Salvation

13:6 Even before my manhood swelled up and turned greenish-black, she would not approach it.

13:7 In Thy Book it is written that the LORD is just and merciful, and that He shall reward His children according to their righteousness.

13:8 Come, LORD, I perform good works in Thy name, I tithe, I observe Thy holy days, and my manhood doth rot?

13:9 O LORD, thou hast forsaken me!

13:10 I have abstained from knowing a woman my entire life, and now it is too late.

13:11 Where is Thy justice?

13:12 Your priests tell me I must die before attaining salvation.

13:13 Why can You not be merciful and loving in this world, O LORD?

13:14 Since Thou promiseth merciful justice and deliver it not here, why should we believe You when You promise to deliver salvation after death?

13:15 As far as Thy humble servant can tell, Thou art a fool.

13:16 The dead are dead; where is Thy life?

13:17 Yea, O LORD, herein is the rub: Thou art the source of all good and all evil -- so speaketh Thy prophet.

13:18 Where is salvation?

13:19 In a pig's eye, O LORD; yea, I believe Thy "salvation" is a jest.

Isaiah's heartfelt cry here summarizes one disconnect between Christian theology and reality: the world contains suffering and agony which afflicts the righteous just as often as the unrighteous despite what the Bible says about God's mercy...and so we cannot count on God to tell the truth. The prophet Isaiah knew perfectly well that it's preposterous to suppose that the Lord is completely good:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. (Isaiah 45-7).

As for God's promise of salvation, while we have abundant evidence of injustice and suffering in the world, we have no evidence at all that anything survives death. There is no evidence that salvation is anything more than a manipulative lie told by the God who creates evil. Iddo is probably right when he calls it off. Why didn't God tell him to go do a hooker like that Hosea chap? What a raw deal.

[edit] Promise of Jesus the Christ

During his Sermon in the Supermarket Jesus said,

Yea, I say to you that some of you dudes and dolls that some of you won't even die before I come back and lift you up to Heaven. Dig it!

Jesus lied. Everybody that ever heard Him in person has been dead as a doorknocker for nearly 2000 years, and He ain't come back yet.

[edit] Cowardly, But Nobody Cares

It would seem that one who slavishly worships a sadist and mass murderer just to so the murderer won't torture him would be a moral coward...but Christians' don't care. Christians believe that if they think about how much evil God has created then God will get angry and deny them salvation...so they don't think about it.

It's similar to being Stalin's houseguest: you really don't want to piss him off and get sent to a Siberia, so you're very very careful to avoid criticizing his regime. Same thing with God: you know He's a cruel bastard -- look what He did to King Jehoram, made his intestines fall out of his ass until he died -- but you're too scared of the Big Motherfucker to say anything about it.

Or, rather, those who believe in salvation are too scared.

But nobody much cares.

[edit] Divinely Manipulative

Of course if people believe they get pie in the sky when they die then people are much more likely not to worry much about being shit upon here on Earth. The Dark Ages in Europe were intellectually "dark" precisely because the Church told everyone that God wanted 'em ignorant, poor, and humble -- and they'd best stay that way if they wanted salvation.

They best put up with being shit on.

The Bible records many, many wars and war crimes committed under the direct command of God Himself. So it's quite reasonable for people who want salvation to make "righteous war" on other people, and the other people to respond with "righteous war" in return. (Interestingly, the current fundamentalist Christian President of the United States appears to think exactly like that: one of his righteous wars has resulted the murder of 60,000 innocent people and he figures he's bound for salvation because he's doing his Godly Christian duty. But we digress.)

Everybody wants salvation and, based on the evidence in the Bible, killing seems like a good way to get it. Moses himself came back from Mount Sinus carrying a commandment reading Thou SHALT NOT kill and immediately had thousands of his people killed. God approved. That incident nicely encapsulates God's divine dishonesty, doesn't it?

Salvation is a lie that can be used to motivate anything -- voluntary poverty, wilfull ignorance, and mass murder.

God is a clever little sod in His own way, isn't He?

Huh? This article is questioning its sexuality. You can affirm its life choice by sleeping with it.