Meditation 858
Man's Mistake?
by: JT
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The other side of the church sign shown in A Miscellany 274 currently displays the message
ONLY GOD IS PERFECT
MAN MAKES MISTEAKS
A trifle amusing perhaps, but let's consider the implications.
Suppose there is a God - and that God is perfect. Then if, as Christian believers in a perfect God claim, God created man - then man makes mistakes because God deliberately designed man to make mistakes.
This isn't an issue of free will. Not all the options man is presented with are choices between doing the right thing or making a mistake. Free will can exist even if man were designed to be mistake-free.
So we have a perfect deity who deliberately designed man to make mistakes. A deity who then, according to Christian theology - carries on to hold man accountable for those mistakes by punishing him for eternity. Thus, the perfect God is a sadist; a perfect sadist. And that's not the benevolent God that believers claim to be the perfect God. We are led into contradictions and we must question either God's perfection, or God's existence.
Let's ignore the perfect god portion of the message, and consider only the idea that man makes mistakes. I don't think too many people would disagree with that. We've all made mistakes. Whether you consider man to be God's design, or man to have evolved from a common ancestor to all life on earth, we can almost all agree that man makes mistakes.
Then we should consider the possibility that the idea of gods (whether perfect or not) and religion are among man's biggest mistakes.