Welcome to 4S

David Johnson 11/24/23 David Johnson 11/24/23

Thankful to god?

Shorts:

Last year, I did a peace on why I am not thankful in the way the Christians define the term. To be clear, I am thankful to people who have done things intentionally to help me and benefit me and some way. I am exceedingly thankful in that way. But I am not thankful for luck, serendipity, and the like. And I am not thankful for things or events where there is no one to thank. I am not thankful to the universe or to any force of nature.

Do you get up in the morning and thank gravity for keeping you grounded? Of course not. Gravity is simply a part of the matrix of the universe in which we find ourselves. Are you thankful to the poisonous scorpion that didn't sting you last night? Are you thankful to the winds and oceans for not crushing you in a deadly tornado or tsunami? I'm not either. How would that even go? Thank you universe for not crushing me like a bug, unlike all the people you crushed last night! That's just weird.

What the Christian wants you to do is to acknowledge some type of ill-defined thankfulness to some ill-defined force of nature. Then, they can claim that even your innermost being recognizes that there is a supreme being to whom you should be thankful. Don't do it. Save your gratitude for intentional actions of benevolence bestowed upon you by actual people. Any other kind of gratitude is nothing more than misguided emotionalism run amuck. I will not be bullied into false thankfulness.

That was the case I made last year and received plenty of pushback from skeptics as well as Christians. Before getting to my current arguments, allow me to provide a little more on the previous ones to serve as a foundation of my arguments this year:

Intentional

For something to be thanks-worthy, it must also be intentional. How thankful do you have to be for a lucky occurrence? In sports ball, there is a such thing as a lucky bounce. You often get a score because of a lucky bounce. You didn't perform the feat particularly well. But you do get the credit for the score. After one of those improbable lucky bounces, an opponent might quip that it is better to be lucky than good.

Sticking with sports, a quarterback might throw an errant pass. However, the ball bounces off the head of a defender and the intended receiver catches the poorly thrown pass anyway. Should the quarterback be thankful for the defender's head being at the right place at the right time? Of course not. Were the player to offer such thanks, there is a good chance that a fight would ensue.

We don't thank people for providing us with unintentional good fortune. If you are being chased by two assailants, one in front and one behind you, there is a good chance you will die as a result. But one of the pursuers skipped a few days of practice at the gun range and shot the other attacker instead of you. This affords you the opportunity to get away. Should you be thankful to the shooter with the poor aim. Certainly not, despite the fact that he saved your life. It wasn't intentional and therefore not worthy of thanks.

Beneficial

This one is tougher because a person might try their best to help and end up making the situation worse. That can be awkward. First, imagine a situation where someone tries to help and fails to do so. Let's also say that nothing particularly bad happened as a result. This seems like a situation where there is no harm, no foul. Good intentions were certainly at play, just not good results. I suppose you could thank the person for their efforts.

But what if that person, because of their interference, got in the way of your intended result. But they thought they were doing a good thing. In that case, they cause the material harm of stopping you from succeeding. Should you be thankful in that case? God wasn't. When the old priest saw that the Ark of the Covenant was teetering and about to fall, he reached up to steady it. God thanked him for his efforts by striking him dead.

What if there was some material harm. Your kids are being held hostage and you are about to complete a successful negotiation for release. Unfortunately for you, a stranger is watching and decides to play hero. He swoops in and gets your kids murdered. How thankful are you now? The unwanted help was not beneficial. I don't believe that thanks are in order. There might be a sliding scale that I am not able to identify. Please help me do so in the comments.

Self-serving help

How much thanks do we owe someone who legitimately helped us, but was doing it for their own gain? This is an even tougher one because I don't believe in pure altruism. I literally don't think it exists. Even sacrificing one's life offers some benefit to the one making the sacrifice. However, if I required pure altruism for a task to be worthy of thanks, there would be none at all. That is definitely not where I am heading. So I have to carefully escape the corner into which I have painted myself.

I find it hard to argue against being thankful to people who intentionally do things for me that are beneficial. But here again, there is a bit of a sliding scale where altruism is concerned. I might vote for a president who consistently does things that benefit me and those with whom I am concerned. I might reward them with my vote. But that doesn't mean I am thankful to them. They are doing what they think will get them reelected.

That is a complicated example because some politicians do have a sense of civic duty and they want to do what they believe is best for everyone. They are probably owed some level of thanks since there is some level of altruism involved. But there are politicians like Bill Clinton who ended up doing some good, but who seemed to care about nothing more than his power and legacy. I thank him for nothing. Is that wrong?

