What if you’re wrong?
I’ve heard this from a lot of Christians “What if you’re wrong, that means you’re going to hell. You don’t want that do you?” Well there are a few things that come to mind when I see this. First and foremost, what if you’re wrong? There a lots of religions out there. What if you picked and / or were born into the wrong one? Do you actually thing that if you were born in another part of the world that you would come to the same belief about Christianity that you do today? I’m willing to bet that if you were born and raised in the middle east that you’d be a follower of Islam. Perhaps if you were born in India you’d be practicing Hinduism. I find it interesting that depending on where you’re born and raised so heavily influences religious beliefs. It’s almost as if man created god instead of the other way around. Seems unfair that you’d be sent to hell for a belief that you’re convinced of due to your culture. I quote a great philosopher of our time, Homer Simpson “Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god? Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.”
Secondly, from what I’ve read and been taught, when one ends up in heaven you just don’t want to “sin” anymore. For a god that is so worried about free will that it won’t reveal him/her/itself to the world because it would mess with our “free will” they seem very ready to take it away once you get to heaven. Free will is a subject for a whole other blog post but just one more thought on that. If free will is what keeps god hidden because if we knew they existed then we would have no choice but to worship him, what about Satan? He knew god existed and still chose not to. He was his right hand angel for a while there and still went up against him. Seems that knowing that god exists doesn’t really have a bearing on whether or not we worship him.
If I’m wrong, god has a lot of explaining to do…
4 replies on “Ask an Atheist”
Consider too the logic of who created evil. It was the monotheistic God that created evil. After all if the god was ominiscient – he should have KNOWN that his right hand angel was going to go against him. So therefore we have a deity that is NOT omniscient, nor can he then be omnipotent, or even omnipresent. So in essence, mankind created God who then created evil.
#scapegoating
Sometimes I have thoughts like, “What if I AM wrong about Christianity?” But reading books about its history instantly wipes those thoughts out. Studying other ancient religions has also made me realize that the Bible is hardly special; it’s just another collection of myths about another ancient god and worldview. I’ll never understand people who think the Bible is actual history.
I’ve never had chance to answer this question. If I were, I’d like to respond, “What if you’re wrong? I know you’re absolutely, positively, 112.5% convinced that you are right….but what if you are wrong?