The Antichristian Phenomenon

“: not genuine or real: as a (1) : intended to deceive or mislead (2) : intended to defraud : counterfeit b : arousing suspicion : probably dishonest c : having no basis in fact” -Merriam/Webster

Anyone with a faith, has faith, that everyone else’s faith, is phony. “Everyone else” knows how ridiculous any single religion is, just like each religion knows how ridiculous everyone else’s is. This can actually be placed into a simple mathematical equation equaling every faith, is in fact, phony.

Faith is a word needed to sum up the battle between a person’s rational and irrational mind. The rational mind is trying to tie together reality with imagination. What we perceive to be going on is the result of our mind coming to a “conclusion” based on external input. The brain has the ability to come to conclusions quickly, even thought it may sometimes be wrong! Ever feel like you’re going backwards when a car next to you takes off? Then you’re mind “flips” back? This is evolution helping us out. Its safer to mistake a shadow for an assassin, then an assassin for a shadow! Having faith in anything, is in essence forcing an unending battle on the mind to draw conclusions based on fiction. The mind KNOWS what is rational. You can manipulate your actions, but you’ll never truly convince the mind of anything that is fantasy!

Golden streets, perfect weather, no hunger or sadness, meeting people who lived long ago, and long overdue visits with loved ones! This is what and why everyone believes. If you really know that what you’re participating in is true, then why doesn’t everyone grab the first ticket they can get their hands on! Why such a grasp to life? Go ahead and donate both kidneys to save two lives. A short prayer, as death slowly overcomes, is indeed a 1 way ticket to heaven! The rational part of the mind is not on board, so that’s why we don’t get up in search of “someone to push out of the way of a bus” each day. The rational mind doesn’t always have the answer, but it is certain when something is clearly imaginary. Even a child that believes in Santa and fairies will give a “nuh uhh?”, when confronted with an outlandish story. Everyone actually “knows” they are wrong so its easier to just not think about it. Hence, the fear of death, persists…

Faith, is something unnatural. Belief without evidence. Belief in contradiction to evidence. Belief in a lie. Trusting in humanity for the truth about life. This is the same humanity that conquers and controls. The same that lies and cheats. The same that has every other faith, (that exists, or ever has existed), brainwashed into doing exactly as told. Conquering people’s minds without evidence and in most cases directly contradicting history, science, mathematics, physics, and general common sense…

001: Fodder for Followers- God told me to perpetuate this whole antichrist nonsense in order to help other Christians! He will intervene at the precise moment (me and God have already prearranged when) so I am able to help Him “launch” His NEW 11th COMMANDMENT!! Ready for it? He said to me; “let the world know”! ——- 11:”Thou shalt not OWN each other”. It was supposed to be in there in the first place. Apparently Moses came off the mountain to get another tablet (to keep writing additional rules). He then got so bent out of shape regarding a golden calf that he broke the ones he had completed! A bunch of shit then went down, and it kinda just absentmindedly got left out. So God recruited me to help! Thanks…

икони*Movement is here used very loosely to include various kind of social groups and movements that all have some kind of anti-religion in common, may it one religious group against another religious group or various forms of atheist movements and the like.

One thing that has recently started to irk just a bit when communicating with people who often express a very strong anti-religious stance is the idea of “free-thinking” or “free-thought”. In particular, “free” is often equaled to that of a free mind, a mind that is not held back by any kind of logical boundaries but is able to expand into the great vastness of human intellectuality. This claim is often not questioned among those who are anti-religious, as it is considered one of the most important goals and is also one of most redeemed values. However, when analyzing the idea of “free-thinking”, the conclusion is unfortunately that “free-thinking” or “free-thought” in the strictest sense of the word cannot exist. Why?

