O’Connor wrote, “…God wouldn’t have that problem, so a benign dictatorship might be paradise,” but it seems to me that a benign dictatorship is an oxymoron. And this same oxymoron is the reason why God is a ball of conflict that creates a ball of conflict in its believers. It’s just not possible in our world of opposites, friction, and contrasts for something or someone to be all good, as well as good for all. It’s an impossibility, so one would have to pretend that it’s possible or simply to ignore the reality of the impossibility. It seems the Taoists may have communicated it best when they created the yin-yang symbol, showing that life is the totality of consciousness and therefore all that exists depends upon its opposite. For there to be evil there must be good, for cold there needs to be hot, for beautiful there needs to be ugliness, and so on. The senses would be of no use if there were no differentiation; and to create differentiation there must be some thing that “is not” in order for some thing to be or to become.

Religion is divisive and breeds divisiveness, conflict, and all the negative emotions and acts, simply because it is in eternal denial of its own limitations, absurdities, and ignorance — ignoring the truth about life. We are as much creators as we are destroyers.

Not only is the idea of a perfect being, a benevolent god, or an all-loving and positive deity an absurdity, but it is also an impossibility. Even the acts of breathing and thinking cause destruction on some level.

You wrote, “God’s sovereignty over the universe would mean he’d set the standard for what counts as good. Thus, might would make right, and whatever God does would be good by fiat. God would be above the law, so the nightmare of monotheism wouldn’t be that an all-powerful deity would become evil, but that morality would be an afterthought, a mere way of kowtowing to God’s inescapable power.” Yes and yes, but there could be no law without negativity, “bad” acts, crime, or injustice in the first place. So the whole line of reasoning falls apart.

There simply cannot be this without that. So the real question seems to be: “What are believers trying to achieve?” The answer seems to be the same as with nearly every other aspiration in life: People want to feel secure in a scary, violent, confusing, and uncertain world. God is an ideal that one should not question or think about, less they rock the boat and undermine the strength of beliefs borne out of the act of ignoring the other side of the coin, which is fallibility, destruction, punishment, negativity, injustice, and someone’s inevitable exertion of force over others.

You offered a passage about the Sufi view on God’s way, and the first question that arises for me regarding all religions is: Who says it’s God’s way? Who decides on behalf of God? The answer is that it’s the people who have created God to sate their own desires for security.

You ask if God is a tyrant according to monotheism, and my response is that he would have to be a tyrant to someone somewhere, unless the fact was that no one would ever be adversely affected or suffer from God’s will or actions. As I mentioned, this would be an impossibility. God cannot be a good force any way we look at it, if we are willing to look at him by suspending all belief and attachment to religious idealism.

You wrote an excellent article here, Dr Cain.