Monday, March 1, 2010

Not the Most Thoughtful of Gifts

I have a friend who received a spider monkey as a wedding present. (This was the 70s, if that explains anything for you.) The monkey liked to hang from the chandelier and drop down onto unsuspecting passersby in order to bite their ears. Not the most thoughtful of gifts.

Neither is the gift of life, if you follow evangelical thought. Ray Comfort is trying to sell people on the idea that life itself is a gift from god, but if you believe in hell, and just how easy and commonplace it is to end up spending eternity there, how can you regard life as a gift? Life is just a way to end up in hell. Don't read the bible the right way? Go directly to hell. Don't pray the right prayers? Go directly to hell. Were you raised in a culture that worships the wrong god? Go directly to hell. Just can't get over the contradictions and illogic of the bible? Too bad for you- go directly to hell.

Life is just a million ways to end up in hell. If god really loved us, he wouldn't let us live at all.

8 comments:

  1. I have been trying to train my cat to do that but she just looks at me like I am stupid. I should have bought a raccoon or spider monkey. Raccoons will do the same.

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  2. PF, this is just another example of a Christianity that feels the truth while rejecting the need to think about it first. Although I don't subscribe to it, I agree with your assessment of life being a curse (according to said religion). I also find it curious that these same people who wax poetic about the privilege of being alive while under the constant threat of eternal torture, also hold up "eternal life in a perfect heaven" as being something everyone would want.

    Personally, I admit that I'd like to remain youthful for a few hundred years, but right now, anything longer than that sounds horrible. I certainly would begin planning my own spiritual death if those years were to be lived while being perfectly happy without a need for food or sex or experiencing new things. I'd be in an eternal state of bliss.

    .. and really, that sounds like torture to me. Not to be crude, but eternal bliss sounds similar to "eternal orgasm", and I know I'd get tired of that pretty quickly.

    Of course, one that last 10-15 minutes might be pretty spiffy...

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  3. Gotta say, pretty well put, PF. If life is a gift that comes with that many strings attached, I’d rather stay nonexistent, thankyouverymuch.

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  4. Believers claim that life is a "gift" from God as one more way to try to reconcile the frightening and often painful realities of life with the idea that God "loves" us. If any such God actually existed, one could make a good case for rejecting him/her and its "gift", were it not for the promise (or threat) of some afterlife, over which that God had control. Since all of religion is man-made and primarily serves as a tool to keep most of us unquestioningly subservient to those "called" by God to direct our lives, some sort of "apology" is needed for the realities most of us face in spite of our observances/prayers.

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  5. I agree with you all...there is no God, and we hate Him!!!! ?

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  6. ^ Not the most thoughtful of comments.

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  7. ...and you like Céline Dion...

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  8. But I absolutely hate Lady Gaga. (Well, her “music”, anyway.)

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Forever in Hell by Personal Failure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at foreverinhell.blogspot.com.