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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: What God Wants
Message-ID: <277@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Nov-84 12:56:17 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.277
Posted: Fri Nov 16 12:56:17 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Nov-84 02:42:19 EST
References: <1376@pucc-h> <1731@nsc.UUCP> <603@bunker.UUCP> <462@uwmacc.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Piscataway N.J.
Lines: 31

> You're right.  People don't want to believe that there is a God who
> might (gosh!) make a *demand* on them for something.  As long as God
> remains vague and amorphous, saying "do what you like, as long as
> you don't hurt anyone", everything's cool.  As soon as God says
> "thou shalt not ...", or "this is right and that is wrong", well,
> that's a different story.  Man does not want to acknowledge 
> an authority above himself.  [PAUL DUBOIS]

Some people WANT to believe (i.e., assume) that there is a god who
does (because they want it to!) make demands on people for some things.
As long as god is pre-defined the way these people want it to be,
saying "this is right and that is wrong" (when it is actually the people
themselves who created the spoken words), everything's cool.  As soon as
someone else points out that just because they want to believe that god
is this way doesn't necessarily make it so, well, that's a different
story. (i.e., they get to label these other people as "attacking their
beliefs").  "Man does not want to acknowledge an authority above himself."
Perhaps "man" [sic] has no need to do so.  You might wish for there to be
an authority above you, but that alone (and "that" IS all you have) does not
make it so.  Just because human beings do not control the universe they live
in, that doesn't mean that there is something that does, and that tells you
what right and wrong is.  This is the basic assumption (or one of them) that
all religious believers make:  because human beings don't necessarily control
their environment, and because the universe presents them with things they
might not understand, this does NOT imply that there is a thing that DOES
control and understand.  It would be "nice" if it were true, but that doesn't
mean it's true.  Without this debunked assumption, religious belief falls
flat on its back.
-- 
Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen.
					Rich Rosen    pyuxd!rlr