Yeah, there’s also a reason they have to say that. You know those five links Danny selected for me? No less than four of them directly cited the Bible and all of them concluded with basically the same rant about how, “It says it right there in the Good Book. Jesus tried to tell us!”
Or, to summarize the argument in Danny’s own words during one of our Skype sessions, “It was God who put the Firmament here because he’s trying to preserve us.”
“Preserve us from what?”
“From the Devil… duh.”
You can probably see why I liked this kid. “Right. That one was obvious. But tell me WHY. If he loves and cares about us so much, why doesn’t this God character just unmake the Devil instead?”
“Because he’s trying to do something even better: prove him wrong. See, mankind is basically like God’s litmus test for determining good and evil. He’s trying to prove to the Devil that his creations are inherently good.”
“This is the same God who created the LITERAL Devil?”
“Why do you think he cares so much about proving the guy wrong? That’s what the whole Jesus thing was about.”
“Okay, I gotta go.”
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against any organized religion that doesn’t require severe genital mutilation. And despite the gasps that this next confession typically garners around my friends, who are a bunch of pretentious science-minded liberal-elitists like myself, I’m not an atheist either. I’m just ALSO not a theist.