First of all, free-thinking assumes that there cannot be any boundaries or limitations to human thought. If there are, the human mind can truly never be free. Here boundaries and limitations can include various ideas such as free to express one’s opinions without persecution, freedom of information or freedom to think and decide on one’s own without force. Of particular interest is the last example, the ability to decide what to think without having other forces doing it for you, as this is in general the kind of idea expressed in the anti-religious idea of “free-thinking”. To understand this aspect from a behavioral perspective, we must explore the relation between the individual and the society.

Within behavioral studies, it is now well-known that humans are quite capable of changing their minds under pressure. The Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiment is most likely the most common example, where people are told to inflict pain to others under the pressure of authority. A surprisingly high number of people were willing to do this, and a rather recent replication of the experiment shows that the results pretty much remain the same. However, this is far from the only way the human mind can be influenced or persuaded to do something that individual would not do under “normal” circumstances.

The use of subliminal messages in adverts and commercials is another well-known phenomenon, and adverts and commercials are great examples of what I here would like to call “societal pressure” (notice the difference to “social pressure”). Societal pressure is a kind of pressure where certain values are supra-imposed over others by being expressed in mass media. Rarely do individual actors play any larger impact, although fashion icon Twiggy is one noteworthy example among others. The main use of societal pressure is to reinforce certain already existing values and make them “commercial” – the idea that we buy into the adverts and their products that often come with the assumption that we agree with certain values is probably a good way to express it.

Societal pressure is one kind of pressure that is very hard to reveal – because in theory, no one actually forces you to accept these values as truisms. In fact, you will often find that mass media may even fight to win you over to their specific camps of what is true. The way this kind of relation can be described is dominance through consent, you allow yourself to be dominated. We do this every day, may it be with our teacher or our boss, or the police officer we met on the street. We recognize that certain individuals or groups have the right to assert more social authority, and by becoming dominated by these groups we reaffirm this. In fact, many social relations would not function without dominance through consent – imagine the grown-up child still arguing as if he or she is a 3-year-old with his or her parent, the age that is most commonly associated with children rejecting the authority of the parent/caregiver. Another example may include a student who incessantly argues with his or her teacher during a lecture that the teacher is wrong, thus assuming that the student has more authority about the subject than the teacher. What this means in theory is that the society in which we live in impose certain ways of being that we often accept as true. These values are upheld by the people who exist within this society and when someone breaks the norm social sanctions will be carried out such as social exclusion, even if these people may not even agree with the values themselves. What is important is that the values are considered natural, personal agreement is of a lesser issue. Many people may for example disagree with the institution of marriage, yet we expect young couples to marry.

As shown above, a society can therefore have several different contradictive values being promoted at the same time. secularism and theocracy are two examples, or traditional versus liberal gender roles. To expand more on the latter example, I am quite sure that when I write the word “family”, most of you who are reading this will not think of a family consisting of for example, a homosexual couple, or even a so called “freely organized” family which may more properly be recognized as a collective of sorts, no, what you think of is the nuclear family: husband and wife with children. Yet most Western societies often promote a liberal gender view that allows for different family constructions aside the nuclear family – even though this may not be the case in actuality where the nuclear family is de facto still seen as the norm. More relevant to this article, I want to discuss the ideas of anti-religion and religiosity as two opposing values. As opposing values, different groups value them differently; however, they exist within the same society. What I am going with this is that anti-religion can only be allowed if the society itself in which anti-religion exists accepts anti-religion as an existing value. What this means is that the idea of “free-thinking” that anti-religion often promotes is not in fact free at all, it is rather free-thinking with quite some modification involved. Furthermore, the way society allows for this is incredibly subtle: dominance through consent. The reason why dominance through consent is so powerful is that people may not always notice that they are in fact dominated since they agreed to be. The crux then is that society tricks you into believing you are free by dominating you and you agreed to be dominated. Free-thinking as it is understood in anti-religion in general can therefore never be truly free, because the idea of “free” is already limited by the society in which these anti-religious movements exist within.

