“God is great! I didn’t get to pack any food at all for lunch today. Randomly a jimmy johns guy walks in with sandwiches for everyone right as I’m clocking out for lunch.”

     This is a Facebook status update from a former high school classmate of mine. I’m an atheist, but I don’t think it is my atheism that causes me to find statements such as this so distasteful. To me, it is the height of arrogance to think that the omnipotent, omniscient master and creator of the universe and all life as we know it is so concerned with the fact that you neglected to take the time to pack a lunch. This is especially egregious when you consider that there are millions of children living in famine, begging god to provide them and their brothers and sisters just enough food to continue on for a few more wretched days. Why are you so special when god lets so many of his children suffer endlessly in abject poverty?

     Furthermore, how does what is claimed to be a loving god allow the endless, unimaginable horror that goes on in the world without intervening. Someone survives a car crash and god sent a guardian angel to save them, but millions die in tsunamis, hurricanes, Holocausts, and wars, and Heaven sits idly by. How is it that god allowed the torture and murder of millions under Hitler and Stalin to go unpunished for years? Forgive me if I don’t consider a place in heaven sufficient consolation for a parent who witnesses the murder of their own child or the man wrongly sentenced to death row. Does god not have the power to prevent his children from being tormented in this way, or does he simply allow it to go on unchecked? Either way, a being such as this deserves neither praise nor worship. If god in fact is able to prevent so many people from experiencing such agony but chooses not to, then he is truly a monster, and praise of such a disgusting, malevolent deity is not only pathetic, but shameful. This is why even if someone could prove to me god’s existence tomorrow, I still would not worship him. Worshiping such a monster out of fear of eternal damnation is nothing more than an act of cowardice, and there is nothing moral about it. This, I find, is the essence of anti-theism.