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title, source, author, published, created, description, tags
| title | source | author | published | created | description | tags | ||
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| 12 Weird Things Christians Think Are God | https://medium.com/deconstructing-christianity/12-weird-things-christians-think-are-god-57105a7095db |
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2024-08-02 | 2024-10-29 | Most of the time, when you ask a Christian why they believe in God, they won’t have a rational reason for doing so. They’ll say they have a relationship with him and see evidence of him regularly in… |
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These things all have other explanations
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Photo by Tony Eight Media on Unsplash
Most of the time, when you ask a Christian why they believe in God, they won’t have a rational reason for doing so. They’ll say they have a relationship with him and see evidence of him regularly in their life. This means that even though none of us can actually see, hear, or feel him, they’ll claim to be regularly interacting with him.
I don’t find this compelling in any way. I can prove my husband exists, for example. Not just because I interact with him, but because I can present him to you and you can actually physically clearly see and interact with him, too. Meanwhile, me and other non-Christians have no interactions with God in our lives, even when we try hard to.
Christians will counter this by saying you can’t interact with God unless you believe in him and are searching for him already. So you basically need to desperately overanalyze your life and decide normal things must be supernatural and have supernatural meanings to them.
That’s not evidence. That’s confirmation bias. So a bunch of things always happen to Christians that they will say are God interacting with them, but really have other explanations.
I decided to make a list of common things Christians mistake as God that actually are something else:
1. The voice in their head
The Pastor in my church always loved to give a sermon from 1 Kings 19. It was about Elijah waiting for the voice of God. There was wind, there was an earthquake, there was fire — all super dramatic things that you would think would herald the voice of God by their dramatic nature. But none of them had the voice of God.
God spoke in a whisper afterwards. The Bible calls it a “still small voice.” Christians use these words to explain how they hear the voice of God often as a subtle thing.
For most Christians, the voice of God just is a quiet voice in their head. Atheists know this is their own thoughts and brain helping them work through stuff, but many Christians think it’s magic and actually God talking to them.
2. Natural consequences
Sometimes Christians, like everyone, do dumb shit. They’ll do something most people know will lead to bad things like cheating on their wife. Then their wife will find out and get mad, leave them, take the kids, and they’ll be devastated. They’ll go, “God is punishing me to teach me a lesson for sinning.”
No, you made mistakes and now you’re suffering natural consequences for it. This has nothing to do with God. This is normal, not supernatural, and maybe you should think things through better next time.
That’s all natural consequences are, not something divine.
3. Luck
Even though gambling is arguably condemned by the Bible, many Christians enter the lottery and pray to win it, as I learned in a recent article written by Dan Foster.
Most of those Christians don’t win any money, but some of them do, I’m sure. Then they think God and prayer are the reason they won.
Nope, it’s just luck.
Sometimes you get lucky in life and good things happen. Everyone eventually gets some good luck, but that doesn’t mean God had any part in it.
4. People Being Helpful
This happens constantly and it drives me crazy. People pray because they need groceries and don’t have any money, for example. Then someone hears about that need and helps them get groceries. And they go, “Wow. God just gave me groceries because I prayed first!”
No, that human being gave you groceries.
Humans are stronger as a whole when they help each other. This can be through charity, kind acts, medical breakthroughs, science advances, and more. Humans only survive by helping each other.
There’s no proof that is God though. There’s no reason to see a human being do a nice human thing and think it’s anyone other than that human doing it. This is not something I should need to say.
5. Coincidence
I get why Christians think this one. I mean, their god refuses to speak to them directly or actually show up for them in any way, so in a desperate attempt to hear from him and reassure themselves that he is real, they decide he must be orchestrating events in their life into occurring.
But to me, it’s like a child, who was abandoned by their father and is desperate to think their father is there and loves them, finding a penny on the ground. And the child says, “My father used to collect pennies he found on the ground and I just found one, so this must be a sign that he still loves me and he must have left it here for me.”
No, if your Dad loved you and was still there, he’d actually be more physically present for you and more direct.
And before Christians say this example is ridiculous, it’s very similar to something my Christian Dad actually does. He found a penny on the ground right before something good happened to him once, so now he thinks finding pennies on the ground is God speaking to him and trying to tell him that he’s watching over and blessing him.
Christians always have to think things like this or they wind up having to admit to themselves that their god might not be real because there’s no evidence of him.
6. Good Feelings They Have
Christians say that God gives them peace and happiness. The Holy Spirit is supposed to feel like a “peace that passes all understanding” in their heart and make them calm, happy, and loving in situations they otherwise wouldn’t be.
I’ve felt the feeling they describe back when I used to be a Christian and I think it’s just them being high on religion.
Life is hard, but if you can convince yourself that you’re special and that ordinary experiences or bad experiences are actually God working in your life divinely, then you can start feeling happy and high during times when you otherwise would feel bad or ordinary.
They get addicted to it emotionally and that’s why they keep turning to religion because they think it gives them purpose and makes them special.