We do have to make some judgments about people's motives when they do things for us. A stalker of a particular celebrity will try to do many things for the object of their interest. But that person should not be thanked; they should be locked away and given the help they need. Their actions might have been beneficial but there is nothing thanks-worthy in those actions.

A man hoping for some action buys a woman flowers and sweets and jewelry. Should she be thankful? Must a woman feel thankful every time a man pays her a compliment? Surely not. You see, we have to make judgements about motives to determine what, if any degree of thankfulness is appropriate.

I don't mean all this to sound like emotional calculus. But to some degree, there is a bit of emotional calculous. Thing is, no one can tell you how thankful you should be to any particular person on any particular occasion. Remember that sliding scale. No one can do the calculus for you. With this as background, we can more confidently make the case for why I don't believe that even the god of the Bible doesn't deserve our thanks even if he did exist.

Monster

Let's start with moral calculus. I'm pretty sure Hitler was a good artist and was good to his cat. That doesn't stop him from being a monster. We don't knowingly thank monsters for their occasional acts of goodness, even when we directly benefit. A mob boss can be exceedingly generous to his friends. But those who are thankful to him, fully knowing what he is, are not doing a good thing by being thankful to him. They are actively doing a bad thing by helping to prop up a monster and paint over his vile behavior.

So it is with the god of the Bible. If Hitler offers to pay for your house, you probably shouldn't accept the gift. So why would we have a different calculus for god. Sure, he murdered all those Jews as chronicled by his sycophants. But he is offering me salvation, and a good parking spot at the mall. Praise genocidal Jesus!

At what point do we take a total body of work into consideration? Neither good deeds nor bad deeds are done in a vacuum. People do things for a reason and they act out of the abundance of their hearts. A person (or god) who does horrible things, and is proud of those horrible things, should not be thanked or courted in any way. When such a person (or god) does something good for you, it should make you nervous, not grateful. Don't accept treats from monsters.

Selfish

There is none more selfish than god. There is also none more greedy by just about any standard. Consider his perfection. Before there was time, space, or sin, god existed in unimaginable perfection. Yet he wanted more. He was not content with his 3-way love affair with himself. He needed others to adore him.

However, he knew that by making these lesser beings and giving them libertarian free will, many, if not most would end up being eternally tormented, or otherwise brought to a bad death. Even if you are a universalist, you still have to contend with the fact that he created a situation where many and more suffered much and more. But for those who would offer that sweet, sweet worship, all that suffering would be worth it.

A truly perfect god would not have needed anything else. He would have followed his own advice and been content with the situation in which he found himself. But he had to express his creativity and punish all who didn't give him the gratification he craved. He had it all but his ultimate greed pushed him to go for a little more. He couldn't find a way to get his gratification fix without causing a lot of suffering in the process. Can you think of anything more selfish than that? I can't.

We don't thank people who do things for us strictly out of their motivated self-interest. God never did anything for us because there was no us and no need for there to be an us. A child doesn't take care of her toys for the good of the toys. She does so for her good. The toys don't need to thank her when she plays nice any more than they should thank her when she rips off their heads out of anger and boredom. Whatever you think god did for you, he didn't actually do it for you. I'm pretty sure I can make that case. Come at me and let's find out.

Strings attached

This is another one of those complicated bits of emotional calculus. A banker takes pity on you and gives you the substantial loan you requested. That said, he also expects to greatly benefit from the transaction. There are definitely some strings attached to that predatory loan that he knows you will never get out from under. Yet from your perspective, he did do you a solid and offered you an opportunity. Like I said, it's complicated.

With god, it is much simpler. He knew he was writing bad paper from the beginning. Not only did he know you would fail, he placed you in the circumstances of your failure. God is incapable of giving you a chance because he knows you can never live up to it.

Sure, he allowed you to be born and not miscarried like the millions per day that suffer his indifference. He lets you live and never mind the constant sexual abuse you suffer growing up. You asked for a doll for Christmas and one year, you finally got one.

Then, he offers you a deal you can't refuse: He loves you so much, he is going to forgive you of all your sins and save your soul from the eternal destruction you deserve. He only wants a few things in return, like all of your constant, tireless devotion, your money, your will, your freedom. You are to die to yourself, take up your new cross of persecution, and be a slave to him. Yeah, there are a few strings attached.

