To My Christian Friends

You believe your God has orchestrated a divine plan for His creation, and that all events which either have taken place or will take place were foreseen by this God with infallible certainty, and taken into consideration for this plan. You believe that this plan is motivated heavily by of God's unwavering love for His creation, and His desire for us to live healthy, ethical lives followed by an eternity of happiness along side Him in Heaven.

You also believe that your God is perfect, and sovereign. And as such, you believe that as mere human beings, we have no grounds to critique or question this plan; that any flaw or inadequacy we may see in the plan is attributable to our imperfections as sinful, arrogant, rebellious, finite beings.

That in mind, I want to take a moment to remind you of what this plan essentially is. Because I think you rarely afford yourself the opportunity to step back appreciate it as a whole. So without further ado, here it is. God's perfect plan for His creation; the big checklist in the sky. Take a look:

Decide to arrange for something other than yourself to exist.

Create a being by the name of Lucifer, with full knowledge that this being will betray you and ultimately cause an infinite amount of suffering, unnecessarily.

Allow an unfathomably horrific dimension of existence known as Hell to emerge (created by yourself or perhaps Lucifer) and allow that dimension to continue existing. Don't override or prevent such a thing. It will come into play later.

Create objective, unchanging moral prescriptions and base them on whatever your nature happens to be, then label any action or thought that is contrary to these standards, "sin".

Be sure to include in these moral prescriptions edicts for social and psychological health, such as:

-Encouragement to beat one's children with a rod. (Proverbs 23:13-14 )

-Permission to buy and sell slaves, and will them as property to one's children for life. (Leviticus 25:44-46)

-Requirement that women not be allowed to teach or have authority over men. (Timothy 2:9-14)

-And of course, the instruction to kill anyone who expresses interest in worshipping other gods. (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)

Design a physical universe, planets, animals and vegetation all with the appearance of age. Be sure to include in your creation biological flaws, redundancies and over-complications that appear as if they were the product of blind, cumulative processes. Perhaps a urinary tract that runs straight through the prostate gland, or an unnecessary appendix prone to inflation and rupturing, or maybe a respiratory and digestive system forced to share the same plumbing. (These are just a few working ideas.)

Create a garden with a tree bearing fruit that, when eaten, provides knowledge of your objective moral standards. Then create two sentient, cognitive human beings without knowledge or awareness of these standards, and instruct them not to eat from the tree which would enlighten them. (In other words, arrange it so that only after they eat from the tree are they capable of understanding that doing so was a violation of objective moral standards.)

Warn these cognitive beings that they will undoubtedly die if they eat from this tree, but do not follow through if they do. Endow a reptile with vocal chords, lips, or some other means of speaking audibly to your cognitive beings, enabling it to make a convincing case to one of them for eating from the tree. Do not prevent this or intervene.

Once one of your cognitive beings do eat from the tree and finally understand what "sin" is, (right on schedule), punish them for having committed it. Curse them with painful childbirth, disease, unplentiful food, labor, sweat, thorns and thistles, etc.

By this point, make sure these cognitive beings have been equipped for reproducing themselves and multiplying. And because one of them has sinned, arrange that every one of their descendants until the end of time will be born with an inherent "sinful nature", defaulting in a future of everlasting torment. Do not by any means allow each of them to be born with a clean slate and the capacity for living a sin-free life if they desire, as you did with your first two prototypes.

Arrange that these beings have a "soul" which keeps their thoughts and feelings, and other cognitive faculties in existence forever, one way or another. Then, allow the "sinfulness" of these beings to be incompatible with your presence, and let Hell be the only other place their souls can go once they exit the physical world. (Do not make any attempt to spare these souls the eternal torment of Hell, such as allowing souls to cease existing or creating an additional realm for them to reside besides with you or in Hell.)

Over time, allow these beings to populate the Earth you have created, knowing with infallible certainty that after so many generations, they will disappoint you enough that you find it necessary to kill all of them in a global flood and start all over from scratch.

