And if someone beats the ass of the man with the gift, to whom does the ultimate joy belong? The assbeater, you dumb fucking hippie.

don’t have religion, but could not be called an atheist. The point of faith is to believe in something without being able to prove it. This does not mean that one should ignore the realities of the world in order to make it fit what their religion says, but that they should be assimilate the real world into their understanding of the object of their faith.
If one believes in the infinite majesty of an omnipotent Creator, why would they turn their noses up at the idea of a magnificently complex tapestry, woven across generations in order to fill the world’s corners with the most perfect possible creature for each one? How one dimensional would a supreme creator be to simply click everything into place from the get go?
Let me ask you in this way, saying, for this comment, that the general Christian ideal is the correct and true one:
Why does God give man free will?
So that man’s worship of God (in all the man does) is pure and uncoerced, and all his actions have merit beyond that of simple forced obedience.
From this we see that the will of God is such that the merit in anything is not merely the end result, but the process by which the result is arrived at- if God just wanted praise, he would have just stopped with angels.
So, too, must Nature follow God’s will and via the process of evolution, produce the “wondrous variety” that is the result of the long process of natural selection.

If you believe what the Bible says without questioning it, without reconciling it with the real world as we know it, then you have given up your free will, the thing that makes your love of God even worth anything.

So I’ll close with this- if there is a God, then he is waiting for you to pull your head out of the sand and wake up to the world he made for you- you aren’t doing him any good the way you are now.

-jake

ps: the kind of God you believe in weeps eternally for the stupid waste of people killed in his name. It is never okay.