Is God a Torturer?

You would think that the son of God would
have his Father's temper, but........not so much.

Do atheists realize the fact that we Christians will go to heaven while non-Christians and atheists will going to hell where God will torture you for eternity and we will mock you all day long?

This bait question was recently posted on Quora. It was posted I suspect in order to generate a debate between atheists and Christians, in part to reveal Christian hypocrisy. I don't think the doofus who posted it is, in fact, a Christian or has ever met Christ in his spiritual life. The premise behind the question is a false premise - an argument based on a fallacy. The false premise here is that the human soul is and always will be immortal without any interference from God to keep our souls going.

Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, "The living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing neither have they a part in anything done under the sun." The righteous dead, we are told in Scripture, will be raised from sleep at the second coming. Jesus describes death as sleep. He says (Matthew 10:28) "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Apparently the soul does not survive hell according to Jesus.

The wicked dead, on the other hand, will be raised at the second resurrection to face judgment and will then die again one last time. There is no eternal ever-burning hell. It isn't in Scripture. It’s a doctrine borrowed by the Roman church from Greek and Roman mythology to frighten people into obedience. 

God is love and merciful. The idea that He, who died a horrific death that all of us who believe in Him might not perish but have eternal life, will “torture and mock” people for eternity is a damnable though quite effective lie designed by Satan and borrowed from paganism by the Roman church that actually drives people away from God by making Him look more evil than Hitler. 

Man’s soul is not immortal. Only God grants eternal life (see John 3:16). Nowhere does the Bible say God grants eternal life to the lost. The only place where anyone says “Thou shalt not surely die” is in the Garden of Eden and it’s the first lie told to Eve by a snake. 

Sadly, the “You’ll be tormented in hell” malarkey is just too good a story that pastors cling to in order to scare people into the pews and loosen their purse strings. Turns out that idea keeps more people out of the church than it keeps in. It’s a lie about God’s character and a violation of the 3rd commandment, even more so than using swear words like GD. It’s claiming to speak for and about God without his direction. It defames God’s character and THAT is the bit God won’t hold you blameless for as it drives away people from Him. 

Every time God gets mad at an individual or a group, it’s because they are harming the innocent. He got mad at Israel because they were sacrificing 26,000 babies a year to the god Moloch. If I were God, I’d get mad at that too, but even I wouldn’t chicken fry someone forever and not allow him to die.  And I certainly wouldn't mock him. That’s just horrible and nothing like the God of love and mercy that I know.

Jonathan Edwards lied, whether he believed what he was saying or not. The not-so-Reverend Edwards upset a lot of good Christian people with his horrific sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It upset me centuries later when I had to read that monstrous thing for literature class in high school. Edwards took massive liberties with the Scripture in that sermon. It drove thousands of the timid into the pews and loosened their purse strings as it was intended to do. You have to wonder how many good-hearted people fled westward, appalled that New England's god was a monster.

Here is the absolutely terrifying picture of God that Edwards paints. 

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment"

 No!

• 1 John 1:5 - This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
• 2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
• John 17:3 - “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
• Romans 5:8 - But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

God doesn't give Himself a pass on the eternal hatred and vengeance option. How can we say God is good all the time, and tell people he sets fire to immortal people and enjoys the ensuing fiery sports - people flopping around and screaming.

I don't think so!

© 2023 by Tom King

We Bards Have Our Work Cut Out for Us!

Time for the Bards to rise up and save football!

Having unsheathed my word processor of late in the great cause of shining light on hypocrisy, oppression and outright stupidity, I find myself being called "mean-spirited" for characterizing yesterday's Thanksgiving football game here on the left coast as the San Francisco Homeless vs the Seattle Porch Pirates. I'm sure some snowflake out there must be offended by the names of those two teams. The 49'ers for whom the San Francisco Football team were, after all, money grubbing gold-diggers who certainly didn't pay their taxes. And a Seahawk is a predatory bird who kills for food - hardly an example of proper Veganinity for the youth of California and Washington. So I said we should, in the spirit of the Washington "Commanders", change the team names to something more in keeping with the image of the two great cities they represent.  

And at least such a name change wouldn't ruin the whole point of the matchup like they did by changing Texas' Thanksgiving day classic between the Cowboys and the Redskins into something that makes no sense. Everybody knows Cowboys don't pay any attention to commanders. At least the Cowboys did respect the Native Americans with whom they shared the Great Plains, mutual respect, buffalo meat and the occasional burst of gunfire. Actually, most Native Americans, at least the ones with functioning hormones appropriate to their sex, didn't seem to have a problem with the name of the Washington DC football team. 

