My old boss hated meetings. I mean, I understand, I hate meetings, too. But, he loathed them to the point that we were forbidden to have them even when we desperately needed them. I was the marketing director and this was a multi-department grocery store with many department managers. I was expected to design a flyer every week with specials from across the store. The way I saw it, I had three options: either I hold a quick meeting with all my department heads and sort out what’s on special and maybe come up with a theme; I could visit each one on my own to ask for their specials and ideas, creating conflict between departments when they can’t object to other manager’s ideas that conflict with things going on in their own department; or I could just make a bunch of shit up and hope for the best. Being as I was a professional, I opted for option one: the meeting.
Now, this meant a clandestine meeting. Our boss (the founder and owner) was in his 70s and often left the store for a nap in mid-morning. He lived very close by and sometimes he would only be gone for twenty minutes max. So, we plotted to meet around the time he usually left, in the General Manager’s office, which had a tiny window overlooking the floor. We could see Boss coming if he skipped out on his Zs a little early. We’d buzz through the topics at hand as fast as we could and get out of there before we got caught and were surely dealt with. It was high-stress and high-stakes but we risked it for the good of the store.
One day, things didn’t quite go as planned. The manager of the furniture department decided to shit all over the manager of the produce department for letting onion skins blow into his showroom and an argument broke out. It would have been fine until the produce manager attempted a deflection tactic and picked apart something the deli manager did a week earlier. Deli manager happened to be our lookout, who was stationed on the edge of the General Manager’s desk so he could watch out the little window for the big boss man. When he was called out on this particular occasion, though, he rose from his perch, turned from the window and started cussing as only a Polish deli manager could. War broke out in that tiny office with half of us yelling at each other, and the other half laughing as we watched.
I don’t know how long he’d been standing there, observing our marketing meeting meltdown, but at some point, the grocery manager noticed our boss was in the room with us. We were caught.
“What are you all doing in here? Are you having a meeting?” Anger and German accents don’t go well together.
Thinking quick, I stood up and blurted, “No! Frank’s computer was glitching, saving the wrong prices to the system. We all came in one by one trying to help.”
“Lower prices?” Boss man asked, clearly concerned. I knew his weakness.
What ensued that day was a snowball of lies. We kept making up bigger stories to cover for our smaller stories that covered for our meeting. It pressed on for the rest of the week. Bigger stories, more lies. Each of us telling lies that conflicted with the others as we spoke to our boss one on one. It was a giant mess of lies, and it ended, finally, one week later, when our boss announced he was replacing the entire computer system because tech support couldn’t figure out what was wrong. We’d buried ourselves under a heaping pile of bullshit so deep, we had no way of climbing out. We either had to let the man go ahead with the system overhaul or potentially lose all of our jobs (not something he hadn’t done before with an entire staff). We weren’t about to risk our jobs.
I always think about this week at the grocery store when I’m given some vapid apologetic response from a Christian in response to gaping holes in their god myth. Instead of recognizing the hole, and being able to admit they don’t know the answer, they make up another lie to explain the gaps in the god lie. It’s a downward spiral of lies, sending apologists into a pit of make-believe that blocks their view of reality completely.
This morning while I was skimming the internet for dank memes, I found a believer trying to explain why God loves to hide from us. You see, to me, it seems like there is no god there at all. That’s generally how I feel when someone cannot be seen, heard, felt, smelled or detected in any way for over 2000 years: he’s just not there. But the Bible-lover ain’t having that. He assures us that God is just… hiding. Before he explains why, though, he has to get in a little dose of answered prayer:
My suburban broke down in front of the whataburger a month or so back. I prayed and asked God to send someone that could explain what had gone wrong.
A nice gentleman driving a suburban stopped I wants even through praying, and showed me what is wrong.
He was a chief mechanic at the chevy place and said he had only owned suburbans all his life. He told me it was the fuel pump (which I had recently replaced). This was likely the very best person in the region or state to tell me what was wrong with this particular make and model of automobile.
