Fallacy: God Will Reveal Himself

You’ve been approached by these asshats, haven’t you? They’re so quick to promise that god will reveal himself if you simply ask him to. It’s his promise to us. (God damn, these people are stupid.)

First off, god won’t reveal himself directly or indirectly to anyone because he simply doesn’t exist. But let’s put that stunning reality aside for the moment and stick with this most asinine and illogical bet-hedging challenge.

You’ve heard it before a thousand times…

“Just trust me on this. Pray to Jesus and ask him to come into your heart and he will reveal himself to you and change your life in ways you never imagined.”

Tempting the Lord

This is when you invoke some simple logic that makes your average bible-punching Christian start to backpedal…

“Okay, I’ll take you up on your challenge…BUT…if Jesus doesn’t reveal himself to me, then you must admit that he doesn’t exist at all, or at least that your challenge is pointless and a complete waste of time.”

Wait for it. Here it comes…

“Well, it doesn’t work that way. You have to REALLY believe it.”

“Really” believe it? Really?

No, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work your way. You’re setting a logically incoherent rule that BELIEF IS THE PREREQUISITE FOR BELIEF. Are you completely clueless?

This is where they typically downgrade their meaning of the word “appear.” They’ll be quick to clarify that god won’t appear corporeally (a-duh!) because it’s not in his nature – like they know the nature of god. No. Now god will reveal himself indirectly through signs and symbols and gifts and other such nonsense…that can always be attributed to random chance. But not to fear. Their challenge still fails on logic.

Christian: Lost in the Logic

Listen up, moron. I’M AN ATHEIST. I DON’T BELIEVE. Was that not clear to you? Um, hello? That’s the whole point of your stupid challenge, isn’t it?

How can I possibly [your words] “really believe” that Jesus will reveal himself to me? If I did then there would be no need for you to challenge me in the first place. The burden isn’t on me to [make huge quote fingers and say in a mocking voice] “really believe” so that I can “believe.” Please, just a little logic. It’s all I ask.

It offends my sensibilities to have to explain this to seemingly intelligent people, but pay close attention…

The burden is on your allegedly ubiquitous god TO REVEAL HIMSELF ON HIS OWN ACCORD so that non-believers will have SOME CREDIBLE REASON TO BE SWAYED. He’s got the chops to do it, he’s done it repeatedly throughout the old and new testaments, so his excuses are his own.

The Real Reveal

All these morons are really doing is manufacturing a delusion of their desired result. Just substitute the the word “believe” with “delude yourself” and you’ll understand.

I don’t know that there’s some specific procedure for conjuring up god, but I would imagine that it typically involves closing your eyes, bowing your head, and whispering some corny words of submission for a minute or two – blather, flinch, repeat.

Then after some amount of rigorous and heavily-lubed mental masturbation you have to purposefully realign your vivid imagination to believe [read: delude yourself] that it worked. This includes attributing anything good that happens in your life to god’s rather indirect way of revealing his influence – while ignoring anything that’s bad or inconvenient. I don’t think this kind of cherry-picking would hold up in any scientific inquiry as proof, but within the mindless rationalizations of gullible, emotionally weak, and desperate fools it does appear to do the job quite nicely.

Trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about. You just have to “really believe” me.
 

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