HOW THE DOCTRINES OF SIN AND DIVINE MERCY DEHUMANISE AND DEGRADE

The view that follows is more popular. It is that God designs humans for they are meant to be brave, kind, compassionate and fair is degrading though it does not look it. It calls the person who falls far short of these things less than human. It defines a person not as what they are but as what they ought to be in the eyes of some religion or God or Jesus.

Religion might say it considers all people human? Really? What if you had to throw a bomb to the left or the right and you had a virtuous person on one side and a shameless "sinner" on the other? You would be dehumanising the sinner where it counts most, not in theory but in practice.  You cannot pretend to hate the sin and love the sinner then as if the sinner should be seen apart from the sin, and as a person.

Religion lying about all this dehumanises everybody. Period. It treats us as fools not as persons.

Religion cleverly accuses anyone who is not bothered about God, especially atheists, of being dehumanised and opening the door to further forms of degradation.  It says that without God a vacuum is made in which monstrous things like murderous hate, Stalinism, you name it, can appear and often do appear.  Unpack that.

It can only mean that making that gap is wrong for you know some will respond by filling it with evil.  Yet it might not have to. 

To repress a need for God would be wrong if the need is real and can only be coped with by some delusion or by simply turning to God.

If there is a God who made us for himself then they are saying that if you are not for God then you will have something that is not good like he is in his place. This is an attempt to be bad to him for he is denied his place.

To rephrase, commonsense would say that if you reject God as he is, you can still replace it with a similar model, a fantasy friend that inspires you.  Religion will say this is still evil for it is putting an image of God over God and is a lie.  So near enough is itself evil.  Those who think that belief in God can make you a better person will not object to this deception as long as the person remains neighbourly and exhibits good qualities.

So let us talk about evil in a more natural way and ask if a gap could make us dangerous?  A person who cares about humanity does not care if God is lied about in the way we have seen but cares if more rabid clearly harmful evil will emerge.

To tell people they are vicious for making a gap just because the gap can allow evil is in fact programming them to become monsters.  It is trying to give them a monstrous potential.  The real monsters are those who in the name of God teach that not having enough of a relationship with God devises a dangerous toxic gap.  It is as if they want them caught in a spiral of evil.

They are saying that the vacuum is bad because of what it might lead to.  Yet we don't hear them saying that in the light of the Bible approved violence against adulteresses etc, that faith in God or alleged scripture is bad for what it might lead to. 

How good is faith in God?  How good is God really?  Not great if a person can get through life with an imitation.  And even religion admits that most people do.  Your wife is not that great and you don't think she is if you can make do with a robot version of her.

Religion famously says that evil is a distortion of good and so is not a thing.  There is nothing there for God to make.  So you cannot say God made evil.  So evil appears in a vacuum.  Then we are told that not every absence of good is evil.  For example, Catholicism says that if a trans woman feels it is unfair that she cannot birth a baby, she is wrong.  It says it is like calling God evil for not letting you sprout wings so you can fly to safety if you fall over a cliff.  Yet religion cannot say this and consistently say that the absence of a sense of God in an atheist is evil because of what harms might appear in it.

Whether you think the character of an act makes it evil, or whether it all depends on how many good or bad consequences there are, you are saying that bad results show that something immoral has been done.  But that contradicts the principle that if I fire a dice for a million years and its 6 every time that has not the slightest thing to do with showing it will be 6 the next time.  It is the same with harmful results.

It is not true that anybody really cares about morality.  They care about power. Everybody does in their own way.

We know there are people who we would call cold and dead inside. We would say that aspect of them is barely human. Those who say we should not dehumanise ignore this. Surely being human in the heart is more important than being human any other way!  Make no mistake, those who slam dehumanising behaviours and communications are not innocent themselves.

And you can talk about how human a person is but once you see them as an instrument of the supreme evil person, Satan, that talk will become irrelevant. If a tyrant is brainwashing a person to harm you you still have the right to destroy the latter in self-defence.  There is no practical or emotional difference between hating them as a person or as an instrument.  Hate is hate.  It is triggered by the threat of danger, and by fear.

You hear hypocrites saying when people burn down a mosque or something that they are not evil and the real blame is with Satan.  If people are evil then why are those fakes deflecting from that?  And if it is okay to fear and hate Satan, that hate will soon spread.  You will soon find that because you let hate in, that it becomes irresistibly evil to start directing it at new targets, especially those who you link with the Devil you detest.

Even forgiveness related to religion has a disgusting side.  It only looks good while it is anything but.

Forgiving people only because they agree with you or are good to you is really putting something else before them. It is letting go of a harm done but is not real forgiveness.  Yet that is the kind of forgiving we see all around us.  It is too much about us so it is going to be shallow.

Hanna Arendt said that our actions, even the heinous ones, are irreversible. And for that reason she said “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we would never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences for ever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell”. Arendt said also that no matter what we do we cannot fully know or know well what the consequences of our actions are. Or will be. “Every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction---we can never really know what we are doing.”

In other words, what harm is done is done and is still harming so don’t prolong.  Don't make it any worse, and don't risk doing so, by empowering it by refusing to forgive and committing yourself to healing the damage. This is not about forgiving so that you can feel better. That is selfishness masquerading as virtue. It is forgiving that you and others can be better as persons now and in the future.  It has to be about giving of yourself for others.

In actual fact, the answer when hurt is to live alongside the harm but give more time to helping others.  Forgiving is unnecessary.  It only blames the victim for helping the damage to remain very alive.  The erasure of the victim, the stigma, is what is really very alive.  And that is what the person that hurt them may want.

One way to dehumanise people, and it has been done to those enduring mental illness, is to dismiss them as not fully knowing what they are doing.  This devalues their place in society and thus them.  Notice how she accidently implies that God gave nobody any real power to choose good or evil for the evil hides so much of itself.  God then would be more to blame for evil than us.  If we are that bad at assessing evil we can't be much good with good either.  If he praises our good he is a hypocrite.

Only you can think this through.  Is it dehumanising to be told we don't know what we are doing?  Or is the problem that we make mistakes that people might call evil but that is only their opinion?  Are they just mistakes?  If they are then only evil people believe that anybody truly tries to be evil.

Religion says God knows vastly more than we do and when we sin we are indeed ignorant of how bad it is and how stupid.  I would assert that God needs to be real.  If he is not then saying that is dehumanising.  It is downgrading others over an unproven belief.  You cannot know God exists to the extent you know you should not treat anybody that way.

Back to Arendt saying we need to stop giving a past harm any more power to harm and to be aware that we have no idea of how it harms and what it harms. 

She does not admit though that if it is that clever you may stop giving it power to harm but she says it has a power of its own.  Your stopping the grudge might only be a small part.  Does not stop her trying to bully you and to get you to feel the problem is you holding on the grudge.

Anyway how does what she says apply to God?  Surely he should prevent the unseen and unintended evils?  To say that there are undetectable evils as a result of the evil I did last year, is to say that God is doing nothing about it.  A God that is no use is not a God at all.  A God who says the future is in his hands and he empowers our evil to become such a hydra and a pollutant is an incoherent one.  It is a fact that persons who affirm that their sins are forgiven do not see the evil outgrowths all going away and hold that there are ones they cannot even notice.  So forgiveness is only a piece of paper as it were.  The forgiven feels good about being forgiven as in some kind of amnesty decree as if that is all that matters.

We conclude that teachings that God loves us, has mercy on us, alone fulfills us for our nature is made for him, are passive-aggressive not to mention shameless ideological lies.  Basically a person without enough faith in God is called a freak, a sub-human, a distortion, a danger, a threat.