If something was God’s plan and God’s creation, it is God’s fault. Clearly.

Seems like pretty straightforward logic to me. If God made everything with a divine plan in mind — that included man sinning — then the sin is God’s fault. God is guilty of the sin.

Which is pretty goddamn upsetting, because all these people are running around trying to say that we’re sinners when it’s ultimately, in their myth, the God they worship who is responsible for all the sin in the first place.

We’re not second-class citizens of the universe who have to say we’re morally inferior to God. Wherever this universe “came from” (whatever that means — there are indications that this question is nonsense), we are part of it, not inferior to it. My hand is not inferior to me — it is part of me. If someone kills a guy with a knife, they can’t excuse themselves by saying that their hand did it, not them. No, it’s their hand, their plan — so it’s fundamentally their fault.

A lot of Christians don’t see it that way. Last night, when discussing the question with a few Christians, the following counterarguments came up:

1. God’s ultimate plan was for something better, so what God did wasn’t sin.

Response: There are two problems with that. The first is the obvious objection that some things are really, really terrible, and it seems somewhat insensitive to think that’s OK because there will be a happily ever after sometime. Christopher Hitchens stated this well when he said:

“What about Fraulein Freissel in Austria…whose father-unwilling to get out of the way-kept her in a dungeon where she didn’t see daylight for 24 years and came down most nights to rape and sodomize her, often in front of the children who were the victims of the previous attacks and offenses? Imagine how she must have begged him? Imagine how she must have pleaded. Imagine for how long. Imagine how she must have prayed every day, how she must have beseeched heaven. “Imagine, for 24 years, and no answer at all…nothing, NOTHING! Now, you say, that’s all right that she went through that because she’ll get a better deal in another life. I have to ask you, if you can be morally or ethically serious and postulate such a question. No, THAT had to happen and heaven did watch it with indifference, because it knows that that score will later on be settled, so it was well worth the going through it, she’ll have a better time next time. “I don’t see how you can look anyone…anyone in the face, or live with yourself and say anything so hideously, wickedly immoral as that or even imply it.”

The second is that, even if God’s ultimate plan was for something better, God still orchestrated the sin. Ultimately, the sin is all his fault — we’re completely made by him, the world we are in is completely made by him, and the plan is completely his engineering. So he’s still guilty for the sin even if it somehow leads to something better.

2. God is higher up on the hierarchy, so he can’t sin.

Response: So…God is higher on the hierarchy on what basis? His power? Then you’re saying “might makes right” — which is bad logic here. The mere fact that God is powerful does not make the sin he crafted and planned out not his fault. Power does not exempt one from hypocrisy.

3. Even though your logic makes sense (yes, a couple of them actually admitted this), we should just trust that God knows more than we do. The potter knows more than the clay.

Response: This is a cop-out. And it wouldn’t bother me if people didn’t use this “just trust God” logic to let God off the hook and put other people on it. This is the height of hypocrisy — you can’t expect me to believe that God is not hypocritical “just because.”

I think the logic is clear here. And I think Christians are making this whole deal way more complicated than it needs to be to circumvent the obvious logic that if God created everything, and had a plan, and man’s sin in that plan, then, at the bottom of it, it’s God’s fault.

4. Is a son’s sin a parent’s fault? No, right? So our sin isn’t God’s fault.

Response: We’ll look at a specific case to make the cause more clear. Last night, one of the Christians asked me if it’s a parent’s fault that their son becomes a serial killer, thinking that God, like the parent, would be left off the hook.

I said they were missing a few details in the story. The parent would have had to intentionally created the child with the full knowledge the child would be serial killer. More than that, the parent would have to manipulate the child’s genetics and plan out the circumstances of his life in a way that would cause the child to wind up a serial killer. In other words, the parent would have had to plan out every part of the child’s life and body in such a way that the child would become this criminal.

Now, I think it’s clear that that parent would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, at the very least, because the orchestration is the parents’ fault, from start to finish.

5. You’re just trying to avoid being accountable to God.

Response: A few times in the discussion, I was accused of just trying to avoid being accountable to God.

I responded by saying I was Guilty as charged. I don’t want to be accountable to a nonexistent God but, more than that, I don’t want anyone to feel they are being held accountable to this God. I love them too much to have them follow a nonexistent hypocrite, feeling inferior and unworthy of His love their entire lives because The Myth said they were guilty for something that He is, ultimately, guilty for.

6. Why is this important? Are you just trying to score a cheap theological point?

Response: Because an important truth is that we are, all of us, part of this universe. We belong here. We aren’t all sinners in need of grace. We’re humans, and our basic existence belongs in the universe without apology.

Which is why a nonexistent God who says otherwise doesn’t make sense and needs to go. I mean, according to the myth, He committed the biggest sin of all by creating the circumstances and putting the plan in place for all sins, and then he decided to blame it on the humanity I love.

Christendom has had its share of hypocrisy these days, but this one really takes the cake.

It’s time for the hypocrite God to go, and it’s time to stop thinking we need the grace of a superior guy in the sky to justify our existence.

Maybe we should join hands with our neighbors without thinking that a nonexistent God knows more about them than they do. Just sayin’.

Thanks for reading.