The God I don't believe in

“….I would like to end my book with this article which is my simple and honest profession of faith, imperfect but sincere, for my non-believing friends.”
– Juan Arias

“No, I shall never believe in:
the God who catches man by surprise in a sin of weakness;
the God who condemns material things;
the God incapable of giving an answer to the grave problems of a sincere and honest man who cries in tears: “I can’t!”;
the God who loves pain;
the God who flashes a red light against human joys;
the God who sterilizes man’s reason;
the God who blesses the Cains of humanity;
the God who is a magician and sorcerer;
the God who makes himself feared;
the God who does not allow people to talk familiarly to him;
the grandfather-God whom one can twist around one’s little finger;
the God who makes Himself the monopoly of a church, a race, a culture or a caste; the God who doesn’t need man;
the lottery-God whom one can find only by chance;
the judge-God who can give a verdict only with a rule book in His hands;
the God incapable of smiling at many of man’s awkward mistakes;
the God who “plays at” condemning;
the God who “sends” people to hell;
the God who does not know how to hope;
the God who always demands 100 per cent in examinations;
the God who can be fully explained by a philosophy;
the God adored by those who are capable of condemning a man to death;
the God incapable of loving what many people despise;
the God incapable of forgiving what many men condemn;
the God incapable of redeeming the wretched;
the God incapable of understanding that children will always get themselves dirty and be forgetful;
the God who prevents man from growing and conquering, transforming and overcoming themselves until they almost become gods;
the God who demands that if a man is to believe he must give up being a man;
the God who does not accept a seat at our human festivities;
the God whom only the mature, the wise, or the comfortably situated can understand;
the God who is not feared by the rich at whose doors lie the hungry and the wretched;
the God capable of being accepted and understood by those who do not love;
the God who is adored by those who go to mass and yet go on stealing and calumniating;
the aseptic God thought up by so many theologians and canonists in their ivory towers, the God who isn’t able to find anything of His goodness, His essence, where love exists, no matter how mistaken it may be;
the God for whom it is as sinful to enjoy the sight of a pair of pretty legs as to calumniate and rob one’s neighbor and abuse one’s power to get rich or to take revenge;
the God who condemns all sex;
the God who says “You will pay for that!”;
the God who sometimes regrets for giving man free will;
the God who prefers injustice to disorder;
the God who is happy with the man who gets down on his knees although he won’t work;
the God who says and feels nothing about the agonizing problems of suffering humanity;
the God who is interested in souls and not in men;
the God who stifles earthly reform and gives only hope for the future life;
the God whose disciples turn their backs on the world’s work and are indifferent to their brother’s story;
the God of those who believe that they love Him because they love no one, the God who defends those who never get their hands dirty, those who never lean out of the window, those who never jump into the water;
the God who pleases those who are always saying, "Everything is fine";
the God of those who want the parish priest to sprinkle holy water on the white sepulchers of their dirty deals;
the God who is preached by those priests who believe that hell is crowded and heaven is almost empty;
the God of those priests who say that everything and everybody can be criticized except themselves;
the God of the middle-class priests;
the God who regards war as good;
the God who put law before conscience;
the God who would form a static, immovable Church, incapable of being purified, perfected and developed;
the God of those priests who have stock answers for everything;
the God who would deny man the freedom to sin;
the God who is not ironical about the new Pharisees of history;
the God who has no forgiveness for some sins;
the God who prefers the rich and the powerful;
the God who “causes” cancer or “make” a woman sterile;
the God to whom one can pray only on one’s knees, whom one can find only in a church;
the God who accepts and endorses everything we priests say about Him;
the God who does not save those who have not known Him but who have desired and searched for Him;
the God who “carries off” to hell the child after his first sin;
the God who does not permit man the possibility of being able to damn himself;
the God for whom man is not to be the measure of all creation;
the God who does not go out to meet him who had abandoned Him;
the God incapable of making all things new;
the God who does not have a different, personal, individual word for each person;
the God who has never wept for men;
the God who is not light, the God who prefers purity to love;
the God insensitive to the beauty of a rose;
the God who cannot find Himself in the eyes of a child or a pretty woman or a mother in tears;
the God who is not present where men love each other;
the God who embraces politics;
the God who does not reveal Himself to anyone who honestly wants Him;
the God who destroys the earth and the things that man loves instead of transforming them;
the God in whom there are no mysteries, who is no greater than we are;
the God who to make us happy, offers us a happiness divorced from our human nature;
the God who destroys our flesh eternally instead of resurrecting it;
the God for whom man is of value, not for what he is, but for what he has or for what he represents;
the God who will accept as a friend anyone who goes through the world without making anybody happy;
the God who does not have the generosity of the sun, which warms everything it touches, flowers as well as manure heaps;
the God incapable of making man divine and seating him at His table and giving him part of His heritage;
the God who does not know how to offer a paradise where all of us feel that we are really brothers and where the light does not come from the sun and stars alone but from men who love;
the God who is not love and who does not know how to transform into love everything He touches;
the God who, when He embraces man even here on earth, does not how to communicate to him the joy and happiness of all human loves put together;
the God incapable of captivating man’s heart;
the God who would not have become a man, with all that that implies;
the God who would not have been born miraculously from the womb of a woman;
the God who would not have given men even His very own mother;
the God in whom I cannot hope against all hope.

Yes, my God is the other God”.

Juan Arias, The God I don't believe in, Paul Barrett, transl., Mercier Press (1978) Dublin.