Angry with God?

Today I'm angry, not so much with God (I'm sure he knows what he's doing) but with religion...

Never more has my conviction that religion is a poisonous fiction that far outweighs any comfort it might bring been more apparent than today.

I only recently learnt a friend was in hospital & went to visit as he'd been asking after me & has no family in UK. He had TB which has led to meningitis in his brain plus he had a throat operation (I'm not sure how they are related) so looks like he's had his throat slit. He's been trapped in a blue box for two weeks & I had no idea!

He wasn't sure I was real when I arrived & had to clasp my hands to make sure. He said he'd been having terrible nightmares & that God will send him (and me, he implored me to repent) to hell for being gay.

Apparently today was judgement day (so its a good job I turned up to offer some consolation).

I tried to reassure him (trying to be the voice of reason in the face of religious delusion isn't easy) and said that if there is a God & he is good & all powerful why would a good God create hell? He could make it disappear in an instant if he so wished & if he didn't then he wouldn't be good or all powerful & therefore he wouldn't be the God he worships & who wants to worship something bad?

I also tried to make apparent the absurdity of God creating gay people (or left handed people who were similarly persecuted by the church in the past) & then condemning his own creation to hell. It makes no sense, but then little of Christianity does when you remove the cognitive dissonance that supports its absurdities.

Thankfully this seemed to strike a cord & he was finally able to sleep. I just hope he has more pleasant dreams. The ward nurse invited me in for a chat & said he has good days & bad days but they are organising a psychiatrist to visit him (a gay friendly priest might be better).

The best summary of the absurdity of Christianity I've come across is from RationalWiki

"God creates humans who, when imbued with free will, suddenly become evil sinners in need of redemption. He is supposed to be the omniscient/omnipotent intelligent designer of humans, yet he somehow isn't to blame for this fatal flaw in what he created. Anyway, all of their sinning cannot go unpunished (an arbitrary rule created by him in the first place), so this all loving, all knowing God decides that the best possible solution he can come up with to save humans (from his own punishment) is to take human form and subject himself to some torture and a crucifixion and have a blood sacrifice...to himself. This is supposed to absolve humanity of all its sin."

In other words the central absurdity is that God must "sacrifice himself to himself to change a rule he made himself!"

I'll visit again tomorrow. Im sorry to go on about this but I'm so angry at religion right now for torturing people this way. If there's a God I have no doubt he/she/it would be appalled at the nonsense in the so called holy books & pity our mangled reasoning & resulting self torture.

As I've said before my partner is a Christian but he seems to have reconciled his sexuality & his faith up to a point. I hope my friend can do the same someday or even better be released from the shackles of religion altogether.

So my blip today (which I took before I knew about my friends mental state) seems quite apt!