miracles not as signs but to conceal his
incompetence which is impossible if he has supernatural power that deals with
problems magically so miracles must be manmade lies. (That would make Jesus a liar for he boasted
that his resurrection was the great sign of his divine sonship
and mission.)
And
it refutes them because they assume that belief cannot be forced.
If
God exists then faith comes first. He expects
you to love him alone and everything else only because that is what he wants
but when you have no assurance that God exists but faith then faith comes
first. Dogma is above God. God is really not loved for his sake at all
but for the sake of dogma, manmade principles.
They are always manmade for there is no evidence of a divine origin and
to gaze at God through a haze of dogmas smacks of inventing God even when you
are just inventing the same God for yourself that somebody else has invented
for themselves. You don’t want God to be
what he is but to be what you want him to be.
You want your idol. It is only
the person who knows God and who therefore does not merely believe in him who
can love God. But there is no such
person and there is no proof for God.
God would not have made us if he is good if we cannot love and know
him. That would be an injustice against himself. The absence
of proof for God proves that he does not exist.
If he did he could not let us think of believing in him.
Anyway
the argument tells us that God would force us to be sure that he existed if he
existed. The argument that God in his
courtesy does not compel us is fallacious.
Reason says charity should be more important than dogma so if God
existed he would want charity and would be happy to force us to believe.
That
philosopher of fraud, St Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the dilemma about how to
reconcile the fact that a person who sees the reasons for faith is forced to
believe by them and the fact that the Christian Jesus and his Church say that
faith is a virtue that deserves a reward.
If faith is a virtue then it is not forced. His solution was that faith rests on
sufficient but not strong evidence.
But
such faith would be without merit for it is based more on irrational feelings
than on logic. And sufficient faith is
not good enough for saying things like that we should die for Jesus rather than
give up the faith, or that women should refrain from abortion even to save
their lives and that we should endure the misery of celibacy as priests which is what the faith of Aquinas taught. You need very strong evidence for very strong
demands.
Then,
the religion that pored over Aquinas and made him virtually her only real
theologian, Romanism, goes and makes saints of people who said they saw the
Lord Jesus or the Blessed Virgin! How
could they be saints when the main virtue, faith, was not in their hearts? The Church says that faith, hope and charity
are necessary for salvation. Faith is
the most important for the other two cannot exist without it. When Paul said that the greatest virtue was
charity and not trust he meant that it was better for charity was trust and
love and not a rival to trust or separate from it. If you love God you believe him and trust
him.
The Bible says that the fool says in his heart (his mind) that there is no God but the words: “There is no God”, are written in the heart. All one has to do is to look inside the heart.