Oct 04, 2007 18:55
"If, as Terry implies, it is the God of the Bible whose 'wisdom' I should prefer, I confess to being puzzled by the idea that I should consider a being who consigns anyone who does not worship him to his satisfaction to an eternity of agonizing torment as 'wise,' when my own, pitifully inadequate notions of human wisdom tell me that a being like that is by definition a horrendously wicked and evil tyrant. Any God who refuses to make his existence unambiguously clear, and then is willing to consign individuals to eternal torture simply for doubting his existence, can only be unutterably evil, and the fact that Christians think that such a God is a paragon of all that is good is a view that quite simply perverts any meaning the notion of 'goodness' could possibly have. For a Christian to hold such a view and still think he is 'better off than the atheist' reveals the intellectually and morally corrupting force of Christian 'faith' more powerfully than any atheist critique ever could."
-Martin Wagner