Dear Proselyte,
You’re very confident.
You know who God is.
What God wants.
What God hates.
What God will punish.
What God will forgive.
And you know this with such certainty that you’re willing to correct other people about it. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes urgently. Sometimes with pamphlets.
Here’s the odd thing, though.
Everyone else is just as confident.
And yet, no one agrees.
God commands peace… and holy war.
God is merciful… and vengeful.
God forbids images… and demands temples.
God speaks once… and speaks constantly.
God loves everyone… and chooses sides.
If God were real in the way chairs are real, this wouldn’t be happening.
Imagine if gravity behaved differently depending on where you were born. Or if the speed of light changed with your passport. Imagine scientists across the globe arguing about whether water quenches thirst or causes fires.
We’d call that chaos. Or error. Or bad data.
But when it comes to God, contradiction is normalized.
What you believe about God is overwhelmingly determined by when and where you were born. A child raised in Saudi Arabia rarely stumbles into Catholicism. A child born in rural America doesn’t accidentally grow up worshipping Vishnu. Converts exist, sure, but they’re the exception that proves the rule.
Belief travels through culture, language, family, and history. It’s inherited long before it’s examined.
And here’s the part atheists find hard to ignore:
If God cared deeply about being known correctly, this would be the one thing God would clear up.
Not with riddles.
Not with competing scriptures.
Not with prophets who contradict one another.
Not with centuries of bloodshed over interpretations.
A real God with a stable identity would leave less room for confusion.
Instead, what we see looks less like revelation and more like projection multiplied by geography. Different cultures producing different gods who somehow all insist they are the only true one.
That raises an uncomfortable question.
Is God fragmented…
or are we?
Is God changing personalities across continents…
or are humans telling stories that make sense where they live?
You don’t have to be malicious to proselytize. You just have to be convinced that your version is the right one. But that conviction often requires ignoring the fact that billions of equally sincere people feel exactly the same way about a completely different God.
So we ask, gently:
If God exists, why hasn’t God gotten the message straight?
And if God doesn’t exist, why does belief line up so neatly with culture, history, and accident of birth?
Because from the outside, it doesn’t look like a single being with a clear identity.
It looks like a mirror, shattered into a thousand culturally specific reflections, each insisting it sees the whole.
Still wondering,
~ The Radical Left