And what happens if you don't keep up your end of the bargain? There is literally hell to pay. You feel like you have no choice but to sign the dotted line. But if you had some other option, you would take it. Never take a loan from a mob boss. There are always strings attached and god will get his pound of flesh regardless. Either way, god wins. You are the only one in the deal who could possibly lose. It is a bad contract with far too many strings attached. Don't be thankful for a contract like that.

Fatal attraction

Yeah, but don't we owe god for his love? I mean, there is nothing more tragic than unrequited love, right? God has offered us all that love and surely we have some kind of debt - so great a debt that we cannot possibly pay it.

That is how the psychopath who captured you wants you to think. That is not how an emotionally mature and independent person should think. You do not owe a return on the affection someone has for you. That would be to allow someone to control you in ways that are completely unsustainable. My declaration of love for you does not obligate you to anything.

So why is it that we teach kids the song that the reason they should love Jesus is because he first loved them? That is a downright stupid reason to love someone and you know it! But when it comes to god, we lose all our emotional intelligence and become the poster child for Stockholm syndrome.

Beyond the fact that we owe no requital of someone's expressed love for us, we have no reason to accept expressions of love that are clearly unhealthy and nonsensical. They might call it love. But we don't have to. It is like a person declaring that if you don't love them back, they will throw themselves off a bridge. That is not love; it is a cry for help. God loves you so much that he will offer his only child to be murdered for you. What, the actual BLEEP!

That is not love. Put it in human terms. Someone loves you so much and wants you to live so much that they kill their kid and gives you their healthy organs as a transplant. See what I mean? There is no scenario where a mentally healthy person would think of that as an act of love that should be lauded in any way. It is utterly sick and should be treated as such.

God loved the world so much that he hatched a plan to kill his kid for it even before he created the wretched place that would necessitate such an extreme act of love. Really? That's your idea of love? It is nowhere close to my idea of love. It is the sort of thing that would lead me to wonder what was wrong with him. I don't believe you are that different from me in this regard. I suppose you could prove me wrong.

He created two people who would represent the entire human race: a job neither of them asked for or were ready for. He gave them this job at which he knew they would fail. As some Christians explained, he could not have created humans that wouldn't fail outside of the purely theoretical.

They fail as planned. But to be sure of it, he creates for them a perfect tempter for that extra little nudge. For their failure, all of humanity and snakes are punished in comic book fashion. Under the weight of that punishment, we do what we do best: We sin. Now, god has to implement his plan of cosmic rescue. We quickly lose count of the people who have to die, in addition to his kid, before this plan is done. Is this really a love story?

He requires that we all accept our horrible condition as something requiring salvation. He also requires that we believe his sick sacrifice of his human kid really happened and was a good thing. But god can't really sacrifice anything because his kid is just fine and is in charge of, well, everything. I'll take crucifixion and resurrection after a day and a half over, say, cancer any day. So his sacrifice that was not a sacrifice requires us to make the ultimate sacrifice that really is a sacrifice or else pay the ultimate price which is a psychopathic punishment no matter how you slice it. And that is the culmination of this love story which is just an early draft of the script used for the movie, Fatal Attraction. Good movie, terrible theology.

Conclusion: Thankful to god?

So we end where we began roughly 3,000 words ago. Should anyone really be thankful to god? If so, for what? Really, let's get into it. What do you think this god of yours has done that can be verified as a thanks-worthy event? Even if you think you have a good reason to thank him, that is not a reason for me to be thankful to him.

I see him as a monstrous, self-serving, greedy, psychopath who will do anything and everything - whatever it takes to get his quota of praise and adoration. If he has to kill every human and raise up rocks to do the job, he will. He does not love me. He made me to fulfill his purposes. He designed me to be a vessel of his destruction. I am a chamber pot and not a flower pot. I have no gratitude for a god who would design sentient beings to be his personal porta-potty.

Even if I were one of the flower pots, I shouldn't thank god for it if he created a single person as a vessel of destruction. I reject the gifts of a mob boss and I stand with my fellow humans who didn't ask for that assignment and don't deserve it.

After my accident, there were some Christians who thought I should be thankful for my good fortune of remaining alive. Think about how sick that is. God throws a van at me and I should drop to the other working knee to thank him for not completely crushing me like a bug. Really?The message is that if you don't love god, he is going to throw vans at you until you do. The beatings will not stop until morale is improved. Nope! Not me. I'm out! There is plenty of room on this side of sanity. I sincerely hope that more of you join me here.

See you in the comments...

David Johnson