I am most pleased to present another compelling and thought-provoking guest post from LRFotS Randale6, who is evidently wrestling with the question of what is true, and who, among the various world religions, is right and correct. As such, he has written what is evidently going to be the first in a series that presents an Agnostic view of the world. He is most welcome to do so, and I will gladly publish them here.

I provide my own thoughts at the end of the post, as usual. And now, on to the guest post, which I provide here with only minimal editing for language, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

The Supernatural

As some of you may be aware, I am an agnostic, one of those strange beings who causes endless frustration to both theists and atheists. In a way we are Turkey, if Turkey was a person – no one else is quite sure what to make of us or what to do with us.

With that in mind I represent the first in a series known as agnostic takes, and yes it will get weird, irreverent, humorous, and towards the end very, very serious.

With that in mind let us proceed to the topic at hand, the supernatural. Donning me theistic goggles, I will do my best to not give you dirty theists false hope, you already have too much of the stuff.

Okay, I am wearing the goggles now, I can see those fat cherubs in the clouds, their wings flapping furiously as their fat chests heave. Looking down below I can see those red, horny dudes with pitchforks… one looks suspiciously like Ned Flanders, he’s torturing the most recent Rothschild… good, good.

On a more serious note, I am seeing some very… concerning things… and some very exciting things. You see above those fat, retarded cherubs, there is this very concerning set of rings with eyes, it’s looking at me… kind of like the eye of terror from WARHAMMER 40K, except more judgemental.

Looking back into Hell, I am getting even more spooked – while I heartily approve of torturing Rothschilds, I am not a particular fan of seeing Julius Caesar being murdered by his colleagues on endless repeat… I mean come on, he died before Christ was even born, why on earth should he burning in hell? He never had a chance to repent at all because the Christian god decided it wasn’t time yet for the incarnation…

Turning towards the East, I am struck by something I never realised about Jannah, the Islamic Heaven. At least according to the most popular translation of the Koran each man who made it to Jannah is entitled to 72 virgin houris. Looking upon them I now understand why each man gets a mansion at least as large as Saudi Arabia, Allah, in his ingenuity, realised the problem with having 72 wives… each of them would endlessly bitch if they knew about the other 71.

Allah, being all wise and cunning had thus given each man an abode big enough that all the wives were sequestered from each other… however he did not account for all of them bitching, “where the F**K is he, I am horny and depressed!”

Then I looked down into the Islamic hell, as it indeed said in the Koran the primary inhabitants are women. It was kind of satisfying actually, every variety of feminist was on display, shrieking shrilly in death as she had in life… except this time there were no men to hear her bitching!

Venturing further east, I saw a great mountain, along each step was a man in the classic Buddha pose. As you ascended the mountain each step was home to fatter, jollier Buddhas. At the summit I asked the biggest, jolliest Buddha of them all why he was so crestfallen. He said unto me, “to reach Nirvana I must now… diet.”

I then coaxed the summit Buddha to take me on a tour of the various layers of existence, explaining to him that such a long walk would surely help him to lose the weight needed to reach Nirvana. Obliging me, we first stepped into the Buddhist hell known as “bug-squash”.

As I looked at all the humans being repeatedly squashed by giant cockroaches my guide told me that these people were here because they had squashed bugs in life… one man yelled out at my guide, “it’s not my fault, I sat on that cockroach accidentally!”

I went so far east that I circled back to the West, there I saw the Three Kingdoms of Mormondom. They weren’t that bad to be honest, the men had less wives than the Muslims, but their wives were significantly less bitchy… perhaps on account of them being not so numerous that their husband couldn’t service them all in a reasonable time.

Looking towards the Mormon hell (known as spirit prison) I saw that the missionaries were still hard at work, if I must go to any hell, please let it be spirit prison! The prisoners even have a release date!

Time to Get Serious – Very Serious

Now that I have taken off my theist goggles, my reason has returned to me… and I am terrified. My rational mind is telling me that I just escaped from multiple hells unscathed, and essentially had tea (or rather, a nice walk) with a being whose farts could cause tsunamis.

