The Word Of God

For those of you who use your religion as a weapon, to deny reality, and to deny the rights and humanity of your fellow human beings, I am talking to you.

Who made you the sole authority on what God wants?

I mean it.  Ask yourself this.  I hear so many refrains about scientists “playing God” or insults thrown at atheists and nonbelievers about how “arrogant” they are to think they can decide for themselves how to be just and moral people without the help of God.

And yet you sit here telling me that YOU know what God wants, that YOU have some inerrant understanding of the creator of the cosmos based on a book written by other humans that claimed to be speaking for God.  YOU are the one who decided to trust and believe the people that told you this was true, from thousands of years ago and countless translations and changes and politics over which scriptures were “acceptable” to the politicians at the time.  YOUR judgment and YOUR perception of which other fallible humans to trust is the one and only true authority on the word of God.

How arrogant.

As generations of scientists have worked tirelessly to uncover the truths in this wonderful universe that YOU claim is not only a gift to us by God, but that we have been made the stewards of, you persecute them and you abuse them and you claim that they tell lies for uncovering all the beautiful miracles and unfolding mysteries that exist in this world that God gave us.

You wonder why all the prophets have disappeared?

They haven’t.  You’re not listening.  You brush off the horrors in our world by saying “God works in mysterious ways” and it never once occurs to you that those mysterious ways might include giving us the scientists that uncover God’s meaning, the very people that dedicate their lives to getting a better understanding of this gift that God gave us, to learning the language of the universe.  These people that show the most respect to our gift are the ones denigrated by you as pretentious or dangerous or sacrilegious because the miracles they are uncovering are too big for your feeble mind to understand.  These people might help to solve and mitigate the disasters and tragedies that exist for us as humans, and it never once occurs to you that these are the answers to your prayers.

And you pretend like you’d be ready for the word of God if you heard it.

God speaks to us every day.  If you aren’t hearing it, you have shut your ears as you have been deafened by false prophets telling you that the reason God is gone is because of followers of other religions or people having sex or the advancement of science.

God never left.  YOU did.

YOU turned away from the whole of existence.  YOU shut your eyes and picked and chose which parts of God’s creation were worthy of your worship and love.  YOU betrayed the request to “love thy neighbor” while pretending all the while that it was okay to hate your neighbor because they scared you, because they made you uncomfortable, because they were different and weird, because, maybe, they showed you something in yourself you didn’t want to see.

You hypocrite.

You don’t get to speak to me about God’s word anymore, as you build boats and museums dedicated to outdated understandings of our world, as you ignore the living God that still speaks to us and through us, the children of God that are your brothers and sisters that you are damning to a living hell because heaven forbid you actually do the hard work to find the beauty and the love in all of God’s creation.

You don’t get to speak to me about God’s word as you create the hell you are terrified of, throwing your fellow human beings under the bus in a scramble to make sure that, in the limited space of heaven your limited mind perceives, YOU are sure to get a seat.

You don’t get to pretend you are holier than everyone else as you keep funneling money into false prophets in mansions that tell you that if you just give a little more of your cash to them, it will save your soul, that if you keep punishing and controlling all of the “different” people, that you will earn your spot in heaven.

You are a wretched creature.  You are a coward.

You don’t get to speak for God.

You never get to speak for God when you persecute God’s children.  You don’t get to speak for God because you are only human.  YOU are not God, and YOU can be wrong.  And you are.

Maybe one of those “mysterious ways” that God works in is in all those atheists and nonbelievers, the people who have walked away from your perversion of what God is and what God means, YOU who worships the false idols of a cross, a list of commandments, and a Bible, graven images that tell you in their very words that this practice is wrong and you still do it anyhow.

How ironic would it be if the very reason atheists exist is because they cannot condone the hypocrisy that permeates the words and existence of all those claiming to speak for God?  How ironic if they and all our scientists are actually the one’s following true to God’s word, being stewards of the Earth as we were asked to do, listening intently for when God speaks through nature, through our universe, through the senses and the intellect that we possess, through the gifts that God gave to us?

The only real question is, are you too afraid to see that this is the truth?  Are you going to keep denying the language through which your God is speaking, paying lip service to worship while all the time pushing away and abusing every manifestation of God that comes your way in need of compassion, and kindness, and care?  Are you going to finally realize that you can be forgiven for this if you can just stop digging in your heels and start loving your neighbor the way you’ve been told?  Are you going to become a messenger of God instead of someone who scares every decent person as far away from the idea of God as they can get?

I believe you can.

You just have to admit your sin, the sin of worshipping false idols and holding your own ego above your service to the gift of our universe.  You have to ask for forgiveness.  And you have to start living a life dedicated to God, instead of to your own fears and prejudices.