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Father Knows Best

Brand-name Gods are in service to the elites who invent them. Therefore, don’t merely do what God says, investigate who benefits from God saying it.

One of the most frightening theological ideas is Søren Kierkegaard’s “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” The idea is simple: God is good and would never ask you do something bad, even if it looks bad to you, so do what God says regardless of what you think about it. In other words: trust God and abandon your capacity to think critically and act morally.

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Gene Roddenberry8

The problem with this is just as simple: The God you’re trusting is a brand-name God imagined by an elite for the benefit of that elite. To trust this God is to surrender yourself to this elite. For example:

You are obligated to fight even though doing so is hateful to you. But consider this: perhaps you mistakenly hate something that is good for you, or perhaps you mistakenly desire something that is bad for you. Only Allah knows what is good and bad, you do not (Qur’an 2:216).