bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 42,257
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
We know what is in the sky - Nitrogen, Oxygen, trace gases, dust, some birds, the occasional airoplane or balloon. No Gods.
In the Abrahamic religions, Gods are generally thought to be "above the sky", which makes more sense, as long as we accept that the Earth is flat (if it's not, there is no "above"; And that the sky is a hemispherical shell (or set of hemispherical shells) above the Earth, onto which the stars (and planets) are fixed.
As we know that the Earth is not flat, and that the sky is in fact an effectively infinite expanse of essentially empty space, the whole concept of a heaven as a dwelling place of Gods becomes nonsensical (or as theologians prefer to pretend, metaphorical - though there's no evidence that the writers of Abrahamic scripture were being metaphorical. Why did God get angry about the building of the tower of Babel, for example?).
The Gods just keep getting further and further away. They lived in temples, accessible only to priests, until people discovered that if you sneak into the temple when the priests aren't looking, there are no Gods inside. They lived on mountains, until people climbed up the mountains to have a look, and found no Gods. They lived above the sky, but then we found out that above the sky is just the vacuum of space, and when we send astronauts, they find no Gods. So they hid in metaphor, and became invisible. Which even a retarded five year old would surely realise is a pathetic cop-out by folks who have got nothing.
And yet, people still believe; And still look upwards when praying.
Humans are stupid.