ABOUT GOD, RELIGION, AND INTELLECT

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

ABOUT GOD, RELIGION, AND INTELLECT
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I'm a freethinker, but logic causes me to lean toward believing in a supreme force. For me, whatever force is responsible for existence and the creation of the universe is God. Something caused the universe to come into existence, and whatever that something was, I call it God. So for me, God is whatever force, entity, or process that’s responsible for what we refer to as existence, regardless of whether God is a he, she, it, or the universe itself. That’s all we know, and it’s all we need to know - and any preacher who claims to know anything more is lying. 
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But I don't think God is sitting around watching everything we do to decide whether to punish us or not. The concept of God being preoccupied with us is only a reflection of man's arrogance and exaggerated sense of self-importance. The concept of God sitting around preoccupied with trying to get man to worship him is the equivalent of man spending all of his time trying earn the respect of the germs under his toilet seat. That would be stupid, and I doubt very seriously that God is stupid.
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thus, neither do I believe in Heaven or Hell - that’s just a concept created by man to get you to dig deeper in your pocket when he passes the collection plate. The entire concept just reeks of man’s tendency to threaten and/or bribe other men into subservience. If God was indeed watching and evaluating us, he would have hit the delete button long ago.
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We can only know God’s will by what he has done, and as I’ve said many times before, he made birds to fly, fish to swim, and man to think. He anticipated our needs when we were created, so he gave us the intellect to answer our own prayers and to live the kind of life that would create our Heaven right here on Earth, if used properly. If used improperly, we also create our own Hell, which we seem to be doing as I speak. So God doesn’t require a Pat Robertson or T.D. Jakes as his Special Envoy and Chief of Staff, nor do we need the Bible as a user’s guide to dictate how we should live our lives any more than fish need a swimming coach or birds need a compass to know which way is South or a calendar to know when to head in that direction. So as far as I'm concerned what we call "The Scriptures" are simply the superstitious rantings of 3000-year-old dead men. These men didn't know any more than we do - in fact, if they truly believed in talking snakes, they knew a lot less.
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That leads me to the concept of good and evil. Good is to use common sense, and what most people call evil, I call ignorance. It’s as simple as that. So, the key to living a good life is to be an independent thinker and to have the good sense to ignore the ignorance of other men. I've boiled it down to one sentence - Never give anyone else's ability to think priority over your own, because God uses common sense to whisper in your ear.

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Eric L. Wattree

http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.