He was late and couldn’t help me but now I was sure it was the fuel pump. I took a look at it and told God if I can’t fix it by myself please send someone who will help me. So then “Gary” a retired mechanic whom God had sent to me 4 times before to help with my car troubles helped me and had a tester for electricity I didn’t have. We found the short and took the fuel pump to auto zone for a warranty replacement. We then fixed it on the spot.
For clarification: while tens of thousands of children across the globe starved to death, god was sending you a Chevy mechanic. Am I gathering what you’ve laid down correctly? While people everywhere are suffering with terminal illnesses, and much of the world lives under the poverty line; while women are stoned to death for being rape victims and majestic beasts are slaughtered for their tusks, skins and horns, your buddy God was busy locating for you a greasy Chevyamour named Merle with a shirt that said, “Friends don’t let friends drive Fords.” You sure you wanna go with that? Cause that sounds… well, it sounds a little arrogant, to be sure.
Later my son was with me to pick up the car. I told him the verse “it is Gods glory is to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to find it out. (he has made us kings and priests). I told my son that God hides things.
This reads about as clear as the Ganges. Am I a king or a priest? Is that why two socks go in the dryer, while only one ever comes out? God hides things?
I told him God could show up and in one second there would be no more atheist, but he doesn’t. Why?
I, too, would like to know the answer to this question. Of course, before we begin your apologetic answer and you disappear into a vortex of lies, I’d like to propose Occam’s razor here. The simplest answer is usually the correct answer. God doesn’t show up to eliminate atheism because there is no god to do the showing up.
1. its Gods glory to hide a thing, that is make complicated things seamless.
I just would like to take a brief pause from the subject at hand and point out your horrendous spelling and grammar. Did God hide your textbooks?
kind of like a good carpenter hides nails in some cases.
No, it’s more like a carpenter on acid who’s building cupboards to put in his showroom to sell. He creates them all perfectly with one exception: in his hallucinogenic stupor, he decides not to put handles on the doors. When customers stroll through his showroom, he assures them, in between trying to catch chasers, they can open the cupboards without a handle.
“You just have to have faith.” He tells them. “Faith and that purple dragon over there.”
You see, your analogy of a hidden nail was, well, for lack of a better descriptor, fucking goofy. God may hide a nail here and there, but to hide himself is to hide the handle. He is the key to your religion. Why would he hide the key, if he wanted more believers?
2. He is also humble so he doesn’t brag on himself.
An all-powerful being who commands that we believe in him despite the fact that he is “hiding”, else we burn for eternity in a lake of fire, is anything but humble, I’m afraid. That is the very opposite to humble. No, god sounds about as humble as Charlie Sheen in a Mexico City brothel with a rolled-up hundo and a mountain of Colombia’s finest.
3. The world is judged for sin and belong to another spiritual master until they legally can be bought out of that slavery. Slaves do not have rights. The full price to obtain legal rights over people has been paid, but to find that out men have to humble themselves and look for God. If they do God promises that they will find them.
This sounds like something you might overhear as you walk past a pile of Drunk Becky downtown on a Saturday night, in between her heaving up a Denny’s Grand Slam on the curb. Inebriated gibberish. It literally means, “My pastor told me this and it sounds smart.”
4. God is opposed to the proud but gives (unearned, undeserved, unmerited favor) to the humble.
Why does God reveal himself to some and not others? “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”
So, it’s a pay-me-up-front kind of deal? Do we have to believe in him before he reveals himself to us? If you wanna put your undies on backwards, be my guest, but I feel like the only thing that’ll come out of that nonsense is a wedgie.
Why can you lay out the facts and atheist can not understand them?
You know, I think your grammar and spelling make it pretty damned clear which of us has trouble understanding basic facts.
With 30,000-40,000 denominations of Christianity based on your little fairy tale book, I’d say Christians have trouble understanding it, too.
There’s a good reason for this: It’s gibberish. It’s less coherent than Whitney Houston in the Bobby Brown era. It makes zero sense without your apologetics and even then, it’s just a mountain of lies on top of a mountain of lies on top of a mountain of lies. It’s been taken so far, now, no one knows what the true meaning was when it all started.
There is a difference between your mountain of lies and the ones me and my managers told at the grocery store, though: my boss actually existed.
You, on the other hand, are lying for nothing.
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