Also, with just a month to go until Christmas, I thought I should update my Amazon wish list, seeing as everything I put up initially has already been purchased—thank you again to everyone who sent me gifts (especially John, who was very generous indeed!). Even though I am a Godless heathen (and I suspect the vast majority of my readers are too), it seems that most secular people still like to celebrate Christmas in a non-religious way, and still enjoy purchasing gifts for their friends and loved ones. As I’ve stated previously, I think this is okay, as long as it is what people actually want to do, rather than what they feel obliged to do. So if you want to buy something for me for Christmas, please feel free to do so. But if you don’t want to, please do not feel any obligation to do so either.

First of all, there is the very obvious point that God is supposed to have created the universe and everything in it. This obviously means that God not only created the free will that compels us to do evil, but also evil itself. The Bible basically says as much in the creation story: God put the “tree of knowledge”* in the garden of Eden to tempt man to sin, complete with a talking snake** to tempt him even more. When man inevitably fell victim to God’s temptation, it is called the “original sin”—prior to that, man is supposed to have been perfectly innocent and completely free of sin. However, this is clearly impossible: if man was indeed originally free of sin, he would never have been able to commit the original sin the first place, as he wouldn’t have had the capacity to commit any sin at all. And it gets even worse than that: God is supposed to have created man in his image. As such, God didn’t only create man with the capacity to do evil, but God himself must also have that capacity. In fact, the most logical conclusion we can draw from the Biblical creation story is that God is a sadist, who created us so that he could tempt us into pain and suffering for his own personal amusement.

And believe it or not, it gets even worse than that! For much of the sin that is attributed to “free will” actually cannot even be called free will in the first place. By definition, free will is individuals making intellectual decisions of their own volition about something. However, when it comes to the sin that I lead people into—the most common sin of all, the desire for sexual pleasure—free will actually has nothing to do with it. The desire for sexual pleasure clearly isn’t an individual decision, because we all have a desire for it, and we all derive pleasure from it. The desire for sexual pleasure is not the result of an individual’s free will, but of a universal instinct we all share, not only as human beings, but as animals in general. Whether you think God made us or not, clearly we are made with a strong and fundamental desire for sexual pleasure. From a scientist’s point of view, this all makes perfect sense, as it drives us to reproduce and perpetuate life. But for a theist who thinks sexual desire and pleasure are sins, this is a huge problem: it means that God not only created us with the free will to commit sin, but he created us as sinful creatures by nature. Once again, this leads to the conclusion that God is a sadist who wants us to be wracked with guilt over the sins he has forced us to commit.

Ultimately, this all leaves us with only two logical possibilities: an evil, sadistic God, or none at all.

*Am I the only person who finds the name “tree of knowledge” both disturbing and very appropriate? The clear implication is that knowledge is evil, and that ignorance (in this case, blind faith) is good.

**So how did God punish the snake for tempting man into sin? By making him crawl on his belly for the rest of his life! How can any sane, educated person possibly take this ridiculous story literally?

UPDATE: I’ve just found out about a very clear-cut quote where God says he is the creator of evil:

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

So there you go: as God himself says, evil didn’t originate through free will, but through God himself.

Image courtesy of Reuters: Johannes Eisele

November 9 marks the 20th anniversary what must be one of the most joyous and important events in modern history—the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is amazing to think that only 20 years ago the world was still clearly divided into east and west, communism and democracy. I think the Berlin Wall is the ultimate example of how absurd this conflict became—a wall dividing an historic city into two sections at a seemingly arbitrary point, which people could not cross lest they be killed. I heard a story of one young man whose parents lived in east Berlin, but who had just moved all of his things into an apartment in west Berlin the day before construction of the wall began. He spent the night at his parents’ place, and then could no longer get back to his apartment the next day! Well actually, he did try to, and became one of the first people to be killed attempting to cross from east to west.

We must never forget that only in the last 50 years, political ideology allowed such an absurdity to not only happen, but be accepted as commonplace. It is a reminder of how susceptible we are to simple ideologies that give us a sense of certainty and identity. Today, the “red terror” has been replaced with Islamic terrorism, and an extremist response to it—i.e. a resurrection of the centuries old conflict between Muslims and Christians—may lead us into a real war this time, and not just a “cold war” (indeed, to a large extent it already has). We must never allow extremist religious and political ideologies to take us into WWIII; we must use reason to fight the forces of fundamentalism.

We have finally found a couple of billing options we can use for our new project—we now just have to integrate them with our systems. We have also found a third party site we can work with should this prove too difficult, although for the best possible user experience at the lowest possible price, we still want to do it ourselves if we can. We are aiming to get this underway by next month (I hope!).

For now, enjoy this hilarious video from DarkMatter2525, the person who brought us the creation story cartoon I posted previously. I also highly recommend his Let God Sort Them Out video—it is along similar lines to the An Atheist Meets God video I posted a while back, and once again shows the sheer absurdity of the Bible’s statements on who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. I also really like his Epic God Fail video, which lists many of God’s outrageous atrocities, with a great punch line!