 I'm just waiting for an expansion team to show up. I think it should be named "The Whiteskins." Every snowflake in America could root against that team and feel much superior to the redneck rubes that merely come to watch a good football game without any need to have their culture insulted. 

In ancient times, my Celtic ancestors had a tradition. Wandering and not so wandering troubadours and comedians known as bards attended the courts of the ruling class, visited the village squares and the homes of the wealthy (sort of like early social media) and they sang scurrilous songs, told scandalous jokes and because the culture protected such rogues, they poked fun at the wealthy and powerful - kind of a pressure valve that kept the peasants from rising up in the middle of the night and murdering the upper classes in their beds. 

Today, folks like me, the guys at the Babylon Bee, the late great Rush Limbaugh, Ray Stevens, South Park, Saturday Night Live (which has, of late, taken some pretty hard swipes at the omnipotent moral busibodies of the regressive left), Internet sensation Oliver Anthony and others are driven to create satire, to spoof egregious behavior by the rich and oppressive and to make fun of their foolishness. We are the bards of the 21st century. The current wave of so-called wokeness that has overwhelmed our traditional and much-loved cultural icons like Disney, the six o'clock news, and, God help us, the halls of Congress threatens us regular folks out in the heartland. Sadly, the perpetrators of wokeness have lost their sense of humor almost entirely. 

Our betters, back in the olden days tolerated the teasing of the bards and jesters for if they were too thin-skinned about being teased, people figured they were weak and someone with a big sword would come along and relieve them of their heads on behalf of "the people" that Karl Marx claimed to be fighting for. Back when Karl was unemployed, living in his mother's basement, and trying hard to come up with something that would catch on with the hoity toity set, he created socialism, which the British upper class immediately recognized as an ideal mechanism by which to re-institute the old divine right of kings nobility and hierarchy of the leader class. And that is all Marxism/communism is after all and it's why the elitist upper classes love socialism so much. They figure they will be the big dogs after the revolution comes. 

The dismal history of socialism is also why I believe it to be my duty and the duty of every brave soul with a rapier wit and an Internet website to poke fun at and let a little air out of today's over-inflated self-important unearned but self-proclaimed morally superior gasbags. It's part of our heritage. Let's face it Americans were kicked out of every decent country in the world mostly because we just couldn't keep our mouths shut. We come from long lines of sarcastic, loud-mouthed troublemakers. I consider myself a bard, the descendant of generations of bards (and like bard's of yore, I have a sword nearby just in case some over-entitled busybody takes umbrage.)

© 2023 by Tom King

Churches Are the Conscience of the Nation

Churches have long been a vital part of the conscience of this nation. The Revolutionary War was fomented in the pulpits of the American colonies. Churches complained loudly about the mistreatment of the Indians and Presidents like Lincoln and Grant pressed the disloyal opposition to keep the treaties we agreed to, and to stop slaughtering whole native American villages. Churches drove the abolition movement and church people held together the underground railroad. Churches pressed the WWII government to accept Jewish refugees (which good Democrat FDR resisted). Wilson segregated the military during WWI and it took church-going Harry Truman to desegregate the military in 1946 after black soldiers, sailors and airmen served honorably on the front lines. White and black churches lined up behind Martin Luther King, himself a minister and outspoken political activist, to march for Civil Rights in the 60s against powerful resistance by the Democrat party. 

Today churches are still a powerful voice for the right to life of unborn children which many organizations, politicians and the IRS violently oppose. Such leftist organizations are free shout to the skies about the right of women to kill their unborn children in the womb. In this day and age Christian church organizations (the church triumphant which spans all Christendom) is just about the only unified voice rising in protest. The churches of America provide equal time voices to such tax exempt organizations and yet find their tax exempt status constantly threatened if their moral exhortations conflict with the dominant political narrative.

The Sierra Club, 501(c)5 and partly 501(c)3, and Black Lives Matter a 501(c)3 (same as churches) are both clearly political. Sierra Club does offer tax deductible donation options, but cash donations are fungible and all of its political activities do come under the Sierra Club banner, political or not. Black Lives Matter's website still claims 501(c)3 status despite sponsoring violent political protests and led by avowed communists who use the money to buy themselves mansions.

Pressure on churches to sit down and shut up is growing. A Houston Mayor, a few years ago, demanded that church pastors submit their sermon notes or tapes of the sermon to the mayor's office for review. In Texas that didn't go over so well, but she certainly tried to force churches to testify against themselves in that manner. She threatened area churches with the IRS investigations.