When this happens (again, right on schedule), make an exception for one small family of cognitive beings whom you deem "righteous". Of course it goes without saying that your powers of omniscience allow you to know, again with infallible certainty, that this family too will ultimately disappoint you in the same way as those you drowned, rendering the entire endeavor futile... But for now it's best that you pretend not to know that.

Instruct this small disappointment of a family to populate the entire planet all over again, by way of incest.

Declare that, until further notice, the only way for these cognitive beings to rectify their sinful nature while on Earth is to perform ritual animal sacrifices and other acts of senseless violence. Additionally, when certain "sins" are committed by any of your cognitive beings, demand that the surrounding community kill that being themselves.

In the meantime, perform many epic miracles for all to see, and intervene often with your physical creation. (Stop the sun in the sky, part the Red Sea, turn rivers into blood and women into pillars of salt, give men super-human strength, speak to the thousands with a booming voice from Heaven, etc.) ...But before these cognitive beings become advanced enough in the areas of science and communication that they could actually document, share, playback and verify these epic miracles, make sure you stop performing them altogether.

Decide at some point that the most pressing of your objective moral prescriptions are not as obvious to these cognitive beings as you once thought. Take this opportunity to chisel your top ten moral concerns onto two tablets of stone, and commission one of your cognitive beings to deliver these tablets to the masses. Note to self: Roughly half of these moral concerns should center around pleasing you, praising you, and remaining loyal to you.

After several thousand years, impregnate one of these cognitive beings so that she gives birth to your son in physical form, who also happens to be you at the same time.

Allow this cognitive being (who is your son but also you) to grow up and make several revisions to you/your son's original standards of morality, and then arrange for other cognitive beings to torture and kill you/your son. Authorize this sacrifice of yourself to yourself as a means of granting all other cognitive beings immunity from the consequences of their sinful nature, which you allowed them to be born with in the first place.

Do not, however, make this sacrifice free. Establish that none of these cognitive beings shall be eligible for the benefits of this sacrifice unless they actively believe that it happened. In other words, despite the quality of their intentions, any cognitive being henceforth who finds themselves unconvinced that these events actually took place is unwittingly designating themselves for the endless suffering of Hell.

That established, be sure to refrain from making it clear and knowable to the rest of the world that these events actually took place. Ensure that no cognitive being born after the 1st century has the luxury of witnessing your son (who is also you) say or do anything that would indicate he was a living God. Again, make sure all of this occurs before advancements in science and technology are available to verify it for those who weren't present.

Arrange so that the only surviving record of these events will be authored anonymously by non-eyewitnesses, translated to a language different from the one you/your son will speak, written no earlier than thirty years after you/your son performs these miracles and makes these claims. However, do make sure these tex ts feature the precept that believing in something without evidence is morally superior to investigation and verification.

Make sure that after only a few decades, the only accounts of these events in existence are copies of copies of copies, which will be verifiably altered and added to in historically and theologically signifigant ways from generation to generation, sect to sect. Do not preserve the original copies of these accounts. Do not protect them from revision. Do not set in place any mechanism for protecting them against being interpreted in hundreds upon hundreds of ways, most of which being heretical and therefor punishable.

Do not bother to employ your omniscience in such a way as to discern which of these cognitive beings are truly rebelling, and which simply don't know how to distinguish you from other versions of God which do not in fact exist, but are attributed the same claims of exclusivity.

Do not make it clear to these beings that you even exist. Allow for your existence to remain an easily debatable, easily questionable, and easily doubtable proposition. Allow billions and billions of souls to be unthinkably tortured for all of eternity regardless of their character, integrity, bravery, responsibility, or conduct, because they had not correctly assumed that the right set of propositions were true by the time their lives on earth were over.

Finally, when all is said and done, demand that you be praised for this plan. CHECK!

"Scott's thoughts on Religion, Atheism, Philosophy, Morality, and Skepticism are aired for public debate.  Scott uses his logic and reasoning, common sense and wit to shine a light on the ridiculous notion of Christianity....Check out his website, Theoretical Bullshit."

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