This weekend, my family and I buried a much-beloved Uncle. My Aunt, his wife, has attended a Methodist church in their neighborhood since they moved there in the early 60's. The preacher of that church gave the "sermon" at the start of the memorial, following the burial.
I have never in my life wanted to slap a person more.
It was all I could do to hold my seat, and my tongue as I listened to my grieving aunt and her family sob unrestrainedly as this buffoon, this moron, "ordained by God" continued to speak.
During the course of his "healing" discussion, he mentioned all the dozens of ailments my uncle has battled since his first heart attack in 2002. In addition to the physical "suffering" that my uncle endured, this clown also had the good sense to mention the fact that we lost his daughter to cancer at a young age, and oh, yeah, for good measure, let's talk about the anguish of losing his grandson to suicide, also at too young an age.
Yes, that's a good way to heal. Thank you so much for that, representative of the Christian God.
How anyone can waste their time believing that crap is beyond me. As others have said in this thread, the God of Christian beliefs is a wanker. He's not worthy of being followed. He uses and abuses his "power" and his followers, and is more cruel than many other gods from mythology.
"It is a better world [without God/gods], a place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it's the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment."
Spoken by Arya in Eldest by Christopher Paolini, as she discusses religion and the divine with the protagonist, Eragon.
A heaven without animals for me is hell. In fact, a heaven where anyone exists in hell would be a hell to me.
The intriguing thing is that in recent years, Church's have started to relent on this point and to do things like animal blessing days and discussions of animals entering the kingdom of heaven. Why? Because too many people in today's modern life find it disconcerting, unsettling and just outright intolerable to consider "eternal life" without our beloved animal companions.
So the church, being a propaganda machine out to make money by capitalizing on believers, is relaxing those standards.
The same thing happened several decades ago when the Catholic Church decided to ease back on the "truth" that unbaptized babies who die don't go to heaven because they have not been "welcomed into the kingdom of God." It was upsetting to people, and upset people have a tendency to leave the church, which results in a loss of money.
Gotta have money to afford all that "bling" you wear to deliver the Sunday service in Rome....