That individuals who claim they are free-thinkers are limited in their thinking by society becomes even more evident once you leave religion and anti-religion as values and investigate what other values related to religion and anti-religion that are considered of importance. From personal experience, I often find that these so-called free-thinkers indeed only see themselves as free because the society in which they live in allowed them to think that they are, they often hold very contradictive and conservative values in other areas. A recent example includes someone who responded to my entry about Sverigedemokraterna and presented “facts” and “evidence” why Muslims are bad, which to my trained eyes mostly seemed to be the same information regurgitated by others who are strongly anti-Muslim. This reveals a very subtle notion that Western values are considered more important than Muslim ones when it for example comes to gender, creating the contradiction that only Western women are “free” (again, with modification), by removing the freedom of upholding traditional Muslim gender values.

To conclude, free-thinking in the sense that it is mostly understood in anti-religious movements does not exist per se, as it is an illusion granted by the society in which the anti-religious movement exists within. Therefore, would you be one of these people who claim him- or herself to be a free-thinker, think again. Are you truly actually free in mind and spirit? What other values do you have that you deem as natural that may in fact not be natural at all (e.g. the gender division between man and woman)?

Lastly, I do not try to offer the key to break out of the societal shackles imposed by our societies. I cannot and I doubt that it is truly possible to do so. We can share values as we move between societies, something quite well-documented among transnationalists, but we cannot break out of our values creating new ones on our own since the very way we view values is limited by the society itself. Therefore, the only tool I can offer is the awareness that we are affected in numerous ways, often unknowingly so. By understanding that you are affected, you may not necessarily be able to always change your values, but you can at least see the consequences of them and act accordingly.

BBC News reports that “religion may become extinct in nine nations” and it seems to be pretty much in lieu with other studies that I’ve seen about religion – atheism is de facto hegemony, particularly in European countries. Even in USA, atheism is on the rise, as fewer and fewer seem to attend church over the years.

However, these kind of studies completely ignore the rising New Age movement, many with a strong flair of what people would classify as religion. Yes, if religion is defined as social movements that must have some sort of clergy and a holy meeting place such a church, then there is no doubt that religion in many Western countries is in decline (on the contrary, the opposite is happening in many Muslim/ex-Communist countries). But people should not count out the New Age movement. I tell you, in a couple of hundred years people will ask what atheism means, where the norm is to perform some type of yoga (particularly the one with the long and complicated name), suggest that the reason why people are ill is because of bad karma and ki levels and that god cannot be dead, since every man and woman is a god.

мека мебелA repost from reddit, in a fail-proof reply to those Theists that love to bring up how they “used to be an atheist when I was young too”.

Hebrews 6:4-8

“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.”

100% of the time, I hear back. “I didn’t know that. Well, I don’t believe that part.” So, of course my response is, “We’re in agreement then; I don’t believe the part that says I’m going to Hell either.”

I’ve never seen someone recover. Enjoy!

Now go forth and pwn.

OK, I’ve made registration to the ACP a bit more difficult because a lot of spam accounts were being registered. You now need the invitation code you can find at the “Embrace Enlightenment” page. Hopefully this will deter automated registrations.

I’ve also deleted the 140 subscriber accounts that were on the ACP. People, you are supposed to create an account only if you want to contribute to the blog. And if you want to do that, you’re supposed to email the admins once you register (Again, check the “Embrace Enlightenment” page)

That is all.

I wrote this short story in greek, but I found it appropriate to translate it for you here – I hope you enjoy it.

—————————–

-Quick, get in the stable!

-Actually, I think it’s just a really dirty homestead

-Melchior, you asshole, give me a freakin’ break. Here, see? There are goats, oxen, even a glorbillah.

-Will you two shut up? Do you want someone to hear us?

Carefully, the three fugitives entered. The place stank of mud and glorbillah poop. The leader, Gaspar, took a quick look around. The goats were asleep.

-Good. Balthasar, start digging. Go behind the post-hay stacks.

-Me again with the hard work?

