Adding to all those, another realization I had during mine was that if a god was real and that god created the universe and all things and all the rules then they could have also set up the rules in any way they wanted. And they chose the system where they had to murder their own son and eternally torture anyone who didn’t do a certain thing or believe a certain thing, but also created people that physically couldn’t ever do those things due to where they were, their abilities, the luck of who might teach them or not, etc. etc.
That’s a wild set of tangled, complicated, cruel and utterly deranged and sadistic set of rules and punishments if you could literally create anything and any system you wanted.
If I was to design a board game and I made the rules where if you don’t do exactly what I want I get to torture you forever and everyone starts with random skills and items and 90% of the people that play don’t get to hear the rules first or even know there are rules and there are also thousands of alternate rules books and people saying their game is the correct real one and saying you have to do their rules, but you have no way of knowing which is real or not. If I did that I’d be ridiculed and mocked and no one would ever buy my game.
I was 10 (IIRC) when I though:
And the next step was understanding that it was a fictional character.
Adding to all those, another realization I had during mine was that if a god was real and that god created the universe and all things and all the rules then they could have also set up the rules in any way they wanted. And they chose the system where they had to murder their own son and eternally torture anyone who didn’t do a certain thing or believe a certain thing, but also created people that physically couldn’t ever do those things due to where they were, their abilities, the luck of who might teach them or not, etc. etc.
That’s a wild set of tangled, complicated, cruel and utterly deranged and sadistic set of rules and punishments if you could literally create anything and any system you wanted.
If I was to design a board game and I made the rules where if you don’t do exactly what I want I get to torture you forever and everyone starts with random skills and items and 90% of the people that play don’t get to hear the rules first or even know there are rules and there are also thousands of alternate rules books and people saying their game is the correct real one and saying you have to do their rules, but you have no way of knowing which is real or not. If I did that I’d be ridiculed and mocked and no one would ever buy my game.
Parts of the Epicurean paradox. This is what also drove me from christianity.