Atheist vs Cartoon

[skull_bearer]

I saw a cartoon on a friend of a friend's wall, she's a Christian, and it showed two people (creatures, whatever) having a conversation.

#1: I sometimes think of asking god why there's all this cruelty in the workld, killing, hunger, genocide...
#2 Why don't you?
#1 I'm afraid he'll ask me the same thing.

It's taken me a while to unpack why that cartoon made me so pig-biting mad. Firstly, I'm not a fan of having my views misrepresented ts a strawman shitout like that one is never going to get on my good side. Secondly, this makes god such a raving arsehole that I feel angry just having him mentioned. Thirdly... I don't know, I'm still unpacking. What I do know is that having an all powerful, all knowing (thankfully fictional) god asking what you're going to do about the mess he's made just pushes my buttons like crazy.

Comments

[shadowvalkyrie.livejournal.com]

I see where you're coming from; that kind of malevolent god would be a major dickhead.

As to the message of that cartoon though... I kind of like it! In its effect, it's practically as close to atheism as a Christian can get: humans have made this world a mess, so humans need to fix it. From this absent, uninvolved god (and that's what I'm seeing here), it's only a small step to no god at all, and the behaviour consequently expected from the reader (fix what is wrong, because there is no god-given meaning to suffering) is the same.

Just my two cents. ;)

[sorion.livejournal.com]

I... like this one, actually :/ It's about humans having free will. (Note that the first character isn't asking about "child cancer" or "floods" or "earthquakes"... but about things that people with free will should be able to avoid.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I might note that in my Omniverse Tales I take the concept of the theological all-knowing, all-powerful, 'all-good', all-present God and use it as the basis for a Cosmic Horror story in an alternate dimension. 'God(dess)' makes the world a mess deliberately and seeks to create sin just so God(dess) can smite people with impunity. This is also, I might add, the Omniverse version of Dread Dormammu. ;) This kind of thing is actually part of a storyline that establishes just what this means, but the gist of it is that God(dess) only allows free will for the purpose of Hannibal Lecturing the people that this entity doesn't like because the all-powerful entity's gone a wee bit mad from unlimited power.

Suffice to say that this is pretty much my view of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient entity that leaves the world a bloody mess with Nature Red in Tooth and Claw and humanity's history a litany of horrors. Such an entity is either evil in the true sense or too incompetent to bother with.

[ahina-gold.livejournal.com]

The cartoon seems to me to be about free will from a theist's perspective rather than anything to do with atheism.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

It makes far more sense if you are Jewish, because God *is* like that.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

All I can say is that it makes perfect sense to a Quaker (and pacifist)