People vs. God (eBook)

OPENING STATEMENT – PLAINTIFF’S ATTORNEY

Plaintiff’s Attorney – Lucius HellMan (LH)

“God Does Not Exist. Jesus Did Not Exist. Christianity Should Not Exist”

How Can There Be Evil In a World Created By An Infinitely Good And Powerful Being?

The Belly of the Beast – the Revelation of the Christian “god”

A House of Horrors – the Story of Christianity

Emancipation

Copernican Revolution

Reparation

Your Honor, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury:

God truly is on trial today. The Christian God.

“He” is on trial for crimes against humanity of which he is author, accomplice and accessory.

But I have to start off by sharing our three foundational assumptions. These, I think, are accepted by most reasonably intelligent people in the 21st century:

God does not exist. Jesus did not exist. Christianity should not exist.

And yet the non-existent Christian God is on trial because belief in the existence of this moral monster has brought untold suffering over two millennia.

The god of the Old and New Testaments is vicious and vengeful. From the first preposterous pages of Genesis to the unhappily ever after ending of Revelation we see a domineering deity who imposes diabolic rules, indentures all who fearfully follow him, inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on friends and foes and invents imaginary enemies (the “Devil”). Most revolting of all is his threat of eternal punishment. Those who dare to dissent from his demand of mindless submission are condemned to roast forever in the fires of hell – a foolish fantasy but one that has unleashed untold suffering on millions of impressionable minds.

This sordid saga of tyranny has, in turn, created a race of brainwashed, brain-dead slaves. Christians say that man is created in the image of God. This claim is right in one respect: they have been recreated in the image of their loathsome “creator.” The last two thousand years is a horrendously tragic history of oppression, persecution, exploitation, torture, war, all carried out in the name of the Prince of Peace. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-hunts, slave-trading, the burnings at the stake of scientists and thinkers, the wars fueled by religious intolerance, the destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures across the world, the pogroms, the Holocaust, the prohibition of any form of enjoyment in the short span between womb and tomb with a virulent and obsessive focus on eliminating sexual freedoms and reproductive rights – this is the legacy of the Christian god. The Christians themselves have single-handedly created a problem of evil that convicts their creator of crimes against humanity!

This trial is about holding this bloodthirsty Tyrant and his followers accountable for their gruesome reign of terror and stopping them from wreaking any further damage while also securing reparations for the irreparable harm they have caused. Since the Tyrant exists only in the minds of his followers, it is his followers that we must indict for their weapons of mass hatred.

I’m not going to waste the Court’s time right now trying to show that the Christian God does not exist for the same reason that I do not have to spend time showing that Zeus or Baal or Pan do not exist. If someone wants to say that fairies exist, the burden of proof is on them to make a case for fairy existence – not on those who do not believe in fairy tales! Of course, some of our finest philosophers and scientists have already done this job for us as our witnesses will show.

The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, the intellectual godfather of the New Atheist movement whose writings led modern philosophers like Simon Blackburn and Colin McGinn to atheism, annihilated all the so-called arguments for God’s existence. The most popular of these is the argument that you need a creator to explain how the universe got here. About this, Russell said, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. … There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed.”1
As you will see from the testimony of our cosmologist witness, modern science has indeed shown that the universe could come into existence without a cause.

The distinguished scientist Richard Dawkins said, “An atheist … is someone who believes that there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand.”2

Russell also said that “modern science gives us no indication whatever of the existence of the soul”3 and “today no serious neuroscientist will entertain the idea of a soul.”4

Then there is the question directly relevant to this trial. If there is a god who is infinitely good and powerful, how is it that we have all this pain and suffering and evil? According to Christians, God is the cause of everything and so he must be the cause of all the evils as well. It is part of the whole package.

When asked, What is the strongest argument against God’s existence? Simon Blackburn said: “Undoubtedly the fact of appalling human and animal suffering makes it hard to believe that the world is the product of an all good, all powerful, and all knowing intelligent designer.”5

As for Jesus, like the God question, I do not have to spend time at this point to show that he did not exist. The self-styled New Testament scholars have already performed that task over the last 200 years with their systematic demolition of the historicity of the book they supposedly study. After denying the actuality of almost every one of the events in the Gospel, “de-mythologizing” is what they call it, they leave us with a work of fiction. This raises the question of why these “scholars” should be employed at all. But, no doubt in the interest of their continued professional relevance, even the most radical of them have insisted that the central character existed – while also admitting we know nothing about him and all the stories surrounding him are false. But other more honest scholars have taken the scholarship to its logical conclusion – namely that there is nothing historically factual in the Gospels including its prime protagonist. In short, Jesus never existed.

Our focus is not on the existence of god or Jesus but on what is concrete and indisputable. Accordingly we will be showing that the god of the Christians is a morally despicable being. We propose to show this in a systematic sequence by

first pointing out the kind of world in which we find ourselves with all its pain and cruelty and the absence of benevolence of any kind;

then highlighting the kind of terrifying deity that we find on display in Old and New Testaments;

and finally exposing the barbaric behavior of those who are morally depraved enough to believe in such a deity, a depravity they have balefully manifested in their every interaction with the rest of humanity.

These three considerations will be a final nail in the coffin of this moral monster – “god” – that has been the single greatest enemy of civilization, rationality, innovation, tolerance, progress, peace and human happiness.

Now it will not all be doom and gloom in our presentation. There is a silver lining to these menacing clouds hanging over the human enterprise. The dark night of faith has been dispelled by the heroes of humankind ranging from Galileo to David Hume to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire to Charles Darwin to Lord Russell, who have deployed science and reason to overthrow the idols of religion. They have spurred on the human spirit dampened by superstition to regain confidence in our own powers of exploration and discovery. Instead of attributing lightning to the wrath of the gods, we come to see its electrical origins. The rebirth of the human spirit inaugurated by the Enlightenment has borne fruit in the new world of science and technology and humane behavior in which we live today. In his breath-taking book Enlightenment Now, Steve Pinker first says, “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned.” He then goes to show that because of the Enlightenment “The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being.”6

Of course, the biggest obstacle to all of this is religion. Russell had already warned us of this in the preface to Why I Am Not a Christian, “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue”7

I turn now to some of the main themes that will be addressed by our witnesses.

How Can There Be Evil In A World Created By An Infinitely Good And Powerful Being?

The first...