Morons in the Hands of an Angry Patrick

Oh, John Edwards, you better be rolling in your grave.

It's Junior year now, kids, which means it's been quite a while since you've last heard from me. I'm sure we'll get back into a nice rhythm as I slowly remember to try and post some more ramblings here, so just bear with me. Anyway:

In  English class today we read an excerpt of the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It was a sermon given by one John Edwards to a congregation of Puritans. Puritans, being the nice pessimistic people they are, believed that one's admittance to heaven was preordained by God, and the fact that we're all alive right this moment, not burning in hell at these very moments was by the merciful mood of God. Oh, and apparently, God is angry. There's a lot of mutterances of God's wrath, yadda yadda yadda, we've heard it all before.

The point is, this whole thing got me thinking: Why do people generally want to go to heaven or even believe in God himself? It was the same tactics as used in Edwards' speech: fear. It's basically, "Oh, be nice and stuff or you go to this crappy place where you'll burn (also interchangeable with several other eternal damnation options!) for all of infinity because God isn't as omnibenevolent as they want you to think!"

A truly omnibenevolent God would put aside any number of atrocities one performed in life. The only thing that matters is faith. One shouldn't be forced into following a dogma of ancient traditions. Where do you think atheists find all their ammo for ripping apart Christianity? All those freaking tenets that they just have to stick to (I have a friend who is really weird with her religious side, and she didn't show it at all until I started calling another friend Jesus).

Um, I would've put all of that much more eloquently if I had felt like it, but I'm lazy. But as a positive note, the video to the song "1, 2, 3, 4" by Feist is quite entertaining.