So I was pleasantly surprised to find Inferno by Dante to be really easy to read and understand. When I first opened it I didn't expect to actually enjoy reading it. I expected to throw the book across the room in disgust after a couple of verses. But the exact opposite happened, and now I find myself lusting to read Purgatory as I had been lusting after Inferno.
But one thing I did notice about Inferno is that the God in it is a complete jerk, little better than the fearsome demons and sinners that inhabit Hell. It seems that the only thing that makes God better than Lucifer is that God is the stronger of the two and beat Lucifer in a fight for the hearts and souls of humanity.
I don't know who would want to worship Dante's God.
Dante's God is every bit just as cruel and sadistic as Lucifer and his army of
demons. The hell visited by Dante is proof of this. What kind of benelovent, loving and forgiving God would come up with such cruel punishments as those mentioned in Inferno?
Surely if God was as all loving and all that as is claimed, then hell wouldn't exist. Or at least, it wouldn't have such sadistic punishments for its inhabitants.
The fact that all of the disgusting foul beings still bow down to God's wishes proves that God isn't much different to the feared and reviled demons of Lucifer. In fact, it proves that God is worse than Lucifer. God pretends to be something which he is not, while Lucifer doesn't pretend to be anything otherwise ... actually, by ruling over hell and over seeing the torment of sinners as God ordained, Lucifer is just following orders.
I guess that's the whole point of Heaven and Hell in religion; separate the righteous from the sinners. Even if that means the all loving, benelovent god has to create a zest pool of torment and suffering and go against everything he/she stands for by doing so. How else are the righteous to be rewarded?
Still it kind of seems childish and unjust to punish those who weren't believers in their life times simply because the worship of the one God hadn't been introduced to them. So many Ancients languish in the first cicrle of Hell simply because the worship of Dante's God wasn't known to them. Apparently, ignorance of God is a sin that is completely unforgivable. Even if God wasn't introduced to the world until centuries (or even millenia) after the had died.
And if you're lucky enough to live in the time of the One Almighty God, getting into heaven still isn't a guaranteed. In fact, God seems to set out to make getting into Heaven impossible. Staying on the correct, righteous path in life is mean feat. Many a Christain is likey to stray from this path without even realising it.
The God that Dante worship seems to take great pleasure in luring his faithful little Christains from the path he wants them to take, and then punishing them for it. It's almost as though he's nothing more than a bored teen playing a game of The Sims.
The only reason I can see why Dante and his peers (by which I mean the entire medieval population) worshipped their God is because they wanted to please God and avoid being sent down to Hell. But since their God is impossible to please, it was a futile attempt and they probably would've been better off sacrifsing their first borns to God, or simply just startinh worshipping another being in the hopes of God being dethroned by their new god.
This evil, petulant God does not seem worthy of worship.
Surely The Devine Comedy is a tongue in cheek poke at God and the craziness of worshipping such an evil, sadistic being.
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