Sounds like a threat to me.
Of course it sounds like a threat to you; that is your presupposition.
And this is what I mean by letting people you know are wrong set the terms of discussion. You already know they're wrong. What is your purpose, to find the right answer, or just bawl about someone, somewhere in the world, being wrong? Because if the purpose has anything to do with the right answer, there is no reason to stay down in the gutter of dismal, neurotic fantasy.
It's like the armchair critics who think they're smarter than Einstein: You don't just concede, at the outset, that they're right.
It sounds like a threat to you because that is how you insist on perceiving it.
And it's not necessarily that you're wrong, but it's true I'm not going to be quoting Bob the Christian from summer camp thirty-five years ago. The thing is, you're not necessarily wrong, but neither are you necessarily right, because you're letting people you know are wrong set the terms of discussion.
Remember, consequences exist regardless of will. The people who make a certain type of cheese cracker weren't trying to cause me to bleed; it turns out something in the recipe really set off what turned out to be an adenomal polyp with a blood supply. Nobody was seeking to punish me, but the circumstances of the period involved a certain cause and effect that could be viewed as consequences. If I ate these cheese crackers, the consequence was feeling poorly and passing blood.
It's not cancer; it's middle age. And people do this sort of thing to themselves all the time. How many "not an alcoholic" friends have you known who drank hard despite expecting a hangover? Dropping booze and coffee in the same week isn't pleasant, but the consequence of consumption was agitating a polyp, not wrecking my liver and kidneys. Running through it with my doctor, he gives me a look when I mention dropping coffee for several days, but he knows the answer to the question; if he says, "Why would you do that?" as if to mean it was medically extraneous, the look I give him tells him beyond doubt, before I speak, there was superficial reason to wonder if I'd finally hurt myself drinking that much coffee. And he knows; his tone is sympathetic. Because the consequence of dropping coffee while feeling so poorly is feeling exponentially worse. He's been through it, too.
And Bob, the Christian? I probably can't quote him, but having to actually pay attention to American Christianism over the last nigh on forty years because of the danger it presents, that's the thing. People have been through the God-the-meanie discussion, they've already offered myriad alternative pathways. The one that stands out passed sometime in the Nineties, I think, because it's really simple: If all you have to do, in order to get your prize, is walk through a door, there will always be at least one antisocial who refuses to walk through the door. You cannot force him to walk in and get his prize.
I've heard a few versions over the years, and all it really means is that IHVH isn't God. If God can't save that person, then it means there is something in the Universe that God cannot do. But, in the end, if it's the loving-God notion about John 3.16, which circumstantially requires salvation, pretty much the only thing one can do to not be saved is to flatly refuse. It becomes a question of human free will. And this God thing? Clearly they don't have a handle on it; the one thing we know about their discursive lexicon is that it is not accurate.
Remember: People are human. If God could explain it to the faithful without human frailty screwing it all up, sure, that would be helpful. But you and I are also aware of why that perfect divine explanation never comes. What we're left with, in the meantime, is human produce. The Holy Book is wrought by human hands; its canon set by human politics. The analysis human, and considers human expressions of human perceptions and understandings.
"God loved us so much", runs the platitude, "that He provided the means for our salvation, but if we reject His gift of eternal life, we will face the eternal consequences of that decision." To the one, we can flip 'twixt circumstance and punishment, but, to the other, we still come back to the limitations of God, and that's what they're afraid of. Running 'round the withered mulberry bush might seem like good exercise, but it's a tight circle, and that's why the ritual is so dizzying.
As it is, the platitude is pretty polished, and polished pretty, but it contains a logical failure in the context of a monotheistic godhead, which leads in its turn to the question of why salvation is necessary in the first place. If an angel moves too fast to see, because the alternative is being perfectly happy standing still for eternity, then perhaps we should not be surprised if the faithful haven't gotten around to the point that salvation is necessary because God needed a planet to suffer a horde of retarded sentience.
And that last is easy enough to reconcile with science: Nature is not extraneous. Our consideration is not a question of if we could have or even should have evolved differently. Rather, this is how we evolved, full stop. If something else was supposed to happen, it would have; if we should have evolved differently, we would have. Our grotesque humanity often seems unique because we have a vote in our pretense of dignity and whether we intend to suffer the rain or drought, but the natural circumstances demanding such decisions are what they are.
But, really, there is the answer. To the other, imagine the psychiatric, and even anthropological impact. Imagine the rattle and shock running through humanity as Abramists finally come to realize that if God loves them so much, it is because he needed them to suffer existential retardation for reasons that, no, we do not need to know, and, furthermore, aren't smart enough to comprehend, anyway.
†
Once upon a time, I knew this guy who was a big animal-rights advocate, but kind of a one-trick pony, so to speak. His big thing was apparently a principle of equivalence, but he could only really apply it in one direction, like an accusation. Other implications confused him, as near as I could tell, to the point that he would occasionally deny what he had just said.
I recall this in part because it's been a long time since anyone asked me if the insects aren't pretty enough, but neither is my point to remind them to ask an agyraphagic orb spider.
Rather, imagine a "snowflake" God, in His Heaven, head in Hands, perceiving the inflicted suffering—not just of His beloved humanity, but of every organism that suffers, be it the veal calf, the bibb lettuce gasping and dying on your plate, every stalk of grass torn up by hungry sheep, and, really, given God's presence and perspicacity, can we really rule out microbes—and muttering to Himself, "I Am that I Am, but what have I done!"
†
It is entirely possible that, for whatever God's actual purpose, It needed that human beings should fulfill the station we do. But the effort of dealing with such possibilities really taxes the faithful. One of the problems of acknowledging the possibility of necessary retarded sentience is the idea of humans calling ourselves retarded.
For the faithful, the way out of that neurotic trap is to comprehend God differently. For the most part of its existence, Christendom has largely been an identity cult. Variable-interval, variable-response conditioning remains the most effective, which in turn might as well describe the vicissitudes of the human endeavor, so it's kind of built into the faith.
For the critic, then, the way through is to demand and compel that different comprehension; this is done by attending the record and arguing back toward more logical assertions of reality.
Well, okay, I suppose that depends on the point of criticism.
†
If the point is just to run around the mulberry bush and take satisfaction pretending to outpace what one disdains, then, sure, playing word games with frailty and fallibility is a great way to perpetuate whatever problem one purports to perceive and disdain.
Attending the danger means more than simply running around in circles and patting myself on the back for thinking I'm faster than the slowest example I could find. Taking satisfaction in this sort of rhetorical slappy-fighting only reinforces the fears expressed by the faithful. In this context, yes, pay attention to the behavioral economy you're engaging. And, also, when in history has supercilious, solipsistic two-bitting ever actually worked toward what useful end?
To wit—
Who here thinks I deserve to go to hell for my unbelief?
—it kind of depends on which hell you're referring to. Lake of fire? That was already determined before the world began, and if your persistent unbelief about someone else's neurotic complex is the reason, well, that, too, was to some degree foreordained. Annihilation,
i.e., end of existence and lack of eternal life? There are soteriological pathways by which that would be entirely up to you.
Meanwhile, consider the simplistic theology you are relaying. What do you think your would-be parable, or jellybean caricatures, actually accomplish in a market sector that believes such superficial, self-disrupting, religion? Do you really think the way you go about this will change their minds? Or is reciprocal cruelty, browbeating them in to silence and submission and surrender, your purpose?
The one thing you don't accomplish by posturing yourself as dumber than they are is changing their minds to see things your way. That kind of idiocy only works if you're giving them more of what they already want.