Let us consider this assumption: all the myths are true. There is a Christian god, there is Allah, there is Yahweh, there is Buddha(s), there are angels, there are demons, and who knows what else. If this is true anytime a human contacts the supernatural (either intentionally or unintentionally) that human becomes rather like the Aztecs… meeting the Spanish.

We all know how that went…

This logically leads to my next point, the only safe and rational response to encountering the supernatural is… the WARHAMMER 40K solution: purge it with fire (or whatever else works). We can’t play around with this shit, trust me, the Aztecs would have been infinitely happ-umm… that’s the wrong word, let’s try “better off”… if they had riddled those fancy galleons with fire arrows and sent the Conquistadores to a watery grave.

This should be our attitude to the supernatural, it is after all one of the few consistent things we see in myths, legend, and religion the world over… Humans always play a role in inviting (or at least encouraging) these things into our world. Whether it was Eve committing the first safety violation, the Aztecs sacrificing thousands to their “gods” (or demons, kind of hard to tell which), or Mohammed listening to a “holy angel” (or psychotic demon, again hard to tell) humans either invite it in or listen to it.

Neither of these is a good thing, if someone from a different strain of humanity (let’s say a Chinese person or to be really racist, a Jew) is trying to convince you to buy their wondrous medicine/bauble/trinket/whatever it is they will tell you all sorts of sweet lies to make you buy it.

If just another human is willing to do this to you, what do you think one of these supernatural entities would tell you?

The Didact Speaks

May I first commend our young friend for taking the necessary steps to think through what is true, and what is right. This is critically important, for if we do not orient ourselves toward the truth, it is impossible to avoid falling into the traps of lies.

Now, let us address a few of the points above, for there are a series of misconceptions around Christianity, as well as other religions, that require mild-to-moderate corrections.

The commonly held view of cherubs being ruddy-faced angelic-looking children with wings, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, a proper Christian understanding of heavenly beings should, when correctly depicted, TERRIFY people.

“Cherub” is an Anglicisation of the Hebrew term, kerubim – and this is what a kerubim actually looks like, according to the descriptions provided in Ezekiel:

That, by the way, is perhaps the least terrifying version of the kerubim. A better version can be found here:

Now, on to the point about pagans being tortured in Hell – this is, at best, a misguided interpretation of Christian historical doctrine. In fact, the early Church Fathers held immense respect for the pagan Romans. There is a reason why pagan Roman centurions have a place of pride in the New Testament – see e.g. Matthew 8:5-13, or Acts 10. It is because, despite their pagan ways, the Romans adhered to a strict code of honour and virtue, and they held themselves to an extremely high standard of morality (at least, in theory).

Moreover, Paul addressed the issue of whether pagans receive grace from God, in Romans 1. It is all right there. God the Father made His Law evident to the entire world, through the fundamental laws of nature, which He wrote upon the human heart. Those peoples that obeyed that Law, saw God even if they never met Jesus Himself.

For such people, there is salvation.

But for those who received God’s Law against murder, idolatry, child sacrifice, sexual immorality, and so on – and then chose to ignore it anyway… there is only hellfire.

This is not unique to the New Testament. It is true in the Old as well. God is absolutely unsparing in His wrath toward the unrighteous – but He shows great mercy to those who repent, and He is patient far beyond mortal understanding. Look at Jonah 5, in which Nineveh repents its sin, and God spares the city. Or look at Genesis 18, in which Abraham intercedes for Sodom, and God spares the city on the basis of its having just 10 righteous men.

So, if we take the text of the Bible seriously, we cannot reasonably conclude God hates pagans outright and refuses to allow them near His presence. That is simply not true. He hates IMMORAL pagans, with an absolutely unquenchable fiery wrath. But VIRTUOUS pagans – such as the Roman and Greek Stoics, for instance, and not just them – get great favour from God.

Also, the understanding of Hell is particularly problematic – and not just for agnostics. Most Christians think of Hell as a place of eternal burning torment. It sort of is. But it is ALSO a place of total isolation and condemnation.

Imagine being in a silent, completely isolated, noiseless, light-less cell, FOREVER – that is both burning hot, AND freezing cold, at the same time.

