Here's a question for you. It might even qualify as a theodicy.
What good is a God who is somehow capable of creating a universe so vast that our sun is but one of over a trillion stars in a trillion galaxies, but is still petty enough to need money and care about how I and other consenting adults get our jollies? The more I talk to evangelical Christians, the more convinced I become that all religion is blasphemy, an attempt by men to know the mind of God.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I cannot help but assume that God doesn't care about us, and that They might not even know we exist. We, and life as we know it, might be no more than an unintended consequence of a grander design than our science and philosophy allows us to comprehend. This might explain why God's default (and quite possibly only) answer to prayer seems to be silent indifference.
And if God wants me to reach a different conclusion, She can get Her almighty ass down here and tell me so in person. I'm not taking my fellow man's word for it. Faith isn't going to cut it; it is too easily perverted to justify cruelty, injustice, and outright atrocities. Nothing short of gnosis will do.
The above was what I said to a couple of Mormon missionaries who came to my door and rang the bell despite the "no soliciting" sign above it. Interrupt a nooner with my wife to sell me steam age Scientology, and this is what you get — because my blood was up along with my cock. And if you stick around, I'll eventually get around to Joseph Smith being a convicted con artist. Don't bring your sacred cows to my house unless you want to see them butchered with Hitchens's Razor; they're good eatin' on my barbecue.
I invoked Christopher Hitchens for a reason. He might have been a drunk and an asshole. He might have been wantonly offensive in his exercise of free speech (and if you think he was bad, you should listen to Sam Kinison). He might have gotten in bed with neoconservatives, and he might indeed have been Islamophobic, but "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" is too useful a heuristic to discard.
If anybody presumes to tell you what God wants, especially if it involves you paying a tithe or letting mere humans police your sex life, you can summarily dismiss that person's claims by telling them you don't believe in their God. Every scripture, religious dogma, and demand from authoritarian weirdos who are congenitally incapable of minding their own business treats the existence of God as axiomatic. Reject that fundamental premise, and any logic built atop it collapses.
This little logic blade kills demons dead. And, unlike Stormbringer, you can fold up Hitchens's Razor and stick it in your pocket. Women can use it, too; since it's not a literal, physical razor you don't actually need a pocket in which to store it. They have used it, too; just ask Hypatia, if you can find a competent necromancer. Metal detectors can't find it, either; so even if you get a UFIA from the TSA you can take it anywhere.
I'm also serious about religious people presuming to know the mind of God. Even I don't know the mind of God, and I've been married to Her for twenty years. Who are these preachers to tell me what God wants? She's a big God; She can use Her words and tell me herself, which She isn't shy about doing in bed.
Also, and to paraphrase Ozzy Osbourne: Tell me I'm a sinner / I got news for you / I spoke to God this morning / and She don't like you
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Also, Jesus knows me, and he knows I'm right.
And if I'm wrong and I end up going to Hell for thinking like this, then to Hell with it. I'll stride through the gates of Dis like I damn well own the place, bigger than the Devil and twice as sexy, and wear my independence like a crown.
Because if your God made me, then he made me to doubt the word of God according to the words of other men. And if the potter wants to blame the clay for his own poor workmanship, then to hell with him. I'll take over for Beelzebub and put aside ten thousand devils just for him — volunteers all.
But my God doesn't do shit like that; She's not even close to being enough of an asshole to be able to condemn somebody just because they don't believe in Her. But enough writing. I still owe my God a good spanking, and then some oral sex. (Who says you can't love God in your bed?)
