Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on About that Dormition thing.
Is everything that exists the product of one supernatural guy who gave an order? (If so, doesn’t that require another supernatural someone, and another for that one, and infinite regress?)
And they can’t/won’t even avail themselves of the claim that it’s turtles all the way down.
Why does it make more sense to claim the eternal existence of an uncreated, all-powerful, supernatural intelligence than it is to theorize the emergence of the entire universe from nothing (or whatever it arose from)? The god hypothesis introduces an unnecessary step. And introduces problems they can’t address. An eternal supernatural being waited for, essentially, to the closest approximation, an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. What was he/she/it/they doing before coming up with the bright idea of making…everything. Must have been awfully boring and/or lonely. And, given all the prep time they had, you’d think that they’d have come up with something more perfect, without all the ad-hoc, jury-rigged contrivances (especially the biological ones) that you’d expect from an undesigned universe that had arisen naturally, all on its own.
The best you might be able to hold out for is a deistic position, wherein your supernatural First Cause sets up initial conditions to get things started, and then buggers off and leaves the universe the hell alone to unfold as it will. But that’s not what all those supposedly sacred books claim. They all assert the existence, and the continuing influence and interference, of a god with an all-too-human personality, who gets pissed off when humans don’t worship him (it’s always a “him”) enough, or in the right way, and who blames humans for choosing incorrectly when exercising the “free will” with which he has so thoughtfully burdened us.
[In one of the oldest horror stories ever, this god does such shitty job of world-making on his first attempt that he destroys it ALL (save for one family and all the animals they could cram on an impossible, wooden boat) and boots up Earth 2.0 using those few designated survivors (with no regard for the inevitable inbreeding depression that would have been brought about by the absolute narrowest of genetic bottlenecks possible). Not only was this god such a talentless fuck-up in his first attempt, necessitating (in his own thin-skinned, blinkered view,) a complete rewrite, he used the bluntest of instruments possible: omnicide. No drone strikes for him (hello, LIGHTNING?). He didn’t even go postal, but went right to the nuclear option, without discriminating between the guilty and the innocent, drowning all those animals and plants (who, being supposedly lesser, lacked by definition human free will, and could not be at all guilty of any of the human crimes and blasphemies which had caused this god to repent of his own handiwork). Over-reaction much? Why anyone would think this is a good story for children, or that this could possibly be used as a positive portrayal of their god is beyond me. This is the story of the ultimate abusive relationship. OBEY ME AND LOVE ME, OR I WILL KILL EVERYTHING. Oh, and take this pretty rainbow as a symbol of my promise that I won’t do this again.]
If we think that can’t be right, and we point to all the reasons for thinking so, is that monoculture or is it just…well, thinking?
These academics aren’t interested in leveling the playing field. They want to raze the stadium and muzzle or kill all of the opposing teams. If they had the power they wish they had, they would (c.f. any officially Islamist state in the present, any officially “Christian” state in the past). Because once they’ve silenced science, they’ll go after all of the other religions which are not the officially sanctioned on (c.f. most of recorded history). To paraphrase the key line from The Conversation, “They’d kill us if they had the chance. These sects do not worship the same god, and they’ll happily, joyously turn on each other to prove it. “Religion” is not monolithic, except in its fictionality.
Most Christians, Jews, and Muslims have managed, for the most part, to start quietly disregarding some of the most of barbarous commands and prescriptions laid down in their scriptures, exchanging the cruel, unanswerable diktats of an absentee god acting through “his” priests and imams, in favour of the manifest benefits of a secular, multi-cultural armistice. But this progress is neither inevitable or irreversible. We have in the last century alone, multiple examples of constitutional breakdowns leading to political extremism, which can be seen, in their obvious cultishness and demands for total authority and obedience, as examples of religious extremism wearing the guise of politics, as the humans in question have aspired to god-like power. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Kims, Trump, all have sought the path of power laid out by religious precedent. They claim omniscience and omnipotence (though claiming and possessing are two quite different things, with the latter being, admittedly, at least in the sphere of human affairs, a bit easier than the former). And of course it’s all for the “common good” or the “worthy” or the “loyal,” with the evil, unworthy, or disloyal righteously punished. Even unto death.
But while these megalomaniacs rise and fall, as they die and disappear, the abrahamic religions these mere mortals envy and mimic are able to carry on, generation on generation, millenia after their founders have died. Now that’s persistence. When will these structures and templates, enacted and perpetuated solely through human agency (there is no god behind the curtain, only men), be seen as distant, quaint, harmless fictions like the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons?