EPTSuperman told Wonder Woman in Justice League Unlimited that he could easily cure world poverty but decided not to because then humans wouldn't be responsible for themselves and rely on him as their saviour. And this is an argument you often hear from Christians who try to justify God not doing anything about all the suffering - "otherwise we wouldn't have free will"! Heck, I'm sure the 30,000 children who die each night from starvation in their dying moments would much rather be robots than have free will and be suffering while the pastors that preach that sort of theology sleep in their comfy beds and prepare tomorrow's sermon on the exact same message without stopping to think for a moment: "isn't Jesus a dick rather than awesome for saying the poor will always be with you so this perfume was well spent on Me".
As you are sitting here reading this message, 1.4 billion individuals around the world are living in extreme poverty, that is less than $1.25 a day.
There's a place in the ocean called the North Pacific Gyre. Basically it's where all the world's water currents eventually flow to - and thus also where all the garbage, old ships and plastic eventually flows to. This has created a massive rubbish dump off India where thousands of poor people, the kind you see in the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, go each day to try and scrap together bits of metal to sell on to the recycling centres to make a pittance in order to survive. Many of them get injured and cut and die from having no medical attention, and even more just simply die from the unhygienic conditions. But that's what they do, because they can't do anything else. The dump is the size of Texas, US' largest state. Look it up on Wikipedia. It really makes us realise how much more we need to be doing to save the world.
If what Christians believe is real then millions of people are dying everyday in order to become a part of the eternal torment. I look at the way Christians live their lives and what they're doing with their lives and so much effort is put into entertainment and having fun, so little of what they do is focused on saving the unsaved. Sure young people are brought to Christ through loud music and so all the resources are put into having a flash Church and 'awesome' events involving 'inspiring' guest speakers, and then every Sunday the big celebration is so and so got engaged or it's someone's birthday, I mean, if this is what satisfies a Christian conscience that all these other people are dying everyday then I don't know how they sleep at night.
One of the most retarding things about Bible-believing Christians (and I use the term 'retard' in its literal sense, not as a derogatory term) is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. By saying because God said so, or the Bible says so, it allows fundamentalists to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not, and on the flipside that their beliefs are justifiable when they are not. The Bible, an oudated book (just being realistic here, it hasn't been updated for over a millenia, unless you're a Mormon.
I accept the Bible teaches some good values but it's definitely not culturally up to date), allows people to be deluded into thinking that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - so when Pentecostal Christians are pressing concerns today (such as over abortion, or stem cell research or condom use in Africa) they will rely on the Bible as opposed to sociological evidence that has developed from research, science and the maturity of human understanding.
Let me put it in another way - a lot of religious concerns have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation, despite a genuine intent to be. Christians press concerns that inflict unnecessary and appalling suffering on humanity. A quote from Sam Harris' book Letter to a Christian Nation:
The Church expends more 'moral' energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. Or they're more concerned about preventing condom usage in Africa rather than preventing the millions of deaths from AIDS there every year.
Sadly, I was one of these Pentecostal Christians in my younger years. I was invited over to my friend's house for lunch once, and I was telling them about how great James Dobson's Focus on the Family morning programmes were because they addressed the social issues of today. And her mum said to me: "I used to listen to Focus on the Family back in the 80s, and I stopped because I couldn't agree with it anymore". And I was perplexed, because I couldn't understand how anyone who listened to the strong, Biblically rational arguments that got put forward by this Christian radio station could possibly disagree with what was being said - abortion is murdering an innocent life! Homosexuality results in promiscuity! Man was I ignorant back then.
I woke up to Focus on the Family as my radio alarm this morning actually and they were talking about depression and how it relates to God and the programme was just so bad I had to turn it off. There was a Christian psychiatrist on air and he was pretty much saying 'worldly' psychiatry had to go hand in hand with 'spiritual' healing. If anyone's ever stayed in a psychiatric hospital before (I used to go visit the mental patients as part of my 'social justice evangelising' at a Church I went to), you'd see just how spiritually deluded the people in there are and how they're utterly convinced that they believe in God and that what they're doing is about God and that the world just doesn't understand, when really they're just a burden on society but they don't want to admit that. I'm all in favour of believing what you want, but don't do it at the expense of the taxpayer and get a damn job.
Anyway, on to the topic on hand. Firstly, another extract from Harris:
Stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine, for the simple reason that embryonic stem cells can become any tissue in the human body. This research is essential for our understanding of cancer, along with the a wide variety of developmental disorders.
Given these facts, it is incredulous to think that anyone would be against this scientific development. So why are the Churches so opposed to it?
Because such research entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos. This is the Church's great moral concern.
So here are the facts:
A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that they can suffer in their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person who's brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.
Perhaps you think the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being. Everytime you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere.
We should throw immense resources into stem-cell research, and we should do so immediately. But because of what Christians like yourself believe about souls, we are not doing this. The truth here is obvious, that anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supercede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Given these facts, it is incredulous to think that anyone would be against this scientific development. So why are the Churches so opposed to it?
Because such research entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos. This is the Church's great moral concern.
So here are the facts:
A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that they can suffer in their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person who's brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.
Perhaps you think the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being. Everytime you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere.
We should throw immense resources into stem-cell research, and we should do so immediately. But because of what Christians like yourself believe about souls, we are not doing this. The truth here is obvious, that anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supercede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
So here you see that Christian moral reasoning is in fact, a barrier to humanist morality. Of course, a similar argument is made for abortion - that it involves the murder of souls. "Life begins at conception", doesn't it?
The Church's position on abortion takes no more notice of the details of biology. It has been estimated that 50% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realising that she was pregnant. In fact, 20% of all recognised pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgement: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.
And of course there's more examples of how Christianity morality is completely devoid of compassion towards suffering, like eating meat because God said it was OK, which I don't really need to go into.
Actually I have been a part of enough Pentecostal Churches and attended enough of their services, conferernces, lobby groups, think tanks and political parties to know that mainstream Christianity is becoming very very Pharisaical. Not to mention that besides all the rich pastors of these mega-Churches, the position of the majority of Church congregations are 100% in agreement with the views I have indicated above. Just go to any Bible study group/pastor of any Church with membership over 100 and ask them what their views are on abortion, homosexuality, evolution, stem-cell research, Israel v Palestine, etc.
I am certain a lot of Christians are a lot more genuine and compassionate about what they believe than I am towards what I believe. In fact, I'll go one step further and say most Christians genuinely care about people than I do. But if the basis for their views is retarded, then all that moral energy is expended and wasted on fighting for what ultimately holds society backwards.
One reason I stopped calling myself a Christian was simply because other people stopped considering me a Christian. In 2006 I still considered myself a Christian because I was a follower of Jesus, but a Christian group I was involved with removed me from a leadership position because they felt like the values I reflected were not Christian values - for reasons similar to the above - not believing that abortion and homosexuality were evil, not believing that you had to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior to go to Heaven. "How can you be a Christian if you don't hold to the central theme of salvation"? I had to sign a statement saying I believed this but I couldn't because it would mean I was accepting that my Muslim friends who invited me to lunch and paid for my lunch the other day were going to Hell. And it didn't matter whether 'God' thought I was a Christian or not, if the term is going to be monopolised by Pentecostals here on Earth to mean something then I couldn't be associated with it.
