Grading On The Curve—Tests From God

Atheism clearly shows we are frequently tempted beyond what we can bear.

“But God is faithful; He will not suffer you to be tempted beyond that which ye are able to bear, but with the temptation will also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it—1Cor 10:13 KJV

Imagine yourself surviving in Auschwitz while your family was maimed during experimental medical butchery. After losing your faith in a god that never answered your plea, you are now judged worthy of eternal hell and torment.

Johnny good-boy however, kept his faith. Raised in the confines of a religious community in the 50s and 60s of middle America, has earned a gold star for his enduring faith—even calling to Jesus on his deathbed. What a good boy he was. But, not so fast. Even that is no ticket to heaven—only if he was chosen. Even in our best moments the gospel is a gospel of wondering self-doubt.

Meanwhile in the Sudan and Burundi…people are being lovingly schooled on starvation, disease, and political corruption—lessons they need to test their faith. If they only had heard the blessed word of god, only then can they be saved. But not now—for now they must suffer.

“God has shown through atheism those “tested” by his non-participation in crimes against humanity for his own will and pleasure, that many, many people are tested beyond what they can bear” No answer is not an answer to be analyzed.

Enter Atheism—Unbelief is truly evidence of errant scripture. God (the writers) have proven time and again their god cannot be trusted to come to your aid or answer a prayer. Like any other relationship based on trust, two or three—then shame on me. Give faith one chance one time in your time of need and see where that gets you and be done with it. Even if god were real he has not proven dependable. Perhaps there isn’t one? Perhaps…

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

85 thoughts on “Grading On The Curve—Tests From God”

    1. That’s an interesting add-on. How many people in their most desperate moment called out only to hear crickets? Silence. Not even a squirt of dopamine that could easily save them. All of us have had dark moments, but what if you’re just really unable to see your way out? Great point—welcome aboard!!

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      1. Thank you, kind sir. I find myself having less and less patience with transparently blinkered (oh! oxymoron time) scriptural self-righteousness, and less still with those in the habit of spouting it to unwilling audiences. Sure, God’s got your back. He’s so busy helping Billy and Karen pass their exams and ensuring his favourite football team win, that he doesn’t have time to attend to the victims of pandemics and genocides. Oh, I’m sorry: my mistake. He *would* have had time; they just didn’t believe enough. If they’d accepted Jesus they’d be fine, so it’s their fault.

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        1. He’s even failed in helping with school work. As you mentioned suicide, the pressures some kids feel, whether justified or not, is it gods way of testing what the parents can bear?

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          1. I don’t think anyone is being “tested”. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an Abrahamic notion that I don’t subscribe to. Life throws us curveballs, and not everyone can catch them. If it weren’t at times painful, we’d be doing something wrong. For those who consider ending their lives, all I can say is that those close to them be there for them, and listen non-judgementally. It’s an unfortunate stereotype–although not without some truth–that non-judgementalism is in almost pathologically short supply, among the most religious.

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            1. I hope I didn’t trivialize the tragedy surrounding this. Be there for someone. Life can be very challenging.

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            2. No, not at all. I was just putting out there the way I see it. I try and do my bit on various forums in advising and on suicide prevention, especially among the young. I use psychology though, not leprechauns and pie in the sky.

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      2. “How many people in their most desperate moment called out only to hear crickets? Silence.” All I ever heard when I prayed were farts. Now, this either means that God heard me but was too gassy to help, or I was too gassy to be heard. I’ll go with the latter.

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      1. The people ordering prayers have a tight schedule and a backlog going back many years. Maybe the answer to prayers said today will come in ten decades

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            1. In principle, it should. It eliminates human error, and provides an ISO-compliant and fully-automated data trail, which can be audited in the event of a grievance. Whether the Almighty would subject Himself to an audit is a different matter, but I think that’s essentially what we’re doing here.

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            4. I like this idea.
              The almighty would need a system that deals with contradictory prayers: A neighbour asking for rain and another asking for sunshine

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            7. What manner of man is this that even the wind and the seas obey him? The lucky man. Weather is unpredictable and often favors guesswork and history. It always calms after the storm and tornados turn course. Get enough predicting Christians and one in bound to be right there with a video camera doing retakes.

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      1. I think I mentioned this earlier—a non-answer is not really an answer. Unless of course by faith you hairsplit your way into the mind of a being you already decided we can’t comprehend. Amen? Amen

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        1. Just believe, what’s so hard about that? If you’re starving and ask for bread and your god gives you a stone, be ‘f*****g’ thankful, you ingrate! Think how much more work it took for your god to make that stone rather than making bread, have a little understanding and compassion, what?

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    1. Superstition makes a neat hobby, but as a mainstay, precocious gods are too fickle to deserve worship. I was reading Mel’s post a couple days ago and he was just giddy with glee of his new epiphany. It was all the same hairsplitting nonsense, but he finally gets it. I think he’s an alien.

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  5. Really, what an incompetent dick. Every project was a train wreck waiting to happen and scapegoating the product was it’s way of deflecting responsibility. The abrahamic god reminds of a Star Trek episode where the deity was a tantruming insecure man child. Civilization based on works of fiction. What could go wrong.

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  6. The Bible is a form of Retcon in that it takes all these threads and edits them into a whole. Think of the Batman origin or Spider-Man origin movies. They keep changing stuff and rearranging everything. Star Wars did that after the kiss between Luke and Leia and the next movies where they were twins.

    So in that light, the editors were cramming a lot into their stories, and it stops having meaning.

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    1. This confusion adds to faith. Any amount of consistency would deplete faith, which is the necessary to be a complete whitewash for the belief to maintain its powerful hold. Dividing it up with fact can only weaken it. Contradiction keeps faith alive.