-Yeah, you! Weren’t you the one bragging like the drunken jerk you are that we emptied the vaults and Herod would find richer kings in stables?

-How could I know the tavern would be crawling with mutant rats..

-Of c..

-Hello there!

-Who the devil are you? Gaspar roared.

-My name is Joseph, and that’s my daug…my wife, Mary. Our hole is poor, but if you don’t mind the baby’s crying, we’ll be glad to accom…

That was when Joseph noticed the strangers had left some bags on the ground. And despite the glorbillah’s smell, he detected an odour of “myrrh”, the drug of which the monopole was in the hands of HEROD CO., and which was the economic foundation of the entire New Canaan colony.

“You’re those thieves from Babylonia 6! You robbed the good king Herod’s palace!”, he cried in outrage.

-Another word and I’ll have you pushing up googooleds old man! By the way, in our circles, we are known as “the three magi”. You see, we make fortunes vanish.

-I’ve already hit the button for the roof star-siren! The police will be here soon! You’d better surrender, you leec…

Melchior had already planted a bullet in the holelord’s left head. Behind some soy-apple boxes, a girl, holding an already bearded baby, cried: “Fath…Joseph dear, are you ok?”

She kicked him cautiously. He didn’t flinch.

-Well, that serves you right, scumbag. So, dudes, let’s make a deal. You’ll give me a taste of this “myrrh” whenever I want to get high, and I’ll see that you get on a private starship to whatever destination you fancy.

The police sirens were already close.

-As you wish, babe. But the baby will stall us.

-Oh, him? Azor hasn’t eaten in a couple of days.

When the captain of the guard and his men stormed the homestead, all they found was some sleeping goats, two oxen and a very happy glorbillah.

Just found this little gem in reddit. It’s a comic about the true story of the Christian God, as the church does not want you to see. I can’t accurately express how awesome it is

It’s apparently a comic from Doc Frankensten so this will be a very nice giftmas gift for your antichristian friends

So, I finished the book while on my way home. I have very mixed feelings about the book itself. One thing that greatly annoyed moe was the fact that the book is supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy but there is no mentioning of such a thing anywhere. It becomes obvious on the very last page. Now I have a very sour taste in my mouth where I’m not sure if I want to go on or not. Like another reviewer said somewhere, the book could in fact probably be much better if that epic story that is intended for three books might be compressed into a very large one instead. Fantasy books of over 1000 pages are not that uncommon, after all.

From this point onward, the review will contain spoilers. If you are not interested in those, I advice to stop reading.

One thing I found hugely disappointing was the escape from Sanctuary. While the world of Sanctuary was quite well-crafted and in great detail too, the book became incredibly watered down past this point. The main characters reach the town of Memphis and suddenly the book changes style – but for the worse. While I had revelled in the misery of Thomas Cale while he was living in Sanctuary, his life took a rather uninteresting turn once he got out of there and by luck managed to become a part of the upper class of Memphis. Memphis seems to be quite inspired by a European renaissance town and got nothing in common with its American counterpart. Now, there are interesting parts here, but most of them just seem to be completely forgotten. Hoffman is incredibly poor with forshadowing; sometimes he highlights certain events and objects as if they bare any importance to the plot to just be forgotten, and sometimes he doesn’t forshadow at all and then it just comes tumbling down on top of the reader that this was actually important – except we never got to know why it was. A perfect example of this is the event that lead to Cale’s escape. By chance he got to see how one of the Redeemers in Sanctuary was dissecting girls alive, and this randomly lead Cale to kill the Redeemer and escape with the girl who was still alive. Afterwards we are told how Cale’s “protector” at Sanctuary, Redeemer Bosco, steps into the room and picks up an object from one of the girl’s intestines, musing whether this is what the Redeemer Cale murdered might have been after. However, we never get to hear anything of this ever again. Here there is also another issue with Hoffman’s inability to properly use the omniscient narrative – instead of properly developing an internal plot at Sanctuary that tells the reader that “this is really important”, he simply just seems to ignore Sanctuary all together most of the time. When he does use the omniscient narrative properly he has shown great ability to create compelling subplots; why did Bosco murder the High Redeemer? However, the plot is then dropped, there seems to be no why than Bosco’s possible sense of megalomania. While I do not mind to let the reader figure out some things on its own, it is one thing to drop clues and another to not drop any clues at all and then expect the reader to figure things out anyway. I have had enough of stories like RahXephon for quite some time, thank you.

