But then there’s the implications if they actually turned out to be right, which are nothing short of terrifying: that our collective fate one and all, rich and poor, good or evil, is in the hands of a super powerful crazed alien monster, an insecure bloodthirsty maniac that tortures little kids to death every day by the thousands. A creature who, so we are told, determined by way of a vastly superior intellect, that the universe just wouldn’t be quite complete without rabies or Alzheimer’s or a million other excruciating traumas it created and inflicted on its most “beloved children,” in part as punishment for a great to nth grandparent disobeying it, despite the fact that that that g-g-g-grandparent could not by its own intentional divine design distinguish the simplest right from wrong and, apparently, in part because it really couldn’t come up with a better way to run things.
And even that wasn’t enough human anguish to satisfy its ghoulish appetite! Any victim who didn’t regularly drop to their knees in abject worship, basking in and praising — get this! — its infinite mercy and benevolence and love would be further punished by a sentence of eternity in everlasting torment worse than any of those mere mortal afflictions thanks to a cosmic pissing contest with a rival maniacal deity said to be, if anything, even more evil. Although how anything could possibly be more evil than the one running a universe like that strains the most pathological imagination.
That’s one of the things that astounds me most about believers is that they don’t seem to be able to comprehend what a monster they worship and call “loving”.
The look on the interviewer’s face is priceless.
As an agnostic if Iame face toface with God I’d ask one thing :
Really? All your power and you let things get this bad for so many? Really?
(Oh & why did Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould die so early whilst the likes of Dick Cheney and the Koch brothers and Pat Roberston lived so long & were not smote down by lightning bolts eh?)
I dunno, Stephen – I think he always looks like that…
I find the question nonsensical. If I asked a religious person what they’d say if they died and had to face Santa or Isis or Gandalf or Quetzalcoatl they’d cock their head and wonder what I’m getting at. The question is just a reframing of Pascal’s wager. It makes so many assumptions that seem so farfetched to me, I don’t really see the point of it. If the person asking me this question doesn’t know what s/he’ll say to Professor McGonagall if they have to face her after they die, then why should I speculate on how I’d justify the life I’ve live to their literary character?