A Visitor Suggests I Go to Sunday School Classes from Planck's Constant

The Lagoon Nebula is around four to five thousand light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

In my article A Merciful God is a Vicious God, I wrote, "I am an atheist precisely because I cannot believe in a God so evil, so unmerciful, so vicious that he would allow a world with so much pain and suffering and misery."

In response, Frederick, a reader from Sacramento, California left this comment:

I am saying this....If you don't understand God, go to your local sunday school class and learn, otherwise your a dummy or an atheist.

To which I replied:

Frederick, I went to Catholic school, went to Catechism classes, made my Communion, went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studied the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, studied the New Testament in the original Greek, studied Rashi's commentaries on the Talmud and Tanakh in the original Aramaic and, occasionally, in Old French. I've Read the Quran in Arabic and studied Near Eastern Religions.

I went to Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible Reading sessions with my best friend Richie Weaver when I was 12 and 13 years old.

Bought 33 rpm LP Living Language vinyl recording lessons in Chinese, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali in my teens (1960s) so that I could better understand Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions.

I seriously doubt that any local Sunday school class could in the least compare with my knowledge of God, gods and religion.

Just because someone believes in God, does not mean they know more about God and the Universe than an atheist. A person who believes in UFOs does not a priori know any more about the aerodynamics of flying objects than someone who does not believe in them.

As for Sunday school classes, let's be honest, they are designed to obfuscate not to coruscate the truth about the universe. Sunday school will teach you that after God had finished creating the Universe he rested on the seventh day. Click on the photo above of the Lagoon nebula to see that stars are still being formed and the act of creation is still going on. Obviously the Universe is still creating itself. Nothing was finished.

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