Additionally, to continue from the old post, the feeling of haphazardness gets worse. Hoffman seems to mix and mash fantasy and reality as he seems fit, however, the result is often bad. Very bad. Why do you use name the main protagonist Thomas Cale, but one of his acquaintances IdrisPukke? I kid you not, no spacing there. I don’t even know how I am supposed to pronounce it, so I just read it as if it would be Norwegian with spacing. All this simply gives a sense of lack of imagination. When Hoffman doesn’t know what to do or name something, he just picks something from the real world and puts it into his novel. A perfect example is how Jesus is actually featured, but this time he is known for being in the belly of a whale. It has no relevance whatsoever, and it adds no depth since this Jesus is not the same as the Hanged Redeemer, despite their historical similarities. There is also a serious lack of geography. All this fuzzyness just adds more confusion when I instead would just like clarity. I want to know WHY the Redeemers are at with with the Antagonists, and I would like to have another perspectives of the Antagonists that is not related to the Redeemers. I would also like to know why Thomas Cale is important to Bosco beyond the “I had a vision and I think you are the reborn version of the Antichrist”. Which, of course, could have been dropped much earlier. While it is a powerful way to end a novel, again, there is no indication of this. While there is a description of Cale either appearing as a callous, cold murderer or attempting to learn the social norms of the Materazzi (the name of the people who live in Memphis), the readers get no indication of this. Just because a person says something about another character it does not make it true. And this leads to my third and final gripe with “The Left Hand of God”, that of poor character development. There is some, but barely. If the author wants to say that this person is this or that, show it! Show how Cale is so cold and callous. Instead, we in fact get the opposite – that he can be kind and caring and attempts to be despite his cruel upbringing. That Cale killed a man in a duel is not proof, especially when we are told that he is in fact scared for his life during the first part of the duel. Personally, that is now how I expect someone who is cold and callous to act like. That Cale after the duel ended cut off the opponent’s head in a fit of rage does again not show that he is cold and callous, but rather emphasizes his frustration over being an outcast despite that he clearly got certain abilities that should make him recognized, which the duel in fact was about to begin with. It was a schism between him and one of his oppressors in Materazzi who made sure to take a social advantage of their different social classes. And then there are characters who are given some development to just disappear. Like the assassin who was spying on Cale for several weeks to fall in love with him. I don’t know why, but Hoffman got a thing for love at first sight. Anyway, the assassin got murdered, so the time spent on describing her and her way of life was completely thrown away. And scrap that thing about character development being my last issue, my last issue are gender roles. Women are constantly described as sex objects, and useless too. Arbell Swan-Neck is a disgusting example. Supposedly, her nickname Swan-Neck is meant to symbolize her beauty, but I don’t know about you, but a woman with a swan-neck just gives me images of a woman with an unnaturally tall neck. That is not beautiful. Women are also constantly described as delicate, and while Arbell Swan-Neck is certainly of noble status is thus treated as such, it would be nice if she just didn’t you know, act it out. Everytime. She is the damsel in mistress personified. Awful. I thought we had passed that stage in fantasy where women cannot be protrayed in other ways, and when they do, they get killed… by men. That says a lot about the gender roles in “The Left Hand of God”.

