The Greatest Lie Ever Told: Introduction

God is imaginary and heaven a sweet lie told to comfort the blind masses so that they can better bear the hardships of life. Hell is an invention designed to frighten those same blind masses into conforming to a rigid set of rules created to allow the educated and powerful to take advantage of the less educated and less powerful through psychological terrorism. This is the assertion of the atheists, those who consider themselves to be the lone voices of sanity and clarity in a world of madness and confusion; those who believe themselves to be the sighted minority in a world of blindness.

Atheists claim that belief in God is nothing more than superstition, easily cured by proper education and the judicious application of trained reason and logic. They rabidly attack any public mention of God or religion, ripping out the slightest hint of it in our schools, our courts, and our gathering places. They smugly congratulate themselves whenever their efforts succeed, believing that they are "freeing" their fellow man from the shackles of religion.

I am well acquainted with lies. I grew up listening to them, have told them far too often, and have had lies told to me. I have never known a lie to do anything but cause harm, no matter how small or well intentioned the lie. It deceives the one being lied to and creates an immediate division between the two parties. The liar must work continuously to prevent the one being lied to from discovering the lie, and must live with the constant fear of being found out. The energy poured into maintaining the lie grows as time goes on, for the liar must work to not only remember the lie told but usually also ends up layering additional lies on top of the original in order to keep it all going. Lies perpetuate division in relationships, fear, anxiety, strife, anger, and depression. They also erode the sanity of the one telling the lie, for told long and often enough the person may well begin to have trouble distinguishing between lie and truth, between fantasy and reality. I am acquainted with truth as well. It is a sharp sword, cutting through darkness to reveal the light. The blade cuts through chains of fear and sets us free to move. When wielded with love, it doesn't just cut but heals wounds as well, removing divisions, and paving the pathway to justice.

If God is imaginary and Christianity a lie, it is the strangest lie ever told. It is the ONLY lie that fosters unity, peace, understanding, and courage. It is a lie that discourages lies - an incredible contradiction! It is a lie that puts love as the highest virtue, gives purpose and meaning to life, brings hope to the hopeless, and encourages forgiveness for wrongs done. If this particular lie sometimes seems to cause pain and fails to bring about what it promises it is only because those who believe do not live the lie perfectly.

Contrast the "lie" of Christianity with the "truth" of atheism. Atheism teaches that life has neither purpose nor meaning, thus there is no value in life and no value in living. Atheism sees death as the solution to suffering because it is the end of everything. Atheism teaches that we are randomly created, spontaneously formed out of a miasma by chance for no purpose except to live and then die. For them, there is no purpose to living a good life, and they have no measuring stick by which to judge what is good except by what "feels" good.

Christianity finds purpose in life, value in suffering. Suffering teaches us compassion for others, humbles us, and helps us to grow stronger. The child who suffers poor health grows up and is motivated to help other children who suffer with illness, the child who suffers abuse grows up and is motivated to stop abuse. The child who watches their parent die of lung cancer because the parent smoked grows up vowing never to smoke and, by their example, teaches the next generation not to smoke as well. Those who are poor become motivated to help others in poverty, those who are oppressed become motivated to free themselves. The mother who loses her child to drugs or alcohol becomes motivated to save other children that same fate and other parents from the grief and anguish she has undergone. In the face of suffering, we become fearless. The one who has lost everything has nothing left to lose.

History teaches us that the first sign of a failing civilization is a failing faith and a decline in worship. Human beings are genetically coded to search for God and to Worship Him. If we choose not to worship God, we will find something else to worship. We will worship drugs, sex, gambling, possessions, or money. We will become slaves of our chosen god, and that god will drain us of all joy and happiness, ruining our relationships, consuming us from the inside out until all that is left of us are empty shells. Religion provides an essential framework for our lives, giving us boundaries which protect us from hurting ourselves and others while showing us the areas where we are free to roam without fear. Crimes which were unimaginable are now every day occurances in our "liberated" society. Mothers and Fathers kill not only their unborn children, but the children they have spent years raising. Both Mothers and Fathers rape and molest their children. Children kill their parents and siblings for money or even simple anger. This is the world without boundaries, this is the world without God.

