As an atheist, I could imagine myself as a deist, but by no stretch of the imagination could I possibly imagine myself as a theist; certainly not with any of the mainstream flavours currently on offer. In a comment to a posting on Pharyngula about the latest example of religious brain rot, Emmet Caufield makes the following comment:
What non-literal Christianity asks you to believe is that Yahweh sat on his hands and did fuck all for ~13.3 billion years, piddling about on the margins of physics to ensure the development of a bald ape with a big brain on an insignificant rock, orbiting a piddly star in an unremarkable galaxy, then 197,000 years later suddenly revealed himself to a small group of semi-literate desert goatherds in an obscure part of the Middle East, behaved like a complete prick for about a thousand years, then decided that he would incarnate himself as one of the bald apes and have himself tortured and nailed to a tree in order to appease himself for his own displeasure at the, entirely fictitious, landmark event of two particular apes using their genitals for their entirely natural evolved purpose. You believe this shit? It’s beneath ridiculous, a transparently preposterous concoction of primitive codswallop that any person claiming to be rational should be ashamed to believe.Christian theology is intellectual masturbation, the product of perverse attempts by weak-minded fools to continuously reshape the silly myth of ancient desert aborigines into something palatable to the modern moral zeitgeist, rather than throwing the whole mess of contemptible nonsense down the nearest toilet, where it belongs.Allegorical my hole. It’s asinine. The whole damn lot of it.
I can appreciate the exasperation. Mythology can be high art, and useful as allegory, in the same way as fables and fairytales. Believing that it’s literally true is basically refusing to use that brain that you’ve ended up with through the process of evolution.
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