To summarize, it got some very interesting ideas but they are never developed. There is some decent writing down there, but it’s usually tossed away. I have very mixed feelings after finishing it. While I think the underlying story is interesting and I want to see where this is all going, I am not sure the sloppy writing can in fact justify to buy the final installments to find out, especially if the writing does not improve, and there is no indication that it will. It can be noticed that Hoffman is a screenwriter, the novel is very “filmic”, but not in a good sense. If “The Left hand of God” had been a 2 hour long film where Hoffman was forced to compress the story to fit this time format, I think it might be great. But this isn’t “The Left Hand of God”. We get a 500 pages long book where most of the content is bland; uninspired and uninteresting. Pure filler, to be frank. And like any person who is not out of their mind, I do not like fillers. I read another comment somewhere that actually describes my feelings of the book pretty well. I don’t want to read it, I just want to read the summary.

I bought a new book at the bookstore today with the rather in-your-face-name, “The Left Hand of God”. The cover doesn’t really say a lot. It’s a man wearing a black coat and holding a silver sword. Nothing else of his body is seen but his hands. The back cover doesn’t say much either; all we get to know is that Thomas Cale is here to change the world – for better or worse. I thus wasn’t sure what to expect when I bought it, but its mysterious air is rather attracting when you just have to get a book and can’t decide on what you actually want to buy.

I started to read it while on the airplane and the first pages were interesting enough for me to stick around, which is rare nowadays. As the title of the book implies, it’s about religion. Not Christianity however, as we might be lead to believe, but rather a fictuous version of it. The religion of the book is unnamed, but we get a rather thorough description of it. The book starts out with introducing its main character, Thomas Cale, who is a 15-year-or so teenager living at the military training camp/monastery called Sanctuary. Despite its name, Sanctuary is not a sanctuary. It is run by overzealous monks referred to as Redeemers, and they accept abandoned boys to be trained as soldiers that are to be sent into a war against the Antagonists in The East. The boys are referred to as Acolytes, and the monks use any methods they deem necessary in order to keep their Acolytes in check. Torture of all kinds are common, that together with brainwashing is meant to ensure that the boys will stay in check. If they don’t or simply have a mental breakdown, they seem to be taken away from Sanctuary to never return again. Where they are taken is never mentioned this early on, but the book emphasizes that it’s a place of no return – death.

The timeline of the book seems to become more typical of modern fantasy: not quite science fiction placed in the future, but not quite medieval placed in an alternate universe either. My impression is that it’s in fact post-apocalyptic. According to the book, the religion worshipping the Hanged Redeemer (it is called the Hanged Redeemer because the main symbol of faith depicts a main who is being hanged as the perfect example of a man who is being redeemed from sin through pain. It is interesting to note that the Hanged Redeemer changed facial expression over the course of time from being agonized to euophoric – very similar to how Jesus has changed his facial expression) has existed for at least a million years, implying that while it is not Christianity itself, it is a spin-off variant of it. It seems to in particular take inspiration from Catholicism, as there are supposedly more saints than there are days during a year (The Hanged Redemeer’s mother is for example the only woman to be considedered holy – all others are the embodiedment of sin because of their female sexuality of course, and how women’s bodies might tempt men sexually). Another point supporting the idea that the universe in “The Left Hand of God” is post-apocalyptic is that towns like Memphis among other American ones are mentioned, suggesting that the East is most likely Europe and the land in which Sanctuary is situated is a post-apocalyptic variant of USA. This seems a bit odd as the author of “The Left Hand of God”, Paul Hoffman, is British. British English also colors the novel itself; while it is not “too” British, words such as “bloody”, “lardy” among others give the novel a British tone. Hopefully the reason why Hoffman decided to play out “The Left Hand of God” in a future post-apocalyptic USA will be explained, eventually.

