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How Convenient Is That?


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My journey away from the Bible has been long. For a long time, I would get sucked back in by the convenience of it all. Sometime in 2008, I had an epiphany. It has been increasingly harder for me to accept any "holy" book as being holy and mostly due to what adherents tend to adhere to within those books.

One of the nails in the coffin for me was how god "punished" the willful disobedience of Adam by making him head over Eve, who was deceived. I can't make sense of that. In the meantime, women have been subjected to centuries of abuse and marginalization and basically told to suck up and live with it, because it's written in a book that is "holy" and "god breathed". As I told my husband one time, "How convenient is that?"

You want to hate sexual encounters outside of marriage yet be ok with wife rape? It's in there.

You want to hate same sex marriage? There isn't a verse for that, but we'll pretend there is.

You want to support slavery, polygamy, wife and child abuse within the structure of being "godly". It's in there.

You want to believe in a god who has a hand in all that happens, but picks and chooses based on no criteria that is discernible as to who or what's going to get intervention and who or what's not? "He's" your god.

I've come to believe that strict literal adherence to a holy book makes an arrogant hater out of you.

I just know that when I stopped taking it literally, I became a more tolerant and respectful person towards other people in general.

What I have not been able to do is have that conversation with anyone besides one of my sons, because it would upend my personal life to an extent that I don't think I could bear it. So I'm at church every week and do a fair amount of volunteering, but not really caring whether I do or don't. I do feel a certain amount of relief due to the not caring.

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If you check out the SIT, TIP confession thread, you'll probably see a "how convenient is that" type of argument weaving through my posts.

Why can't linguists detect an actual language when a person is speaking in tongues in an observable setting?

List the reasons. They're hilarious.

1. The linguist's knowledge is limited.

2. God won't subject himself to a test. It's genuine when the speaker is speaking under conditions that are not being observed, but take the same speaker performing the same action in the same way while someone is watching and taking notes, and suddenly God's not energizing it anymore. The speaker can't tell the difference. But trust me, God energizes it in church, but won't energize it in a lab. How convenient is that?

3. God promised NO ONE would understand when a person speaks in tongues. Acts 2 was an anomaly. Other anomalies include stories about people visiting fellowships from West Bubbagump, astonished to hear someone who's never been to West Bubbagump suddenly speaking in fluent West Bubbagumpian! At last, a confirmed case of SIT producing a language, violating the ironclad rule that NO ONE would understand (a rule that suddenly becomes as ironclad as a colander)! So where are these West Bubbagumpians? Gone. No one has seen or heard from them since. How convenient is that?

Etc.

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  • 1 month later...

Another modern example of "how convenient is that" ties into the post hoc ergo procter hoc fallacy (forgive any misspelling).

How many people can cite a miracle that goes something like this: So-and-so got a diagnosis of severe fatal cornitearjerkititis. So we prayed for So-and-so. Next time So-and-so visited the hospital, all traces of the disease were gone! It's a miracle!

The implication is that the prayer triggered action from God that led to the curing of the disease. Indeed, no other explanation is even entertained. To God be the glory, right?

But what happens if you reverse the results?

When my friend's wife was knocked down by a stroke, so many of us prayed for her. Prayed and prayed and prayed. And she died. Using the same logic as the previous example, I should be able to say that the prayers triggered God's intervention resulting in the woman's premature death, right?

Oh, no? NOW it's a fallacy? NOW we seek alternative explanations?

How convenient is that?

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  • 1 month later...

"This class will answer all your questions. All you have to do is sit through 36 mind-numbing hours of blather and ask us again when it's over."

how convenient is that?

uuuuhhhmmm...............Not so much.

It was 39 when I took it, and it was even more mind numbing. I sat through it 1 (one) other time as a helper and honestly tried to figure out what all I had to do to not actually be in there. It was worse than I remembered. I read all the books when I first went through in 79, then when we left in 87, I read them all again and couldn't believe how badly written they were.

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