7. Adversity
Building on that whole idea of feeling special, life is hard and full of adversity, I think many Christians cope through life by deciding the bad things they face in life are actually tests from God or attacks from the devil.
It makes their life story seem more dramatic if there’s supernatural forces focused on everything they do and manipulating each decision. It makes them feel powerful and like superheroes.
So they self-delude to help themselves cope with their life problems.
8. Achievements
Christians will work really hard to do something. They’ll go to medical school, so years of residency, and start their own medical practice. They’ll think that because it all worked out that God “called” them to that profession.
Or maybe they just worked really hard because they had a passion for something and made it happen.
9. Their Own Desires
When I was growing up, my best friend was a conservative Christian. One day, we were sitting and watching some missionaries speak snd she felt inspired by them and wanted to do the same thing as them.
She told me afterwards, “God is calling me to become a missionary.” She figured that that desire was in her heart because God wanted her to become a missionary and placed it there.
But she never actually became a missionary when we grew up. She instead became a film maker. Because it wasn’t a god speaking to her, she just had a strong desire to do something and decided that must be God.
10. Their Own Beliefs
Even Christians that believe the Bible should be taken literally and directly at its word, always think it needs to be translated in some way (by the Holy Spirit supposedly), in order to understand what God is trying to tell them.
==All other books in the world are just supposed to be read at face value, but the Bible is a magic trick that needs to be interpreted.==
This is how they cover up that the Bible is outdated and doesn’t make sense. You aren’t viewing it through the Holy Spirit, so you’re translating it incorrectly and that’s why you find it nonsensical. Their god says the Bible has to be a coded puzzle and you need divine help in order to understand it.
Yet at the same time you are close minded and shutting out God if you don’t get it the way they do.
And they use all this logic regularly to make the Bible say whatever they want it to say.
So, for example, if the Bible says:
“I, God your father, am a shitty asshole and think you should all be punched in the face.” They’ll say it’s not God being an asshole and threatening everyone, it’s proof that he’s loving because that’s what they believe. And proof that we all deserve to be punched in the face, but because God is so kind and Jesus died on the cross for our sins he stopped being a shitty asshole and thinking we should all be punched in the face as long as we accept him.
The Bible can be saying things they don’t like directly but because they say it has to be interpreted right, they’ll always twist it to make it say whatever they want it to say that matches their beliefs instead.
An example of this is Numbers 5:11–31, which is an abortion ceremony described in the Bible. I’ve used this passage many times when arguing with Christians. If God doesn’t directly condemn abortion in the Bible and has a literal description of an abortion ceremony that should be performed in the Bible, then doesn’t that mean the Christian God supports abortion?
They always come back at me and say that I’m misinterpreting the scripture. Scripture isn’t to be read directly but interpreted to match whatever they believe it says.
So Christians tend to decide God believes something first and they interpret the Bible to say that God agrees with whatever they already decided he should think afterwards, and then they call it “the Holy Spirit” showing them the truth.
11. Ideal Circumstances
My Mom is one of those Christians that prays for a good parking space and regularly receives one. She also lives in a small town, where there aren’t as many people to compete over parking spaces with, and only goes grocery shopping during hours when people are at work, meaning no one is at the grocery store.
So is it really God providing her a good parking space all the time or is she going grocery shopping during the times when she’s most likely to get a good parking space?
12. Predictable Circumstances
My Dad has a story he loves to tell about why he thinks my Mom is a prophetess. It’s because when my ex-church was choosing a pastor, he was on the committee to decide who they would hire. They got hundreds of applications and my Mom said God had told her who they would choose. The pastor they chose wound up being the one she said they would choose.
I keep telling him, “Dad. You just made her choice happen. You were part of who was in control of hiring the pastor and you wanted her to be right.”
But he keeps insisting he had no choice in the matter, even though he was on the committee who chose the new pastor.
I told him that I was psychic and going to pick up a blue pen, then I picked up a blue pen and gasped in shock. “Either I must actually be psychic or some things are easy to predict or easy to make happen based on a prediction.”
My Dad insists I don’t know what I’m talking about.
But it’s like when “prophets” or whatever predict who is going to win an election. Is it really a sign that they are connected to God if they had a 50/50 chance of getting it right?
Many Christians will see this list and sigh in exasperation. I just have an explanation for everything. I’m not even trying to see God in anything. I’m just excusing all evidence of God away.
But they really should be more upset instead that the God they value and believe in is like an absentee Dad that abandoned them all. You shouldn’t have to search for him everywhere for any small clue that he might still be around. If he’s loving and good, if he’s actually a big part of your life and has a real relationship with you, then the evidence should be overwhelming.
He should be physically present. Not you trying to desperately find any shred of evidence of his existence among a million things that have other rational explanations to them.
And this is 100% why, when Christians tell me that they know God is real because they experience him every day in their lives, that I don’t believe them. I just feel like their “experiences” are one of the things on this list and not something that is real.
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