I was just thinking about arguments for why if god created human beings, that he would punish them for behaving in the way he would behave. I mean, man is supposedly created in god's image (convenient, considering man created the idea of god), so he's punishing people for what he would do. So not only does he love you infinitely, it's on the condition that he also hates you infinitely and would punish you in hell for eternity for not repenting for masturbating.

It seems a little draconian to punish people for eternity, especially how they describe it in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Catholic sermons describing hell, where basically ever possible imaginable torment is happening to you in every second of every day. That in itself seems really excessive, but of course it's totally arbitrary how you describe hell, and a lot of religious people don't even believe in hell, because religious people are stupid and have no continuity in what they believe, and just believe in doctrines created to try to control the dumb bewildered herd. That's why human nature is so hated by some religions.

But the one argument which I remember from my confirmation class when I was a kid, which was given by someone else, to the question of why god would create us a certain way and then punish us, was something along the lines of "if we didn't have jurisdiction over our own actions, then we couldn't be free". Which first of all, begs the question of whether we're free, and second of all, raises the question of why you would want to be free if it meant god wants to punish you for whatever reason the church authorities make up.

Either way the concept of freedom is irrelevant to most people. Most people don't even care if they're biologically free, in a sense of the physical laws of the universe, or will try to escape the question by proposing an immortal soul which somehow drives the body and overlaps the body, and controls it through spooky magical forces. I don't think most people really think that hard about it though.

The only reason I'm thinking about this at all is because I've been reading James Joyce and I've been reading through parts with Catholic sermons, and I've been really really annoyed at page after page of preachers describing the torments of hell. Either way it's just a bunch of brainwashing bullshit to make people feel ashamed of themselves, and make them follow the lowest form of morality, which is doing something moral because you're afraid of punishment as opposed to doing it because it's the right thing to do.

youre a genius