The original title I wanted to use was something along the lines of "George W. Bush is Just Like God," and I might still use that, in which case I will switch my current working title for the phrase currently in italics earlier in this sentence, and the only reason you'll know about it is that I'm telling you, now.
There's a terrific diary up there on the Rec list right now, and there's so much traffic on it I don't even feel like waiting around for my browser to refresh. So I thought I'd stick my atheistic oar in with some thoughts about God.
And to those of you who think that an atheist has no business talking about God...why not? If the supreme deity of the Abrahamists actually exists, then He can be discussed, even by those who don't believe in His existence. After all, I can talk about the sublime intellect and penetrating insights of Sherlock Holmes, or about the big ears of Mickey Mouse, and they certainly didn't (and don't) exist.
No, my point is this: God is a Post Turtle.
And because God is a Post Turtle, He (I use the masculine pronoun intentionally and with full consent of the will) is almost exactly like our erstwhile president.
I am a great admirer of the writer/philosopher Daniel Quinn, and I recently acquired a copy of his most recent book, "If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways." In it, I found some very telling material, framed as a dialogue between the author and a woman named Elaine. I'll excerpt a bit, and paraphrase a bit. In this section, they're discussing some of questions Daniel receives, and he brings up one he gets often:
Is God (either from compassionate or retributory reasons) trying to reduce human population with AIDS, plagues, tsunamis, earthquakes, famine and the like?
Daniel challenges Elaine to uncover the "unvoiced assumptions" of the questioner, and she's stumped. He asks her about her early religious education, and she tells him she was raised Catholic.
Daniel: ...you're in a pretty good position to evaluate God's performance. His early experiences with the human race were pretty disappointing.
Elaine: Yes. He finally became so disgusted that he wiped it all out except for Noah and his family. Even the results of this weren't too satisfactory.
Daniel: Eventually he decided to adopt a chosen people to be his own. What was his thought in doing this?
Elaine: {snip} ...the idea in the short term was to champion this one people and help them surpass all their neighbors, as long as they remained faithful to him. [and it didn't work out]...too well.
{snip}
Daniel: ...he nonetheless promised them a Messiah...
Elaine: {snip} ...the Jews assumed the Messiah would restore their independence and put them back at the pinnacle of the human race.
{snip}
Daniel: According to Christians, he was the Messiah not merely of the Jews but of the whole human race. {snip} But only Christians got this message. The Jews are still waiting, and the Muslims consider Jesus to be just another prophet.
Note (and hold the thought) that Daniel and Elaine are talking about the work of a deity who first made His appearance in the Fertile Crescent, sometime around the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. That is to say, a local God, whose job description involved handling the affairs of a few intersecting tribal peoples.
Now the narrative has placed a "Messiah" in the picture, and Daniel asks, simply enough:
Daniel: If Jesus was sent to save the entire human race, why is it that only Christians got the message? {snip} If you were an omnipotent God, do you think you could have managed to get this message across to the whole human race? One way or the other — that Jesus either was or was not the promised Messiah. Naturally, Christians believe that they got the message God intended to send. But what's ultimately happened to Christianity?
{snip}
Elaine: ...It's become splintered into a thousand different sects, each with its own version of the message.
Daniel: They disagree on all sorts of vital issues: divorce, birth control, abortion, homosexuality. Not to mention the primacy of the pope and even the means of salvation. {snip} If you were an omnipotent God, don't you think you could have made yourself absolutely clear on these issues? {snip} So I ask again: What kind of God is this?
Elaine (after some thought): Strangely enough, I would have to say that he's an incompetent God. {snip} I don't think I've ever heard him called incompetent.
Daniel refers again to the question he received:
Is God (either from compassionate or retributory reasons) trying to reduce human population with AIDS, plagues, tsunamis, earthquakes, famine and the like?
Daniel: ...it is the unvoiced assumption of this questioner that God is incompetent. {snip} Our population continues to grow...and has done so steadily for the past ten thousand years despite such things. If he was competent — and really concerned — an omnipotent God would be able to do something really effective, wouldn't he? {snip} Think of something that wouldn't cause a single death, either of plague or starvation.
