This
simple belief gets complicated usually by deceitful people for selfish reasons.
They convince sincere and otherwise rational people of man-made convoluted
requirements to understand God. Requirements such as believing God communicates
directly with them, the clergy, and the sincere believer in God must submit her or his
God-given reason to the unreasonable demands the clergy claim God has revealed
to them. But in fact, they are only demands the clergy have made up themselves.
That is how "revealed" religions have convinced billions of people of such
unreasonable ideas and beliefs as the Devil, that beautiful innocent babies are
born in sin, and the Devil boxing God into a corner where the only way out is
for God to become a person and suffer and die for the sins of humanity, etc.,
etc., etc.
Another
example of "revealed" religions making the uncomplicated and obvious into
something complicated is a recent statement by the new Roman Catholic Archbishop
and head of Belgium's Catholic Church, Andre-Joseph Leonard. After police raided a
meeting of bishops and confiscated a lap top computer and church documents it
was revealed that Catholic priests had been sexually abusing children in Belgium
for decades. The sexual abuse even included molesting infants! It is very simple
and crystal clear that such unnatural and disgusting acts are wrong and should
never be tolerated anywhere. However, Andre-Joseph Leonard said, "We want to learn the lessons of the errors of the past."! This ridiculous statement makes it seem that not sexually abusing
children and infants is something that has to be learned. It unnecessarily
complicates the obvious. By this insane statement alone, the "holy" man is
letting us know that he and his pedophile infested organization, the Catholic
Church, don't get it!
The entire Christian idea that we are all born evil with "original sin" and need Jesus to make us pure again is demeaning to all people and to our Designer. It gives the false impression that we are not responsible for our own actions and/or inaction; that Jesus will take care of it. As the revolutionary leader and Deist Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition, "If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself; it is then no longer justice, it is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show, that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing as redemption - that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his greatest consolation to think so. Let him believe this, and he will live more consistently and morally than by any other system; it is by his being taught to contemplate himself as an outlaw, as an outcast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown, as it were, on a dunghill at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout."
It is clear from the disgusting acts of the Catholic pedophile priests that their man-made dogma of redemption by Jesus, which gives the false idea that we will not necessarily account for our own actions, creates more harm than good.