Over at B&W, Ophelia is animated

[Dogmatic] believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, and that’s why it’s such a crap answer. Quick and easy answers are worthless for such disagreements. They’re worthless because they have no content. They’re empty. Saying “God said so” is exactly the same thing as saying nothing. It’s like holding up a street sign rather than saying anything. Why shouldn’t we execute gays for being gays? Why shouldn’t we kill women for talking to an unrelated man? Because Galer Street. That tells you just as much as “God said so.” Just saying a name doesn’t tell us anything. All “God said so” really means is “it’s what I think and ‘God’ is like an official stamp on what I think” – which leaves us exactly where we started. “God” is just the label people put on what they already think is good. They don’t put that label on what they already think is bad. They don’t punch “God” into a good-bad computer they have so that they know which goes with what. They just take God to endorse what they think is right, and that absolves them from the work of testing what they think is right.

Indeed. Saying “God said so” is difficult to distinguish from saying “the devil made me buy that dress.” I’ve had quite a few exchanges with dogmatic believers, including a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, for whom history and logic could be upended as convenient, and a Methodist minister from Alabama, whose claims to piety involved extraordinary temper and resentfulness. My attempts to tease out some explanation of exactly how they knew the detailed preferences of their hypothetical deities were unwelcome and, sadly, unsuccessful. At no time during such exchanges did I feel in the presence, albeit vicariously, of some numinous imperative. I did, however, feel I was in the presence of people who were trying, and failing, to hide their own egos, while indulging them with megalomaniacal abandon.

















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