{snip}
Elaine (after some thought): He could strike ninety-nine out of every hundred women barren.
{snip}
Daniel: If you're clever enough to come up with that solution in sixty seconds, shouldn't an omniscient and omnipotent God be able to do as well?
Now, remember that they're discussing the qualifications of a postulated individual, and basing their discussion on two sources: the various Abrahamic doctrines and their stipulations as to the attributes of a deity, and the assumptions underlying a question Daniel got in his email one day.
For the purposes of their discussion, and of this diary, the provable existence or non-existence of a deity or deities is irrelevant. Put one way, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, Leopold Bloom, Mickey Mouse, Travis McGee, Miss Havisham and Yahweh don't exist and never existed. Put another way, they're all real enough to have inspired the permanent or temporary suspension of disbelief required to engender fan clubs, academic papers (read Steven Jay Gould on Mickey's evolution; it's a classic (PDF)), museums, collectible trinkets, movies, TV shows, and cross-references scattered throughout our culture.
Absent the existence of a huge intellectual, epistemological, cultural and political infrastructure predicated on the existence of the God of Abraham, their discussion is analogous to a student and a professor, examining the underlying assumptions of another student who's asking a question about the motivations of an important character in "Pride and Prejudice."
And in this case, the important character is a book called "The Bible," and it appears that the questioner is assuming that he's incompetent.
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At that point, reading "If They Give You Lined Paper...", I put the book down for a minute.
That really struck me. No matter if He exists or not: God is inept. He's bad at His job. He's vengeance-prone, apt to hold grudges, clings to the myth of his own competence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He requires absolute fealty and punishes those of his circle who deviate from his stipulated orthodoxy...despite being Himself confusing and ambiguous about what his followers are expected to do.
God started out as a local creation; a deity brought into the narratosphere by a group of Semitic peoples in the Fertile Crescent, way back when. And as the deity of a small clan, he did fairly well. Not very well, mind you: he had the same traits he has now, which meant that people were often getting on his bad side and getting killed or ostracized for their transgressions. But since God's incompetence was local or regional at best, people outside his sphere of influence didn't suffer because of it.
And then God got promoted through an accident of culture, in the blink of a geological eye, to Lord of the Universe. Should we be surprised that was no better at being LOTU than he was at being a tribal deity? God had invoked the Peter Principle; he was already at his Level of Incompetence...but thanks to a series of political accidents, He found himself in charge of the whole shootin' match.
And (unsurprisingly) massive screwups ensued.
Tell me: does this story remind you of anyone? Someone else we know, who started out locally incompetent (though well-connected) and through political accident became Globally Incompetent?
George W. Bush is just like God. And God is a Post Turtle:
A 70-year-old Texas Rancher got his hand caught in a gate while working cattle. He wrapped the hand in his bandana and drove his pickup to the doctor. While suturing the laceration, the doctor asked the old man about George W. Bush being in the White House.
The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a 'Post Turtle.'"
Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked what a Post Turtle was.
The old man looked at him and drawled, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a Post Turtle."
The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain:
"You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he can't get anything done while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor dumb bastard get down."
It's too bad that, unlike the God of Abraham, George W. Bush's existence is demonstrable and provable. Sometimes it really sucks being a member of the "reality-based community."
Now unlike many atheists here at dkos and elsewhere, I came by my atheism in the way you're supposed to get your guiding religious convictions: I inherited them from my parents, who raised me that way. As to why I've remained an atheist...well, nowadays I call myself a Bohr Atheist, after Nils Bohr's remark about nailing a lucky horseshoe over the door to his office, "I understand it works whether you believe in it or not." The effects of God's incompetence are plain for all of us to see; it matters not a whit whether He exists or not. God exists for other people; not for me, thank you. I'm not a fan.
I am not by temperament a proselytizing atheist, and for years I have preferred not to discuss my spirituality with other people; I believe it's an essentially private matter. But in these troubled times of crisis and universal brou-ha-ha (extra points if you recognize the source of that phrase), I'm becoming less reticent. Public advocacy and discussion of my atheism is my attempt to "...help the poor dumb bastard get down."