Just a few random thoughts on a typical Sunday…
I’m sitting here watching Scooby Doo with my daughter. I love Scooby Doo, I freely admit this. I’ve also got a roaring head cold at the moment, so I’m really not doing much more than sitting, watching Scooby Doo, and thinking. Well, and writing, obviously. I’m watching my daughter play with some plastic dinosaurs, which I remember doing ALL the time when I was her age. And that got me thinking about my childhood.
I remember as a child being dragged to Mass every Sunday (sometimes we went on Saturday evening instead) and again on special church holidays: Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, etc., etc. As we've done before, for the sake of discussion, let's say that God exists exactly as described, and that all of the religious precepts are correct. Difficult, I know, but work with me. Why, as the almighty creator, would you a.) insist on unquestioning worship from your creations; b.) insist they ostentatiously repeat this worship at least once each week; c.) care in the least that your creations are dressed in their finest clothes; and d.) even granting (a) and (b), why would you insist that this self-gratifying (dare I say "masturbatory"?) worship take place in a specific building? These are all things that tend to lean more in the direction of a deity with some serious neurotic tendencies, or to suggest that they are all ridiculous fabrications of the fallible, self-serving, power hungry species of relatively hairless apes that so widely populate the planet. The argument is simplified substantially when one simply accepts at face value that the entire concept of religion and all of the unusual precepts contained therein are completely and entirely works of fiction. And not even particularly good fiction. It boggles the mind to ponder why an almighty creator would have made writers like Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Joyce, Dickens, Twain, and Chaucer substantially better than himself.
I’ve been writing a rather lengthy, possibly book length, piece on this sort of thing. As I’ve come to realize that I’ve actually been an atheist all my life without actually realizing it, I thought writing about it would not only help me clarify some of my own thoughts, but might actually be useful for others. I’ll post bits and pieces of it here.
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