And imagine you will never, ever hear another human voice near you – not even the voice of a torturer.

Imagine being completely shut off from any kind of contact, even hostile contact of any sort, FOREVER.

Now imagine CHOOSING to be there yourself, because you hate God.

THAT, my friends, is Hell. The Gates of Hell are locked from within. The people who are there, WANT to be there, because they rejected God of their own free will.

Then there is the stereotypical vision of Jannah. The Koran and the hadith are rather more explicit than what our friend mentions, actually. In Jannah, the shahids get 72 houris – though there is considerable controversy over whether this is a reference to women, or grapes, due to the issue over the Syro-Aramaic origins of the text – as well as bright-eyed boys to service them.

Not only that, but the hadith and tafsir state that men who enter Jannah will be forever 31, no matter how old they were when they died. They will have a penis that never goes limp, stretching all the way to the heavens, and the women in Jannah will have derrieres a mile wide, and their vaginas will fit the penises of the men perfectly.

Oh, and did I mention that the women there will be so white, you can see through their bones to the very marrow?

I am not making any of this up. Just go lookup the Izzlamist sources, or read Christian Prince‘s book, Sex and Allah. Better yet, just watch and listen to his videos, like I do.

One does not have to be a Christian to realise this is a filthy pornographic vision of “heaven”. In fact, it is outright and blatantly STOLEN from pagan visions of heaven – specifically, from the Persians. This is not surprising, given Izzlam is a completely incoherent, man-made, and ridiculous religion, built up over centuries through stealing and mashing together Christian Syro-Aramaic lectionaries, Persian poetry, and pagan Arab practices.

On the subject of Buddhism – I have addressed this before, when I wrote a post some years ago about the sheer incoherence of the notion of reincarnation, as explicated by the Buddhists and Hindus. It is all illogical nonsense.

Think about it. Suppose you act badly in life – by whatever definition of “bad” happens to be in vogue at the time – and are reborn as a wasp, or a mosquito, or a banana slug. How, exactly, do you define good action for a creature with an extremely short lifespan, and no moral compass to speak of? How do you define “goodness” for an insect? What does “good” look like for such a creature?

This is why the whole concept of reincarnation is silly. It literally makes no sense whatsoever, the way Buddhists and Hindus (and others) think about it.

As for Mormons – keep in mind, the entire doctrine of Mormonism is utterly incoherent. It starts with the view that Jesus and Satan are spirit-brothers, and that Mormons, when they die, will send their spirits throughout the Universe to populate and rule over entire planets as spirit-kings (or something along those lines). There is a LOT wrong with Mormonism, just as there is a very great deal wrong with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who deny the Trinity, and therefore condemn themselves on the basis of what the Bible itself says), and especially with the Muslims.

All of this leads to the last major point our friend makes: let us assume all of the myths are true, and there are many gods.

In fact, from a Christian perspective, there ARE many gods. The Bible and the deuterocanonical texts (e.g. 1 Enoch) make this perfectly clear. There is, however, ONLY ONE true Creator. And it is HIS Law we must follow.

Our friend’s attitude to the supernatural, is to leave it at arm’s length, because it is too terrifying to contemplate. This is not a new attitude, either. The legendary exchange of letters between Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft presented two very different views on how to deal with the supernatural, in the absence of belief in Christian salvation and a true Creator. Howard took a romantic view that the “noble savage” provided a way to deal with the horrors of the supernatural realm – while Lovecraft took a rationalist view that said we humans are merely the playthings of unimaginably powerful and terrifying supernatural entities that look at us with either scorn or ravening hunger.

Both views have their roots in debates going back millennia. And both views ultimately ignore the bigger picture, which ONLY the Bible, out of ALL religious texts, tackles in its entirety.

That picture is the eternal war between God’s vision of a Creation that exists in harmony with His Will, and the attempts by entities HE HIMSELF CREATED, which used the freedom He gave them, to violate that vision and destroy it.

Once you understand this, you will understand how the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, encapsulates this story and tells it in detail.

And then, you will understand how and why the only possible solution to this eternal dilemma, is Jesus Christ.