So I say that if Christianity is a lie, then it is the Greatest Lie EVER told and I hope that I NEVER come to see the "truth". I hope that I may always serve God, because He loves me and He asks much of me but what He gives in return is far greater than what I give. I hope that I continue to believe the lie that expects me to be my very best, expects me to love my neighbor as myself, the one lie that "dares all things, hopes all things, and believes all things." I pray that I may always see the value of eveyr life from the moment of conception through natural death, and that I may have the courage to defend that life with my own if ever called to do so.

God Answers Prayers

There's an atheistic website entitled God is Imaginary which states that it has 50 proofs that God doesn't exist. Proof number 2 is that God doesn't answer prayer. His argument is that God doesn't answer prayer EXACTLY THE WAY WE WANT HIM TO, and therefore God doesn't exist. He goes further on to say that we who pray and believe are silly, and if he's right about God not existing then he has every right to say we are silly. He doesn't have courage enough to permit comments or even provide an email address to allow rebuttals. I do feel sorry for this person, though. I wonder what prayer it is that he thought God didn't answer, it must have been something very close to his heart like a girlfriend, a child, a wife, or a mother he lost. Maybe a father or a best friend. However, I will write a response to him and hope that it makes its way to him. I invite him to reply to me. I invite him to comment. In the meanwhile, I will pray for him that he has a change of heart.
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You cite proof # 2 of God is imaginary as “God never answers any prayers”. On a scientific level, this is patently impossible to prove; therefore it cannot be a proof. In fact, all it takes is ONE occurrence of God answering prayers to debunk this “proof”. I have personally had many prayers directly answered, and many that have been indirectly answered, and several answered with a “no”. No, by the way, is a perfectly acceptable if sometimes disappointing answer frequently used by loving parents and by God.

You act as if God would have to play the big sugar-daddy in the sky in order to be believable, but I challenge that such a God would be less believable. Love has limits, love has boundaries, and love thinks of the greater good, not the immediate want. You cite as an example that if one million persons who were holy were to gather together on a single night and pray for everyone with cancer to be cured, that it wouldn’t happen. You’re right. Most likely, it is true that not everyone would be cured. God’s view of good isn’t always our view. You say that the overnight curing of cancer for everyone in the world would be an obvious good. I challenge that this is not necessarily so.

Cancer is the result of contagions and contaminates in our environment, our waters, and our air. We put those contagions and contaminates there, God didn’t. Thus, cancer is man-made. Now, if God cures all cancers overnight, our urge to find the source of these cancers and eliminate the source is gone. The contagions and contaminates linger, hurting us in other ways and in six months other people will have developed cancer. We would continue to think it’s okay to pour contagions and contaminates into our environment, becoming lazy and careless and expecting God to do the work of cleaning up a mess we have created. What parent that truly wants the best for the child doesn’t teach by allowing natural consequences? Those consequences may hurt, but they are important reminders of how the world actually works. Also, some of the people who get cancer will have changes of heart and remember the God who created them, turning back to him in prayer. If they become well too soon, they may not have this important change of heart. Some of the people who get cancer will cause other people to have changes of heart and remember God. God may save thousands of souls that would have been lost by allowing this one person, who loves Him and trusts in Him, to get cancer. Through that soul’s temporary suffering, God strengthens their already strong belief in him and converts many who would have been lost. God would rather save the soul and lose the body than save the body, which is temporary, and lose the soul. It may also be that some of the people who have cancer may need to die. These people may have allowed themselves to be so filled with evil that they hurt everyone around them, people like serial murderers, rapists, pedophiles, etc.

God doesn’t judge good by our standards, just as an adult doesn’t judge good based upon a child’s standards. A child believes that it would be good to eat nothing but candy and cookies all day long. An adult realizes that this behavior, in the short term will almost certainly cause the child to have a severe stomach ache and in the long run will cause the child to grow weak as the candy doesn’t adequately nourish the body, though it tastes good. Likewise, God doesn’t give us everything we ask for because sometimes what we ask for is short-sighted and over the long run will do us more harm than good. I invite you to read the parable I wrote in the post just before this, to help explain a little more.