I have been thinking about God a lot lately. Which is interesting because I have been experiencing a severe crisis of faith for the past five years at least, and it has only become worse and worse and worse, to the point where I have considered becoming completely atheist.

But I suppose the decision to become atheist reeks too much of the Sin of Pride for me, because, how can you be sure? How can you prove the non-existence of a benign intelligence at the root of the universe? Oh, there are plenty of examples suggesting the non-existence of God (the existence of hate-filled fundamentalist Christians and Muslims being one of the most convincing), but there are plenty of counter-examples, too.

I suppose that my stance is less radical and considerably verbose: I believe that all organized religion is corrupt, but I believe that there are beneficent intelligences that exist in the universe whose form we cannot perceive and whom we cannot understand, who are much greater than us, and who try to strive for peace and harmony. Now I realize this could include anything from God to ancient extraterrestrial civilizations, but I can’t help but believe that there is something greater than human barbarism.

Maybe it’s all just wishful thinking, but I think sometimes you’ve got to hold on to your fantasies.

In any case, I stumbled upon this little blurb on kottke.org, asking the question: If God does exist, is He a jerk?, a question which has often come to my mind more than once.

But the example used is perhaps a bad example. My take on the whole Garden of Eden thing is squarely against humanity.

For one thing, since, despite supposed divine intervention, the Bible was still written by human beings, it goes without saying that the author probably tried to spin things to make humanity not look so bad. So I think the account is suspect at best.

But I think that when God created the Universe, he made a big deal about Free Will™. Nevermind the whole problem of being Omniscient and all that. That is another topic that requires more thought on my part and I’m not going to address it here.

Although as an aside, it makes me think of something that frequently happens to physicians who have long discussions with their patients regarding life altering interventions so that the patient can make informed consent. Not uncommonly, something goes wrong in the intervention, and the patient complains that they would never have agreed to undergo the therapy if they knew that this could possibly go wrong (assuming that what went wrong wasn’t that they died.) Sometimes it happens that it’s true, that the physician failed to mention this particular possible outcome, but sometimes the patient simply wasn’t paying attention the first time it was mentioned.

So I’m kind of wondering if that’s what really went down during the whole Garden of Eden debacle. Because it strikes me as cruel and not a little irrational to plant a thing called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil™ and then expressly forbid eating from it.

What I think happened is that God put this tree there and told Adam and Eve: Look, you can skip this tree and just live here happy and carefree, or you can eat from it, gain the ability to discern Good from Evil and all the responsibilities inherent within. I leave it up to you.

So, not really understanding what those responsibilities were, they went ahead and ate from it, and then suddenly everything changed.

The point being: every action has consequences, and even if someone, even God, tries to discuss what those consequences are, chances are, you won’t understand them until they actually happen.

And I think that God makes it a point not to press the shiny-red History Eraser Button™. (The story of Noah and his Ark notwithstanding, but I tend to parse the Old Testament with a lot of skepticism—especially that part about an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, something expressly repudiated by good ol’ J.C.) I mean, if I had been working on something for 15 billion years, and then someone involved in the project makes a decision that has dire consequences, and they ask “hey, I screwed up, can I have a redo?” and this redo would require screwing around with the very basis of your project, well, I think I would be a little reticent about screwing around with the basic structure of the universe, but, well that’s just me.

I think that God, more than anything, wanted people who could make their own decisions without him or her having to tell them what to do, and simply fixing their mistakes is not what a good parent or creator does, as much as we’d like him/her to.

So what about the part that states that we are all doomed, and can’t be saved without God’s intervention? I don’t know. Given my current mindset, I think that the Afterlife was invented by human beings as an afterthought. I think that humans as a whole are simply incapable of understanding nonexistence, so they made up all these loony theories about what happens after we die.

Personally, I believe that my ancestors’ thoughts regarding this dilemma are the most realistic. Before they were converted by the Arabs or conquered by the Spanish, they believed that when we died, our lifeforce was released back to the universe. The life we live is all there is, there ain’t no mo’. This is also consonant with such philosophies as Taoism which I have been in the process of learning about.

In any case, I think that the concept of the Afterlife has been exploited to allow or cause great Evil. For one thing, it can be used to justify the suffering of the unfortunate: sure they’re suffering now, but they’ll be fine in the World to Come™. I think this idea has driven European History for more than a millenia, and has been implicitly responsible for such atrocities such as serfdom, slavery, colonization, and outright genocide. (I am reminded of Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who in his campaign to flush out heretics is said to have uttered the oft repeated words: “Slay them all. God will know his own,” often quoted as “Kill them all and let God decide.”) Or take, for example, the horrific idea of being rewarded with hundreds of virgins for killing as many people as you possibly can by, for example, flying a plane into a building.

So here I agree wholeheartedly with the atheists: this life is all you’ve got, don’t piss it all away. This actually fits rather well with my view of God as someone who refuses to hit the history eraser button, even if it means the humiliating torture and killing of his only Son.

So yeah: the Garden of Eden: we were given a choice, and now we have to live with it. The Sin of Pride can be taken to mean the idea that Adam and Eve felt they wanted God-like powers, or it could be the idea that they could simply do whatever they wanted and that God would fix whatever they screwed up, or finally, blaming God for the decisions they made, despite the fact that they have free-will.

I don’t know. Maybe God isn’t omniscient. Or, even better, maybe he/she can be omniscient, but refuses to be so, so as not to interfere with Free Will.