Make Up Exam
God admitted to me today, that almost all religions are based on stuff that somebody just made up. Now he doesn’t have a problem with that. The question, he says, isn’t whether or not they are based on lies but on whether or not they do good things.
Of course, when it comes to doing bad things, religions have produced some doozies. But today is not the time to discuss the Crusades, suicide bombers, or pedophiliac priests. I do wonder, though, whether those enormous bads are made up for by the countless and uncounted small goods. What complicates the equation is the unknown value of how many good deeds done in the name of God would still have been done if there were no religion or notion of gods.
Getting back to my original point, the reason we were discussing the fictive nature of the origin of religions was because I was doing some light reading about Mormonism. As you may or may not know Mormonism was founded on information revealed to Joseph Smith by the Angel Moroni. I asked God if it didn’t not only show that Smith was making things up but that he had contempt for his audience that he claimed to get his information from his “moron I.”
God told me that through the millennia he’s found religions vastly entertaining but has been very disappointed at how little most people apply their endowments of reason to determining the authenticity of their spiritual leaders and stories. I suggested that maybe he had built a blind spot into most people’s sense of reason when it came to religion because he was afraid that if we really thought about it he would disappear in a puff of logic. He just tousled my hair and smiled.
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