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  7. This is a godless world, regardless of whether God is real or not. If he’s not real, that would explain why the suffering still continues. If he is real, then he doesn’t care for us to know it or have our lives changed by that fact. An absent god is an absent god. Real or not, absent is absent. If God can’t be bothered to show up when we need him to, it doesn’t matter if he’s really real. The results are the same and we’re still on our own.

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    1. True true. Regardless of belief, it is up to us all to make this work. But I guess god put in a president to do his work.

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    1. This is as obvious as it gets. Funny how some things just hide in plain site. It’s really not that complicated. Line by line the scripture (and those who present it) is designed to make you overthink and feel some nonexistent meaning.
      Similar to the status of belief. We argue over what to believe, but it is belief itself that is the culprit.

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    1. But wait, there’s more! My parents used to teach me that tithing was fire insurance. Using Malachi as their guide, I wouldn’t be burned at the lords coming even if I was a sinner. Seems cash can talk your way out of the religious cooker no matter what you do.

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      1. I’ll add another layer. The prosperity gospel taught in the mega-churches tells followers that if you are really good you will become wealthy and healthy here on earth. All those miserable bastards suffering must have done something to earn their pain. So you know, you don’t need to feel any compassion for others … I am not sure if a guy named Jesus ever roamed this world but the guy described in the new testament would certainly be appalled at this development.

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        1. Prosperity gospel, charismatic pop preachers and all the science that goes into the service rally galls me too. Calculated to elicit emotion and call it the Holy Spirit. Dopamine is the real god, and any little dab at the right time and voilet!

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        2. The ‘prosperity gospel’ is merely a twist on one of the oldest scams in the book. It is exploiting peoples desire for wealth and having a showy wealthy person say: ‘If you do these things, you will be rich like ME, also give me money plz.’ The desperate and poor are more prone to be exploited. Why do you think many of the rich televangelists do crusades in poor African countries?

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  10. The more I read about God, the less I want to read. I believe however that for this week at least god is busy laying eggs just as Santa is busy making toys at the north pole. I wonder if either of them have heard of climate change? I know, that’s a non sequitur but you can’t tell me I don’t know any big words!

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    1. I may agree with you. The more I write the less I want to relive all this. My investigation may be in the dusking stages of content confirmation that it is all a charade of mirrors and guesses, designed to occupy the mind from real meaning.

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  11. “No answer is not an answer to be analyzed.” That’s brilliant, Jim.
    As hard as I tried, as hard as I sought “God” (the god I was taught was the ‘right’ god), I also came up with no answer…. and it’s pretty damned difficult to analyze ‘no answer.’

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    1. Wanting to believe makes one do some pretty ridiculous things. “ how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! —Mt 23:37
      How often had I prayed for peace, and ye wouldn’t give me the time of day?
      And thank you dear. I keep some pretty good company here

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  12. Stalin was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, he was a seminarian for five years. Imagine Joe making a deathbed confession and going to his reward: Heaven, of course. The church teaches in its catechism that it’s never too late to confess, that no sin too big because God loves us so very much. However, any of Stalin’s many victims may have decided with full volition to skip a Sunday Mass, and to skip going to confession, and to decide not to fear the Lord: those three omissions would send the offender to Hell, of course. Do you think that any of Satan’s minions would miss the chance to remind that mass-misser that Stalin is enjoying eternity with a god that fashioned Joe in his own image?

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    1. Nice work Bill. Of course the same person that struggles with impure thoughts and never acts out is guilty of the sin too. He knows you when your sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, the thought police are even there after your dead.
      We have a lot of serial killers from the PNW, and your story could be one of them. But the reality is they have a screw loose and are manipulated by the organism. Sure they need to be put away, but you and are are pretty lucky to not have a bad wire or two (or maybe you do?) haha

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      1. I would always mention “impure thoughts” and use the same count as “the number days since my last confession.” As in, uncountable times each day. My parents would go to the cathedral downtown, they knew their voices would be recognized. 🙂
        Bannon is very active in the Make the Vatican Fascist Again movement. I’m planning to write about it real soon now…

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  13. I’m always struck by narratives about the struggle with faith. We can watch those caught up in such a struggle keep making their lives pointlessly difficult on the assumption that their struggle is somehow deeply meaningful. And I just keep thinking, how much easier their lives would be if they just dropped the whole damned game.

    At the very least, they would be more focused on struggles with more concrete stakes.

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    1. You described my neighbor to a T. Every fuckin thing is contemplated about how god wants him to interpret things. What does god want him to do. He’s a tad extreme, but jeez man, it’s just life. Even if there was a god, he wouldn’t care what you did for a living as long as you were honest.

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    1. His wisdom is more than we can even question. But we’re told we could never understand the ways of god, so why try. Or why not let me be the judge of that? Just like even the most difficult problems seem insurmountable, right up until you understand them. I think we’ve done pretty well with our teaspoon of dirt sprinkled with consciousness.

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      1. Ya know, one day I’ll go and read Genesis and Job again for some entertainment. Once being removed from religion, a competent God doesn’t seem so competent after all. The skeptics annotated bible makes for an interesting read too.

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    1. And as Kaian mentioned, suicide is another…unfortunately. I know exactly how it feels when doing your best and you still don’t measure up. Some people are deeply affected by this doctrine. I’m sure the guilt is out of love, though.

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      1. I can definitely relate to that feeling. As a child I always thoughts to myself “If the Bible is to be taken literally, well my faith is definitely short of moving mountains…I’ll never be good enough for God.” I know that may not be on the exact subject of this post, but that “worry” was a mental burden, enough for me to say, “I’m done”…..

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