"Рэймонд Смаллиан. Две философские сценки (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

envious of me. But I think with a more realistic world view, you no longer
will be. So you really have swallowed the idea which has been taught you
that your life on earth is like an examination period and that the purpose
of providing you with free will is to test you, to see if you merit blissful
eternal life. But what puzzles me is this: If you really believe I am as
good and benevolent as I am cracked up to be, why should I require people to
merit things like happiness and eternal life? Why should I not grant such
things to everyone regardless of whether or not he deserves them?
MORTAL: But I have been taught that your sense of morality--your sense
of justice--demands that goodness be rewarded with happiness and evil be
punished with pain.
GOD: Then you have been taught wrong.
MORTAL: But the religious literature is so full of this idea! Take for
example Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." How he
describes you as holding your enemies like loathsome scorpions over the
flaming pit of hell, preventing them from falling into the fate that they
deserve only by dint of your mercy.
GOD: Fortunately, I have not been exposed to the tirades of Mr.
Jonathan Edwards. Few sermons have ever been preached which are more
misleading. The very title "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" tells its
own tale. In the first place, I am never angry. In the second place, I do
not think at all in terms of "sin." In the third place, I have no enemies.
MORTAL: By that do you mean that there are no people whom you hate, or
that there are no people who hate you?
GOD: I meant the former although the latter also happens to be true.
MORTAL: Oh come now, I know people who have openly claimed to have
hated you. At times I have hated you!
GOD: You mean you have hated your image of me. That is not the same
thing as hating me as I really am.
MORTAL: Are you trying to say that it is not wrong to hate a false
conception of you, but that it is wrong to hate you as you really are?
GOD: No, I am not saying that at all; I am saying something far more
drastic! What I am saying has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong.
What I am saying is that one who knows me for what I really am would simply
find it psychologically impossible to hate me.
MORTAL: Tell me, since we mortals seem to have such erroneous views
about your real nature, why don't you enlighten us? Why don't you guide us
the right way?
GOD: What makes you think I'm not?
MORTAL: I mean, why don't you appear to our very senses and simply tell
us that we are wrong?
GOD; Are you really so naive as to believe that I am the sort of being
which can appear to your senses? It would be more correct to say that I am
your senses.
MORTAL (astonished): You are my senses?
GOD: Not quite, I am more than that. But it comes closer to the truth
than the idea that I am perceivable by the senses. I am not an object; like
you, I am a subject, and a subject can perceive, but cannot be perceived.
You can no more see me than you can see your own thoughts. You can see an
apple, but the event of your seeing an apple is itself not seeable. And I am