God Hates Acne
By Romana Annette 04/20/2009
The World Wide Web is littered with God Hates websites. Of course, the most famous is Fred Phelps’ God Hates Fags, a pseudo-Christian tirade against every precept that Jesus ever taught. There is even God Hates Spam…halleluiah to that. As a point of fact, SPAM did drop from 80% to 50% of all email last year when a major spamming network was smote; however, it resurged back almost immediately to 70%.
Of course, we all know God Hates Acne, just look at the endless commercials and infomercials aimed at stamping out this blight. Just as the battle was being wrapped up, a new strain of drug-resistant bacteria has cropped up. Why would God allow this?
Many opponents say God Hates President Obama. Yet, the orthodox are deeply divided over this issue, since they cannot decide amongst themselves whether Obama is the Antichrist or the new Hitler. Complicating matters, many have already claimed that Hitler was the Antichrist, which means that prophecy has already been fulfilled.
What next? Will Obama be called the new Idi Amin or even Saddam Hussein? These new accusations cleverly whitewash the Bush dynasty’s tilt toward fascism. Also, what about all the crooked financiers who sold us worthless assets? They really sound like Antichrists.
What if Reality was one big asset? If God is the CEO of Everything, what happens if Reality melts down? Evangelical Republicans say that we are in safe hands, just like they claimed for all their financier buddies. Be afraid.
Why can’t God just step in and fix things? We and President Obama could certainly use the help. God did not personally step in to end the Holocaust; in fact, all historical accounts of direct action from God came from superstitious oral history and scripture that has been endlessly translated. People often do believe that God can actively fix problems, even if he violates physical laws, but people also believe in a high traffic of extraterrestrial aliens.
Creationists and Intelligent
Designers believe God can divinely interfere and expertly fix problems,
especially if the beneficiaries have sworn allegiance to this God. Followers of Intelligent Design say the complexity of reality proves that a
helpful deity is always tweaking things. A few years ago, at a Mormon Sunstone
Symposium in
I was flabbergasted; my eyebrows raised and my chin dropped. What? The redundant DNA, referred to as evolutionary ballast, is actually proof for Evolution, since it represents ancestral DNA sequences. The speaker hijacked sound science for his erroneous conclusions.
There is a concurrent Creationist idea called the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. This line of reasoning follows a table of dimensionless ratios, based on a variety of physically measured values. These ratios appear to be tightly wound. That is, they mesh together with precisions of thirty to forty decimal places. If any of these ratios should be tweaked, reality as we know it could cease to exist. One could also take the opposite view, that the cosmic fit is poor, since it only goes to thirty or forty decimal places of precision.
Imagine a Far Side cartoon, with God in his workshop, compass and straight-edge in hand, checking every calculation on his ultra-accurate calculator, flawlessly fitting all the pieces together.
Now, one could ask where God and his workshop came from, or if he even has hands. Philosophically, before there was matter, energy, physical laws, and even ideas, what was there to work with? How can one start with a chicken, move on to an egg, and then on to molecules, atoms, and so forth ? What was the prototype of reality?
In evolutionary terms, all of reality is in motion, so we are always looking at the current prototypes. Creationists say the current complexity is impossible; yet, they are once again hijacking sound evolutionary principles, since there is every indication that what we see evolved from some earlier state. Modern physics now suggests that our universe consists not only of what we see, but also that there are features extremely small, large, and obscure that we can never see. Yes, it is all tightly wound, and that is the only way it can be, because that is the way it evolved. Reality is like a really huge evolving organism, consisting of energy, particles, fields, matter, planets, stars, universes, dimensions, God, living things, ideas, and information in one convoluted and interrelated package.
Reality is so diverse, that it has even managed to include George W. Bush, creationists, intelligent designers, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. Many speculate that this was not a good idea. Aha, a new website is born: God Hates Idiots and Clowns. However, considering all the problems we face, it would just add to all the drivel about hatred.
Why would anyone make a God Hates website anyway? Having God hate anything implies some kind of a disconnect, since, in nearly every theoretical model, God influences how reality runs, either actively, or at least, passively. If God does not like the outcomes, how did they happen?
An obvious remedy would be to switch to God Loves websites, but there is a familiar catch here, since they mostly describe a non-inclusive God (the father) who will only love someone if they swear allegiance, and if they worship Jesus Christ (his son) as the rightful savior and only path to God. Conditional love seems just like another form of hatred. How many of us grew up despising tyrannical fathers who thought they were like God, or despising a brother who thought he was God’s gift to the world?