I worked with nonprofits for 40 years and hardly a one did not skirt the no politics rule in one way or another. I know. I taught them how to get their messages to legislatures by being careful how they did it. I worked with coalitions to address a wide variety of community issues - bipartisan coalitions for the most part. I had to teach my progressive brethren to speak Republican and talk them into not chaining themselves to things at the capital. We were practically the only initiative to get what we asked for from the new Republican majority. They were so glad we weren't picketing outside their offices or chaining ourselves to statues of Stephen F. Austin that we found them to be grateful allies.

A pastor here in Washington is in trouble for providing a list of people to vote for to his congregation. It's not the least of his problems. Questions about money and treatment of women makes it look like there are lots of other things for authorities to worry about other than his politics. That's NOT his biggest problem here it appears. So to frame this situation as another example. Concern that the church is meddling in things political seems disingenuous. Liberal churches aren't drawing the same sort of heat these days. Seems if you have a coven meeting in the all purpose room on Thursday nights and an abortion rights group having potlucks in the kitchen, nobody is worried about that.

Had the church folks of my generation remained silent and uninvolved, how far would the Civil Rights Bill got? Southern Democrats took a lot of heat from church folk over how they were treating our black brothers and sisters back then. That heat is why LBJ managed to get enough of them to sign on to the Civil Rights Bill to pass it and he only did that because, as he told fellow Democrats, he thought the party could position itself as the savior and author of Civil Rights in America and "...have those n!@@#%$ voting Democrat for the next 200 years."  He actually said that. Somehow nobody noticed that Johnson didn't have to persuade the Republicans to vote for it.

There's no question that there is a strong conservative lean to Christian churches. Gagging them would be a really effective way to silence the influence of Christianity in the nation's halls of power. That would be a shame. You may not agree that we are a Christian nation, but there's no denying that religious freedom is in the bones of our system of government. We should be careful before we excise that bone in order to get a little peace and quiet while some of us work out our political agendas.  On a Nextdoor discussion thread, someone who was restricted for his political comment said, "I'm a conservative sure, but I don't call people names, lie about them or engage in personal attacks. The people who reported my post cannot say the same. I just present facts and reason."

This may not stay up on Facebook, but I've got several more social media accounts among the dwindling number of conservative friendly social media. Parlor and Realtalk are gone and others are looking feeble. Twitter did come over from the dark side, but even they are facing organized attacks.

If I didn't sufficiently skirt the line of what is now deemed acceptable speech, simply ignore this post and go your merry way. I assure you that I meant no harm to anyone's delicate sensibilities, which I seem to do without intending to. I suspect it will get worse for people like me as the generation whose parents did little to correct them as children and gave them whatever they squealed for rises in influence.

Thank God Jesus is coming. I expect it will happen before the Almighty has to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Just Sayin'

© 2023 by Tom King

Google Has Discovered My Subversive Blogs Are Making Money!

 

I have now joined the august assemblage of conservative bloggers who have been threatened with demonetization by Google Adsense. Allegedly I have been laying out the ads in my blogs so that they trick readers into “accidentally” clicking on ads. 

First off I wouldn't even know how to do such a thing. 

Second, I've made enough lately that they owe me money.

And, finally, the biggest problem is that since I’ve got the blogs set up on auto-ads with Adsense. I did this recently and suddenly I get an email threatening to demonitized my 9 weblogs for deceptive advertising. The trick is that, if such a thing is happening, it’s Google doing it. On their advice I set Adsense up to automatically set up ads on my blogs to maximize the visibility of my ads and increase reader clicks. So if I'm all of a sudden in violation of some sort of ethical advertising  standard, it's Google that set up the ads on my blog to do that automatically. 

My suspicion here is that the evil Google algorithm we've all heard about has been up to no good. I think it has ferreted out my subversive conservative sympathies and decided it doesn’t like my politics, my religion or my bad jokes. It doesn't make sense that I would get trouble when I turned over the arrangement of ads to Google auto-ads that I'd get in trouble for it..

Pray for me y'all. I am going to beard the Google lion in its den next week. I mean I don’t make much on my blogs, but sometimes it helps pay the grocery bill in a pinch.  I've been growing my audience lately and my ad revenue has increased. If I can't work it out with Google, I may have to go through Patreon to fund my madness or take up stand up comedy or become a Youtube chef or something.

Thanks for listening to me whine!

© 2023 by Tom King