Distorting the truth

[Re: “Not God’s fault,” Letters, July 24] M.N. Syed is free to worship God or Zeus or Elvis’s left testicle, but his emotions evidently cloud his perception when he accuses me of “blaming God for all the troubles.”

I absolutely never blamed “God” for anything—since I don’t even believe the thing exists.

I opined that the concept of a supernatural deity is a man-made invention that was perhaps once necessary but that is now doing more harm than good and will hopefully one day be discarded. No one is suggesting that the demise of organized religion will usher in utopia and eliminate injustice (as the legacy of Stalin and Pol Pot vividly demonstrated) but only that belief in some celestial über-engineer is both delusional and counterproductive.

The problem of evil and suffering has never been satisfactorily explained by creationists. If God is all powerful but allows the raping and murder of innocent children, then he is a callous monster. If he is compassionate, but cannot prevent the countless obscene injustices occurring every day, then he is hardly omnipotent. He is either a tyrant or helpless—certainly not worthy of worship.

Finally, Syed’s familiar line that the fault lies with men’s distortion of religion rather than religion itself is hardly adequate, since it can be made to defend any ideology, as some diehard Marxists still do with communism.

>>John Dirlik

God lives

[Re: “Avid atheism,” Letters, July 17] Corey Keleher may be “a 21st century man” but he certainly doesn’t appear to be “a logical human being.” To be logical, it helps to know the facts. Case in point—Keleher says, “the Bible was written more than three centuries after the death of Christ.” In fact, the Gospels were written by “eye-witnesses” less than a century after Christ. They were inspired, and so they must be flawless.

Before Christ, mankind had a rudimentary understanding of God. They didn’t always get everything right. But they believed nonetheless because God, being our Creator, is inescapably written into the minds and hearts of man. Christ came as the final revelation to reveal to man all he needs to know to attain heaven.

So God is something innate inside of us. God is not something we were “taught” or “raised” to believe. What is taught is the doctrine of atheism. This is drilled into modern man so as to reject his inner urge towards God.

Man is given over to his own lust so he engages in extra-marital affairs and homosexual activity, which in turn spread AIDS and destroy the family. Other atheists like Hitler and Stalin killed whole civilizations of people simply because they didn’t like them.

No—it is not atheism but religion that will save the planet. This is because God in fact does exist. And he is a good God.

>>John Hill, Toronto, Ont

Religion as economy

[Re: “Dialogue with God,” Letters, July 24] Religion’s insistence upon an unquestioning belief is an insult to man’s superior intelligence, his questioning and reasoning abilities as well as his moral capacity. Moreover, not to use these uniquely human qualities is an insult to the God who chose to share them with man having created man in His “likeness.”

Sooner or later, as man becomes increasingly comfortable with the mysteries of human existence—the mysteries of what we can but don’t yet know, as well as the mysteries of what we can never know—all formal religious belief systems will coalesce under the banner of humanism, a deity-free system of practical principles for living in the only world we can be certain of—this one—as opposed to the utopian standards of idyllic existence in a hoped-for next world.

The great virtue of humanism is its inclusiveness; it harbours the full range of human differences. The great challenge of humanism is the challenge of human existence: how to reconcile mutually exclusive differences. The solution, like the problem, is rooted in economics.

Human differences or inequalities have their most pragmatic expression in economic terms—security, food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, mobility, employment, procreation, recreation and fulfilment.

Unless man wilfully works to reduce the gross inequalities in the standards of living amongst the world’s peoples and to increase the life possibilities of all people on the planet, one of two things will happen.

The weak will exploit their second greatest quality, their numbers. They will join together, resolve their internal differences in the short-term to acquire the long-term power they need to balance life’s playing field.

Or, in the face of hopelessness and resignation for themselves in the present and for future generations of their children, a small dedicated group of radicals will acquire and use the means to destroy our planet and everyone on it in the belief that, “If we can’t have it, no one will.”

>>A. Lawrence Healey

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