The book itself is not the most amazing piece of literature I have read; but it not the worst either. It is certainly passable as easy entertainment, but of course the most striking feature is its anti-religious stance. The Redeemers are often compared to the Inquisition; while the Redemeers themselves often live in wealth, eat good food and live well, their existence stands in stark constrast to the Acolytes who live very miserable lives similar to that of a prison. The book’s target audience lingers somewhere between young and adult fantasy, and can certainly please both age groups. I initially thought it would be more in the veins of Neil Gaiman and/or Robert Jordan, and it is more similar to the latter than the former in terms of style. The backside text seems to actually imply more descriptive violence than what it actually contains, hence also making it passable for a younger audience, even though I think more descriptive violence would be able to give the book a far rawer and brutal undertone which would be more fitting of what the book seems to aim thus far. Something akin to The Sword of Truth might be more appropriate.

The problem with the book however seems to be that it is very haphazard. Sometimes you simply don’t know where it’s trying to take you. The most notable examples are the changes in point of view. The book is written from an omniscient third person perspective, and when it changes point of view it feels very forced and unnatural. Instead I think Hoffman could’ve used other literary tools to explain the same thing without having to change point of view.

I will update with more posts as I continue to read the book to see if I change in opinion or if there’s new information regarding the Redeemers.

кухненски масиWhy do people still believe in god? I’m not looking for the philosophical answer so let me phrase that better. How has the christian god survived for so long? Surely, as a core concept it’s not a more believable deity than all the ancient ones, and is much less likeable. What differentiates this god and makes him/it so enduring to all kinds of evidence against its existence, or better yet, what makes people defying common sense?

The force of habit, you may think. Along with lack of the necessary education that will remove the persisting notion. Or maybe it’s the very reason why people believe in gods in the first place – hope. Ok, second place – first would be explaining things. All of the above is correct. But even so, there are still vast numbers of people who believe – even indifferently so. Even though many of them do possess sufficient education. And hope is a mighty reason, but surely all these people can’t just believe any nonsense just because it would be nice if it were true.

Which forces us to consider another option. Is the christian god really so unlikely to exist?

Yes. Actually, he is. But the ancient jews who invented him, had one trully incredible idea – perhaps without realising it. They made their god invisible.  God is invisible. Despite his occasional portrayal as a thin Santa with a triangle-hat. Why is invisibility important? God can take any form. God is everywhere. You can’t climb Mt. Olympus and say, ok, there’s no one here. But god isn’t just unseen, he’s is also…trinity-istic(?). What does that even mean? It doesn’t actually mean anything. But it is wonderfully, ingeniously vague.

Vagueness is a very powerful weapon. The christian god doesn’t need to throw  down lightning bolts to kill you. He can just take credit for your random death (or healing). He doesn’t need to appear. He is everywhere! He’s not anthropomorphic. You don’t need to physically experience his presence. He is “transcendental”. He is a shapeshifter. Christians can believe in god because he’s so quick to adapt to any new situation. The earth isn’t flat? The universe is vast? We’re made of quarks? Blah blah, God still can take credit for all that. And should you recall that the Bible tells a pretty much standard mythological creation story, the christians have the answer to that too. It’s weapon number 3: “symbolic”. Or even better, “it’s saying exactly the same thing as what science has discovered, if you interpret it like that”. The constant adaptation leaves god leaking philosophical inconsistency from every pore, but in philosophy  christians have always managed to do fairly well at excusing their contradictions. God isn’t believable – but he is just adaptive enough for most people to not rule him out completely – and that is exactly where the force of habit and the power of hope come to fit in. The “Symbolic” idea allows him to overcome the major obstacle of “what you said is untrue”, “transcendence” allows you to think that if he’s in your head, it’s actually reasonable, and being vague allows his more clever believers to devise convincing-sounding arguments to link him to reality.

It’s funny, really. The ancient jewish god was quite similar to his contemporaries. He made his appearences (though not physically), he sent down natural disasters, he was often sinister and very, very anthropomorphic in his reactions. But he was invisible. And then he became trinity and grew in all his vagueness. Nowadays the reason he can’t be disproven is that he cannot be properly defined. Ironically, god has evolved, camouflaging from his enemies, as effectively as any living creature could have.